Juke joint? It’s in phone
You can play cards on the Wild Card cellphone from Virgin Mobile, but with a built-in jukebox that runs over the phone’s speakers, it might be more suited to music lovers than card sharks. The phone, $100 online and in Virgin stores, has two color screens, one on the front above a numeric keypad and another inside over a full keyboard for messaging. It includes Bluetooth and a camera as well as a speakerphone. The Wild Card can double as a music player, and for 25 cents a song you can play back any of the songs available on Virgin’s music service. Unlimited text, e-mail and picture messaging costs $20 a month.
You’ll wear these sunglasses at night – over DIA
What does the next generation of in-flight entertainment look like? How about a jet-black headset that resembles something out of “Star Trek” and beams video straight into your eyes?
The headset, the Myvu Universal, looks like a pair of 1980s-era sunglasses attached to a set of foam-tipped earbuds. Connect the glasses to an iPod or other compatible device – including DVD players and laptops – and the picture appears to float a few feet in front of you.
The device plays video at about TV quality. While there is some slight blurring on the edges, where you can still see what’s going on around you, the images are more than passable for a long international flight.
At $200, these glasses may cost a bit more than your video player, but the look you get from other passengers – a mix of horror and curiosity – is priceless.
The ace of basses
Speaker systems for computers with conveniently small desktop satellites are usually burdened with big, under-desk woofer boxes. But standard bass-extending strategies will not work on really tiny speakers.
Bose’s answer to this problem is the wooferless $399 Computer MusicMonitor system. Each of its two speakers uses two small radiators tucked inside facing each other across a tunnel that runs through the cabinet. Because the radiators move in opposite directions, their vibrations cancel each other out, and the tunnel protects them from damage. The Computer MusicMonitor is available at Bose stores and authorized Bose dealers.
Wonder of convergence
For computer owners who want to see what convergence is all about, the TV Wonder Combo 650 USB from ATI, out this week for $150, will pump lots of television into a PC.
This sandwich-size outboard tuner hooks to a computer by USB cable (sorry, it won’t work with Macs). Local television stations, broadcasting the old way, over the air and – quaintly – free, are starting to send out high-definition digital signals.
This box will snatch them from the ether with an old-fashioned rabbit-ear antenna. If you have cable and a PC running Windows XP, the TV Wonder Combo 650 can handle unscrambled (nonpremium) channels. With Vista, it will also tune in digital HD cable programming. An included wire antenna also pulls in FM radio signals.
500 gigs and it streams tunes too
The music, videos, photos and other personal files on your computer are more useful if you can get to them while you’re not at your computer. LaCie’s Ethernet Disk Mini Home Edition, a media server that is about the size of a hardcover detective novel, offers 500 gigabytes of data storage for $199, less than the cost of most stand-alone hard drives of the same size. But it can also stream music and video through your network to other computers, game consoles, digital photo frames and so forth. Through digital media adapters, it can also stream content to your TV and stereo.
