If only you had an extra arm to take that photograph
If you are vacationing by yourself or with just one other person, you may not always have a kind stranger handy to take your photo – or you may not trust a stranger to return your camera. With an autofocus camera, you can shoot yourself at arm’s length. But that close, a camera often exaggerates noses and leaves out most of the background.
Good arm’s-length picture-taking requires longer arms – or a Quik Pod. A telescoping wand with a camera mount at one end, the Quik Pod adds about 18 inches to your reach and carries a diminutive curved mirror showing you roughly what the camera will see.
The Quik Pod Pro ($24.95) weighs less than a quarter-pound, collapses to a pocket-size 7 1/2 inches and comes with pocket and belt-loop clips and a carrying bag. The Quik Pod Pro Plus ($29.95) adds legs that turn it into a small tabletop tripod. Both are available from quikpod.com and many camera dealers.
The Quik Pod can also be used for shooting over the heads of crowds or shooting in awkward places, like under a car. Its light construction limits it to cameras or camcorders weighing a pound or less, the kind most people take on vacation. – Ivan Berger, The New York Times
A music device that can play, oh, 2 million songs or so
SanDisk has joined up with Yahoo to add a new wrinkle to its latest MP3 player, the Sansa Connect.
The player, available for less than $250 at major electronics outlets, gives owners the ability to stream Yahoo Music’s catalog of more than 2 million songs without having to put the tunes onto a computer first.
While the Sansa Connect has only a 4-gigabyte flash drive, the streaming ability sets up virtual storage via the Internet. As long as you keep paying your $12-a-month Yahoo Music subscription, and as long as the unit has a Wi-Fi connection, it can keep picking new tracks to play. The player can also stream music from Internet radio stations.
When connected to a computer through a USB cable, the unit works in the conventional way of setting up playlists and copying music from your CDs. While Yahoo is the preferred service, the Sansa Connect will work with other online services, including Rhapsody, Napster and Urge.
Sansa Connect is also a photo viewer that can show photos stored on Flickr. It does not play videos, but it does have a feature that most other players do not: a speaker to let others listen in. – Stephen C. Miller, The New York Times
