As Steve Jobs said when he introduced the iPhone, it’s not just a phone — it’s also a music player. It stands to reason, then, that music fans will want a pair of headphones that can reproduce the highs, lows and mid-ranges they expect from their other music devices.
The Ultimate Ears Super.Fi 4vi is an iPhone headset that uses proprietary technology to improve and isolate the sound coming out of your phone. Available now for $150, the buds have soft rubber earpieces to block out extraneous sound and a tuned filter and speaker for improved bass and treble. They have a 20- to 15,000-hertz frequency response — music enthusiast talk for the ability to re-create a wide range of sounds. The earbuds also have a microphone built into the cord as well as a small answer/hang-up button, just like the ones Apple gives you. But do you really want to trust your extensive Lithuanian sea chantey collection to anything less than professional earbuds?
Even as the prices of LCD and plasma TVs slide, high-definition projectors remain expensive — but at least they are getting considerably better. The Sony Bravia VPL-VW40 front projector, for example, costs $3,000 but displays images at a vertical resolution of 1,080 lines and 60 frames a second, the highest on the market.
Stiletto 2 gets serious about taping live radio
There are essentially four ways to put music onto a portable player: Rip it from a CD or other storage medium, download it from the Internet, get it streamed from the Internet or receive it by satellite.
The new Stiletto 2 from Sirius Satellite Radio does all four, using one device. It’s a satellite receiver, a Wi-Fi receiver for both streaming and recording from the Internet, and an MP3 player that can accept music files copied from a hard drive. Sirius has expanded from its satellite service and now streams most of its 130 channels with its Internet radio service. The Stiletto 2, which sells for $330, with a monthly subscription of $13 a month, provides the satellite channels as well as Internet radio when in range of a Wi-Fi hot spot, or plays downloaded files. The files can include those from music services like Rhapsody or Yahoo Music.
Time-shifting in TV is old hat, but the ability to record live radio for later playback is a serious feature for radio fans.
A Dell with lighter touch
Dell, with its new Latitude XT Tablet PC, has created a lightweight portable computer with “capacitive touch” capabilities that can accept on-screen input from finger taps as well as a plastic stylus.
Unlike the resistive-touch technology used in some tablet PCs, which requires pressure on the screen for the computer to accept input, a capacitive touch system can sense the finger on the screen without the need for pressing down. The Dell tablet also can perform right-click mouse functions.
The Latitude XT starts at about $2,500, and it can be configured and ordered at /tablet. Customers have a choice of the standard Windows Vista operating system or the Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005.
The computer weighs less than 4 pounds, and its 12.1-inch screen rotates to reveal a full keyboard for typing.
Now that’s a big screen
The VPL-VW40, which will be available in February from and other outlets, uses Sony’s 1,920-by-1,080-pixel image panels to project a sharp image measuring up to 25 feet diagonally. It includes two HDMI connections, a component input, a composite input and a PC video input. It can be mounted on a ceiling or placed on a floor stand. Like most projectors, the VPL-VW40 includes keystone correction for fixing images when the projector is at an angle to the wall. You will need an external video source because the projector does not include a TV tuner.
Put the VPL-VW40’s giant images next to a puny 42-inch plasma, and maybe that $3,000 price tag won’t look so big after all.
