When it comes to headphones, there is a lot of versatility in terms of design, price and quality. Thus customers have a lot to choose from. There are entry level phones which cater to people on stiff budgets and on the other side, there are the high end Bose sets which will certainly make a big hole in your wallet. There are also the bulky headphones which are mostly meant for use at home and there are the sleek earbuds with thin wires that are ultra compact hence easy to carry. I got the Urbanears Plattan headphones for review in my labs and this is a good set for music playback. Urbanears are not fashion centric; I have seen some of their products in the past and I have noticed that they haven’t put any effort to make their products look sexy. I am not saying that the products are downright ugly; they do have a stylish edge. In this case, the style is confined to various colors options which you can choose from. There are fourteen color options for the Urbanears Plattan headphones  [...]

I first came across the MEElectronics M11P+ Sound-Isolation In-Ear Headphones at CES 2010. It belongs to the group of durable and affordable headphones and I was quite pleased when the company sent the headphones to my labs for testing. I will recommend you this set if you are a fashion conscious person. The cost of this set is $70 which is a bit high and the sound quality is nothing different from M6, its predecessors. The only feature that is put to justify the high price is the microphone and call answer button. MEElectronics M11P+ Sound-Isolation In-Ear headphones are quite impressive and the design too is durable. There are three color options to choose from – black, red and silver. The colors relate to the earpiece shiny coating. There is a 52 inch cable descending from each of the earpiece and it is covered in clear plastic. The cloth coating on the inside makes the set ultra rugged. The headphones are also  tangle resistant. On the other end, there is a gold plater L plug  [...]

We appreciate brave talk but it gets irritating when someone crosses the line. Chang Ma, the LG’s Marketing Vice President recently crossed the line when we said that LG’s new tablet will be better than the iPad. He told this at the Wall Street Journal interview a couple of days ago. We all know that LG has been working hard on its Optimus tablet lately but these claims make us laugh hard. You can see for yourself when LG brings their product in the market but we don’t think anyone can beat the prowess of the iPad at least for the next couple of years. You can either call these claims foolish or brave but the Vice President will certainly make a lot of headlines through such comments. US will be a big market for the LG tablet and it will be interesting to see how the product fares in the tablet market dominated by Apple right now. LG’s tablet is rumored to be Google centric.

When it comes to entertainment notebooks, these three features are really important – HDMI, Intel Wireless Display and Blu-ray. The latter was just limited to step up laptops some time ago but now it is good to see it on the less expensive laptops as well. Amongst the three, my favorite is the Wireless Display technology as it lets you outsource the video to a large HDTV. This technology is quite new and it is not surprising to see it getting really popular in such short time. This is also quite underrated feature in most laptops. Sometimes, the manufacturers don’t mention it at all. As compared to this, laptops with Blu-ray drives are heavily plastered with stickers. I have compiled this list from the various notebooks that I have got in my labs for reviewing. The ones that I haven’t tested are not included simply because I don’t know anything about that laptop. You can still rely on this list because all major manufacturers send me their products in my labs. Here are my five bits  [...]

If you thought that hard disks are going to die soon and they are going to be replaced by SSDs – then you are quite right. Why would people go for traditional hard disks when there are these cool SSD lurking around? The only problem with SSDs is that they are not quite popular in the market due to their high price. Even the 64 GB ones are priced at a really high rate. Price will come down but we don’t know why. What we do know is that when they get affordable – these SSDs will quickly kill the hard disk because of their superiority. The SSDs are very small and the power consumption is really less because they don’t have any moving parts. Also, SSDs don’t make much noise while they are in action. Hard disks, on the other hand, start with the irritating whinning noise (remember the noise that you hear when you press the power button?). Higher end cabinets take care of these hard disk noises by giving those rubber screws which absorb all the sound but they come at a price.

Bose has made a lot of high end headphones in the past and has specialized in just that segment. It is quite rare to see a low end set from this company and they have got three of them now. Two are for mobile phones and one is meant for music players. The MIE2i and MIE2 are made for phones and it looks they have been made especially for the iPhone 4. You get StayHear tips along with the three headphones which will give you better comfort in the ear. But we were really intrigued to see that there was no sound isolation or noise canceling features on either of this set. Bose is not giving any specifications about the headphones either which is even more frustrating. The third pair, IE2 is made for iPod Touch and other such MP3 players. It will be available for purchase from August 23rd for $99.95 and MIE2 will ship on the same date for $129.99. The last set, MIE2i, will arrive in October and will set you back by $129.95. We still cannot believe that  [...]

Green ways are now ubiquitous; people have finally woken up to the threat posed by problem of global warming and they are now taking measures to make earth a better place to live in. Accordingly, there are various manufacturers of gadgets like mobile phones and TV advertising their ‘green’ products. Some are trying just to make money while some really care. San Francisco recently held a green week where in they put a green roof on Transbay Transit Center and also unveiled new plans to install charging stations of 5,000 EV in Bay Area. We were intrigued by the variety of options that it had to offer. There were a lots of different forms of transportation for instance, we were amazed by the single person helicopter which only emitted water vapor and also a car powered just by humans which can go up to 30 mph driving uphill. It was a really exciting week for the people of energy storage tech as well, New York was preparing for grid-scale flywheel  [...]

HTC has announced that it will be hosting an event September 15th in London. The company is tightlipped about the details and all it gave us is this smoky image as a teaser. There is a lot of speculation going on in the market about the product it is going to launch. The event is quite close to the launch of Windows 7 and hence we might see some handsets released on the new OS. I personally think that the company is going to launch the HTC Vision, which has been rumored since long. But we are still scratching about what cloud could possibly mean. HTC Vision will be launched soon but we don’t know its exact date. HTC might release it at the September 15th event. This phone is going to be covered by T-Mobile and it will be a 4G handset. But don’t expect the 21 MBPS speed that are often advertised. These speeds are theoretical; they are limited to WebConnect Rocket data cards and not actual handsets. HTC has been dangling this phone as a carrot since  [...]

We have seen a lot of cool USB designs and they have all been worth drooling upon. Manufacturers too have played a lot with the design of the USB thumb drive. They have let their imagination run wild. A thumb drive is one of the few peripherals of a computer which you carry around a lot and hence there is a lot of demand for cool USB designs. But I bet you have never heard of such a design. Check out the picture, this thumb drive has a shape a boot and looks super cool. The cost of this thumb drive is $25 which is a bit high but the manufacturer wants to cash in on the sexy design. I haven’t seen such a design on other thumb drives which is quite strange since there have been a lot of haphazard ideas been thrown at, at the thumb drive. The price of this device might be high but it will surely make you famous amongst your peers for the design. The size of the thumbdrive is 2 GB which is really low. 2 GB pen drives died quite a while ago and there  [...]

Asus VG236H is a monitor having a 120 Hz refresh rate which makes this product compatible with Nvidia 3D vision kit. This panel is thus targeted towards gamers. For testing, I connected this monitor to the DVI port of my Windows Vista computer. The performance was good but it was nowhere close to the Samsung PX2370, my current favorite. I was concerned about the color accuracy problems and the panel also occasionally coated the screen with a green tint. You can get rid of this green tint but you have to adjust the settings a lot and it is a chore. Changing the presets increases or decreases this green tint but it was there no matter what skin tone or color temperature settings I used. Finally, I accessed the RGB values and then adjusted the green to 85. At this point, the green tint was least irritating. Also be wary of the fact that you will have to adjust the red to 94 or else the whites will appear pinkish. I put the Asus VG236H through the Black Level test and saw that the dark grays  [...]