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IPod Speakers
Dorm dwellers: Are you itching to share your passion for Pan Sonic and Parliament with the rest of your floor?
There has never been a better time to plug your MP3 player into a new pair of speakers. And you can do it without blowing your beer money for the week.
The iPod music system maker, iHome, has a set of headphones, the iHMP5, which - turned outward - act as speakers powerful enough to fill a room.
At about $70 for a sturdy, padded pair, the iHMP5s are an excellent deal, particularly if space is tight in your room or apartment. (I pitied the Emmanuel College kids I saw schlepping big speakers up to their rooms last week).
Just be sure the iHMP5’s built-in pre-amp, which is what makes the headphones work as speakers, isn’t on when you don the headset for your walk to class.
To give your iPod a sleeker and more permanent home on your nightstand, check out iHome’s see-through iP1 Speaker System, with 100 watts.
The iP1 nestles your iPod between two 4-inch speakers (each of those is topped by a 1-inch tweeter) set inside a flat, translucent black panel. The iP1 is iHome’s best-looking iPod speaker system by far, but you will pay for the luxury: about $300.
If you prefer to keep your music to yourself (and to save a few bucks), the iFrogz EarPollution Timbre is an excellent option.
The Timbre (www.ifrogz.com) earbuds have wood chambers and light but snug rubber fittings. The Timbre earbuds cost about $40. For about $50, you can get a pair that includes a microphone, for use with an iPhone or Blackberry. Note to iPhone jailbreakers: My wife, Lisa, and I loved the Timbre. But the Timbre microphone did not work with Lisa’s unlocked first-generation iPhone. The earbuds did.)
If you prefer to be ensconced in a pair of juicier headphones, look to the Jabra Halo - a foldable and fairly flat set resembling the LG concept headphones I reported on earlier this month (www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/08/10/glimpsing_the_future_of_mobile_phones/).
Bonus: The Halo (about $130) does Bluetooth as well as the standard 3.5mm corded connection.
Tablet PCs
Alternatives appear before Apple's planned device
Fans of mobile computing will have more than one new tablet PC to choose from this fall, even if Apple doesn’t get its act together - or if the what, where, and when of Apple’s tablet rumors prove to be false.Archos (www.archos.com), for example, hopes to steal some of Apple’s thunder with its PCtablet, a Windows 7 number with a 9-inch touchscreen, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 1.3-megapixel webcam. Archos wants us to view the PCtablet as a netbook without the keyboard. It has a trackball and buttons for navigating Windows menus. A software “virtual keyboard’’ stands in for the real thing, so you can get those e-mails and tweets out from any location.
The PCtablet, which has a storage capacity of 60 gigabytes (you can upgrade to 120 gigabytes), is less than three-quarters of an inch thick and weighs less than 30 ounces. It is expected to sell for about $500.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
