David Weiss: September 2008 Archives

Designer headphones are all the rage, given the success Dr. Dre had with his Monster Beats line. Enter the Phiaton MS-400's, a combination punch of laser-sharp sound and eye-popping design that will make you the envy of the commuter class. Just make sure the CHP doesn't ogle you bopping to the beat on the 405.

The red and black carbon fiber details are pretty fly for a piece of gear usually relegated to the functional, but these headphones also deliver an even response across the board -- the lows aren't too boomy, the highs don't sizzle so much that they distract and dominate. They sit comfortably about the ears, tight enough to drown out ambient noise. Also, they fold up two ways and fit snugly into a compact carrying case.

For $250 smackers, you can now have a pair of headphones that match the Ferrari in your driveway! Or at least the Ferrari edition laptop Acer put out a couple of years ago. Either way, you're styling and profiling while getting your Brahms on.....

You may not hit the ball like Sergio or Retief -- a couple of TaylorMade Golf's pro endorsees -- but now you can emblazon your TP golf ball with the two-digit voodoo code of your choice, just like the big-boys. Sure, you can carry a Sharpie like the rest of the peons, or pick a number from 00 to 99 and personalize the dimpled spheroid.

Just hop on over to the My TP Ball website, pick a number and order yourself a couple dozen pre-mojo'd balls in any of TaylorMade's various flavors --high or low spin-rate, distance versus feel, etc. Also comes in handy when some stooge picks up your ball on an adjacent fairway, claiming it as his own. Give him your name, rank and TP number and watch him start to sweat. Civility, comrades -- 'tis the game of gentlemen!

Thissy-here device could take all the adventure out of going to the mall: Bushnell's Backtrack GPS/Digital Compass is a surefire way to never lose your car again. Push one of those two little buttons at the top as you're locking up the Dodge Dart, buy yourself some saddle shoes and a Bin Latte (popular at the Al Qaida Starbucks in Tora Bora), then find your way back without fuss or muss. I hope I'm not the only one who finds this an exciting prospect.

Backtrack is even more useful as a digital troop leader out in the wilderness. Mark the base location, hike til your Vibram soles go smooth and then beeline your way back to that dehydrated sloppy joe mix that's got your name written all over it. Or hang the deal around Grandpa's neck before he goes out for a stroll and he won't need the local constabulary to get back home again.

This compact miracle pairs a digital compass with a high sensitivity SIRF Star III GPS receiver in order to perform its magic. For seventy bucks, it's a no-brainer if your brain is at all like my own. Now if they'd just make a device to find the Backtrack once you lose it.

Anyone walking through a Costco or Sam's Club recently may have had their progress impeded by the razor-sharp images emanating from one of Vizio's new XVT flat-panel LCD's. Once sufficiently slowed, your eyes might have blinked twice, then rolled around in your head like a roulette wheel: that's right, the price of these HD stunners is easily 25% to half of what a similar set would cost you if it bore the Sony or Panasonic logo. Okay, now you can go buy that delicious, $4.99 Costco roast chicken, but what are you going to watch while you de-bone the badboy??

I don't know about you, but my inner cheapskate tells me that the difference in markup pays for the mammoth advertising and marketing budgets of the aforementioned Japanese Goliaths, while Irvine-based (Go USA!) Vizio claims a major share of sales merely by producing a superior product -- so the dough actually goes into r&d and customer service. Five million flat panel sets later, upstart Vizio has climbed to the top of the North American sales charts in just a couple of years on the market.

That having been said, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding in this case is Vizio's new XVT technology, which boasts a 120hz refresh rate (twice the speed of most other LCD's) and 1080p LCD clarity. To boot, the company's proprietary "Smooth Motion" technology ensures high-end picture performance from any video source.

Translated into human-speak, what that means to football and hockey fans is that there are no ghost images when the camera pans fast or a runner bursts down the sidelines at warp speed. Add four HDMI inputs to that and a side panel HD game port and you'll soon be slaying aliens so lifelike you'll be looking for green slime to be oozing out of the screen. Yes, it's a great value, but Vizio performance trumps its price-point by a mile.

The time has come to put away childish things, and to join the adult world of kick-butt audio. Introducing the M-00 powered multimedia speaker system from NHT, already a favorite among high-end audio retentive types, but perfect for gamers demanding sonic realism and music freaks who want to hear every last frequency in that hi-res download they paid extra for.

NHT has long been a highly respected manufacturer of speakers and home theater rigs, and applies that know-how to this compact system: a pair of M-00's, an S-20 subwoofer and, if you want to splurge a wee bit more, a "passive volume control" that ensures you don't lose fidelity due to rinky-dink audio connectors. Now you're ready to crank that thing to 12 and really annoy your housemates.

Mind you, this ain't yo daddy's Wollensak anymore, and will cost you more than the average heap o' plastic on the shelves at Best Buy. But if it's good enough for the finicky likes of Peter Frampton -- who has been a M-00 Man for some time now -- it will more than do the job for civilians who also cherish accurate sound reproduction in a compact system. In this iWorld we live in, small is beautiful until it comes to the power and grandeur of music: NHT delivers all that and a dose of glory to boot.

To malign Gertrude Stein once again, when is a bag not a bag not a bag? Answer: when said bag is a Lowepro, the choice of peripatetic professionals toting expensive digital gear, from laptops to cameras, and sometimes both at once. The bag above is their Stealth Reporter D550 AW, ostensibly for photojournalists, but hyper-useful for those of us who never the leave the house without an array of hardware sensitive to the thousand natural shocks such gadgets are heir to. To slip, perchance to fall? No problem with the heavily padded and ergonomically correct Lowepro over your shoulder.

I was recently on a longish trip and had my laptop, digital camera, iPod, battery chargers of various provenance, batteries and cables, et al -- all snugly packed into one of Lowepro's "slingbags," which quickly shift from 'carry mode' to 'ready mode' in seconds. Say you're hiking through the hills near Peshawar and you spot Bin Laden in a game of volleyball -- bingbingbing, you go from pack mule to shutterbug without fuss or muss or losing the shot. Tell him his day is coming.

The choice is yours: pay a wee bit more and buy a bag that's better-made than almost any consumer-oriented product out there and rest easy -- your sensitive digital stuff is insulated from heat and cold, accidents and careless handling. Before I went Lowepro, I carried a bag that spit out my Macbook laptop twice at airports after security screening, denting the enclosure and cracking the screen. As the JDL used to say, never again!

It took me a while, but I finally gave the old heave-ho to AT&T and joined the VoIP revolution courtesy of Ooma, who are here to give Vonage and Skype a run for their money. Speaking of dough, you need only shell out your hard-earned one time to say goodbye to phone bills forevermore. That's right, $250 buys you the Ooma hardware and then you can stay on the phone 24 hours a day to anyone in the USA and never pay another penny. Stock up on throat lozenges.

Of course, there are minor drawbacks to making your phone calls over the internet and not on a landline. In the event of a power failure or if your ISP is down, you will have to resort to your cellphone or carrier pigeons to communicate with your bookie or broker. You can even keep your current phone number for a one-time fee. Caller ID, voicemail and call forwarding are all available as well.

Acoustic performance has been excellent thus far. Setup is simple: You plug an ethernet cable from your router to the Ooma base unit, attach the phone and you are in business just like that. Another cool option is having your voicemails delivered as soundclips to your email address, which I've found is a handy way to send memos to oneself. International rates are dirt-cheap, and data encryption safeguards make sure nobody's listening to you whispering sweet nothings down the block. Here's hoping the word gets out -- Ooma is heap good gadgetry.