Personal Tech
HANDS-FREE CALLING
I always try to get my wife Lisa off the phone when she calls me from the highway on her commute home from Providence. (Rhode Island drivers make their Massachusetts counterparts seem downright cautious on the road.) "It's OK," she always says. "I've got my headphone in."
Motorola also believes that some kinds of calling are safer than others. I agree. And that's why I find the MotoRokr T505 hard to resist: The car speakerphone from Motorola deftly combines Bluetooth and an FM transmitter to make taking calls and listening to music a virtually hands-free experience.
The battery-operated, rechargeable T505 looks a lot like a radar and laser detector. You clip the device onto your visor, and it has large buttons on the front to play and pause your music, or take a call.
The T505 has an internal speaker, and audio caller ID, which speaks the number of incoming calls. It uses Bluetooth to pick up music from your iPod, MP3 player, or music phone, and can relay those tunes to your car stereo via the T505's FM transmitter.
You can also have the T505 surf the FM airwaves for the best connection for your transmitter, by pushing a button to activate its StationFinder feature.
The T505 will be available early in 2008.
MOBILE PHONES
The Samsung Juke is one mean instrument
Verizon Wireless might have called its new Samsung music phone the Switchblade, for the clever way it opens: you flick it sideways.
The marketing folks at Verizon, however, smartly avoided kids boasting about their new switchblades in high school hallways by naming the phone the Juke.
But imagine all of the choreographed knife fights that could instead be settled peacefully with the stick-like phones, playing MP3s from Verizon's online music store.
Like so many Samsung phones, the Juke is splendid to hold and behold. It has a textured, metallic click wheel that resembles a platinum record album. The phone is only about an inch wide, and 4 inches long.
Folded shut, the Juke looks like the second-generation iPod Nano.
But the Juke's click wheel takes some getting used to. It is not a touch sensor device, like that on the iPod. You must actually turn the Juke's wheel to navigate through your music library. The phone does have handy volume controls and a lock button on either side.
The Juke stores 2 gigabytes of music, and links to your PC via USB. Unfortunately, the V Cast Music Player that helps manage the Juke's music is for Windows PCs only.
Flipped open, the Juke has a metallic, numeric keypad, and buttons for navigation and the phone's built-in camera, which takes pictures in low light (think late-night parties, people). One click of the button turns the camera on. Another click of the same button, and you've snapped a picture.
One inconvenience with the phone's camera: You must flip it open to take a picture.
The Juke's standard battery should give you more than four hours of talk time. The phone is available from Verizon for about $100, after an online rebate, and with a two-year contract.
Gaming
Das Überclok runs faster than it should
If you don't mind running a PC's processor faster than you should (picture Scotty warning you, "She can't take much more of this!"), the Überclok Ion (starting at about $1,500 at uberclok.com) promises to take your gaming where it has never gone before.
Überclok has tweaked Ion's 2.2GHz Intel processor to run at 3.4GHz. The company's Reaktor has a 3.0GHz processor bumped up to run at 3.7GHz.
Overclocking PCs - making their processors run faster than their factory specifications - is what hardcore PC gamers do when they want to kill trolls and enemy troops even faster.
But overclocking will wear out your hog faster than normal, Überclok admits, though not before your hardware becomes obsolete.
The Überclok machines come with three-year warranties.
Innovative last week
Better pictures with Skype
It used to be the best images you could hope for in video conferences were blurry shots, just good enough to identify who you were talking to. Now, Skype and Logitech are practically claiming that broadband users can see their workmates so clearly they will be referring them to the doctor to check on suspicious moles.
With Skype 3.6 for Windows, version 11.5 of Logitech's QuickCam software, and a Logitech Web camera (such as the QuickCam Pro 9000, pictured here), you can get VGA-quality video at up to 30 frames per second. The QuickCam Pro 9000 will cost you about $80 after rebate at the Skype Shop (skype.com/shop).
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
