Klipsch has given its 2-year old iGroove SXT iPod dock a much needed refresh. Now boasting Apple’s ‘Works with iPod’ certification, the iGroove accommodates all current iPod and iPhone models, and charges a docked device using a 1000mA rapid recharge circuit (theoretically twice as fast as charging through USB). Other enhancements include retuned bass ports and bi-amplification – amplifying each driver individually so as to eliminate distortion. I’ve had good experiences with Klipsch products, and the updated iGroove looks set to uphold the Klipsch tradition of excellent sound quality at reasonable prices. The refreshed iGroove SXT is available exclusively at Best Buy until later this month, with the price unchanged at $149.99.

This is the Olympus E-P1 , the digital camera that set a million tongues wagging when it was announced. The first Olympus camera to be based on the Micro Four-Thirds standard co-developed with Panasonic, the E-P1 is supposed to be able to capture close to professional DSLR (digital SLR) quality photographs, in a form-factor barely larger than a compact point and shoot camera. The E-P1 is also one of the smallest digital cameras with interchangeable lenses.

I’m not a professional photographer, and my experience with digital cameras has thus far been limited to point and shoots, so bear in mind that this review is from a purely amateur perspective. That said, I’ve had the camera for almost a month, and it’s shaping up to be a great experience.

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Mobile Edge, maker of functional laptop cases and accessories, has acquired the Sumo brand of fashionable carrying cases. Along with the acquisition, the Sumo brand is being expanded to include non-computer related bags and accessories, such as trendy totes, duffels and storage cubes. The addition of the new range, to be sold as the Sumo Lifestyle Collection, has more than doubled the total number of items in the Sumo product portfolio.

Read the whole announcement at the Mobile Edge Blog

Tin foil is sooo passé. If you’re stylish and paranoid, the Flipside wallet is the fashion accessory for you. This polymer and aluminum wallet comes in three striking colors, holds 6 cards or 15 cash bills, and springs open automatically at the press of a button. Credit cards these days come with embedded radio (RFID) chips, and the Flipside’s shielded interior prevents identity thieves from skimming your cards. The stylish geek knows that fashion is fleeting, and when it’s time for a new wallet, the Flipside is completely recyclable. Best of all, it’s made entirely in the US of A.

$40 each from Flipside Wallets

The iPhone has done it again. Google announced today that in less than a week since its release, the latest iteration of the iPhone has boosted mobile video uploads to YouTube by 400%.

This is part of a wider trend that has seen a 1700% rise in uploads to YouTube from mobile phones over the past 6 months.  The number of uploads is ‘increasing exponentially’ with the iPhone 3GS set to take the lion’s share of those uploads as it goes on sale in more markets across the globe.

What’s next? An explosion in mobile multiplayer gaming (sorry Nokia, n-gage just doesn’t cut it)? Let’s hope the iPhone 4G does the same for video-conferencing…

Music Ally via stuff.tv

According to one iPhone app developer, the current paucity of push-capable apps is due to server-side problems at Apple. Powerybase, developer of the NotifyMe app, received an email from Apple notifying them of a delay. According to NotifyMe’s developers, they believe Apple may not have even started testing some (most?) of these apps; as with NotifyMe, Beejive, a popular instant-messaging app, has been in Apple’s review queue for about a fortnight now, with no estimated release date. Powerybase notes that their app has been working fine in internal testing, so the problem probably lies with Apple, with other apps in a similar limbo. Given that we’ve been waiting for push notifications since September last year, another week or two is tolerable, but if we have to wait ’til OS 4.0…

via Whirlpool, appadvice, Beejive support and MacRumors

RapidRepair got one of the first commercially available iPhone 3G S’ from France and performed a quick teardown. They’re in the process of conducting a more detailed analysis, but they’ve already found out that the 3G S runs on a Samsung S5PC100 SoC (system on a chip). The S5PC100 is capable of running at up to 833 MHz, but is downclocked to 600 MHz, presumably for power-saving reasons. (Photo: The 3G S board is on the left, 3G is on the right)

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The iPhone 3G was launched internationally a year ago. From June to August 2008, iPhone mania reached a peak; lines snaked around phone stores worldwide, and for a while, the ubiquitous xylophone ringtone was heard everywhere.

It’s been almost a year since then and the true 3rd-generation iPhone, the 3G S, is about to be released. In the meantime, a plethora of other phones have hit the market, and various Android, WebOS, Blackberry and Symbian smartphones are in the pipeline. How many of you are still on your 1st and 2nd gen iPhones, and what is iPhone sentiment like in your country?

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Opera, maker of the Opera web browser, has just announced Opera Unite – a feature that turns your web browser into a web server with one click. It’s hard to categorize, but the description makes it sound like a mash up of P2P, social networking, file transfer, internet relay chat, instant messaging and cloud-based technologies. Which, I think, basically means that they want to run the internet off of your computer.

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Apple has said in the past that from the iPhone 3G onwards, the iPhone product range will be segmented, based not on hardware, but on software. The iPhone 3G S gives an idea of how Apple is working towards this. The iPhone 3G, when upgraded to the new iPhone OS 3.0, lacks the voice-dialing and video recording features of the iPhone 3G S. Apple says that this is because the current iPhone 3G doesn’t have a powerful enough processor to handle these features; when jailbroken, the 3G is able to record video, but at 15 fps instead of the 30 fps of the iPhone 3GS, so we’ll accept Apple’s excuse that it doesn’t want to compromise the iPhone experience. These excuses fall flat with the discovery that the numerical battery life indicator will also be restricted to the iPhone 3G S. Continue Reading

It’s amazing that in these troubling times filled with economic uncertainty and unbridled social woe, the petty-minded governments of various countries still manage to find the time and resources to censor media outlets in order to protect their citizenry from the corrupting influence of free speech.

Iran briefly blocked access to Facebook, ahead of its June presidential elections. China has upped the ante by blocking, amongst others, Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail. Even Microsoft’s newly unveiled bing search engine hasn’t been spared. The ongoing media blackout occurs ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre this Thursday (June 4).

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There are some hardcore Windows Vista fans out there, but for the rest of us, October 22 can’t come soon enough. That’s when Windows 7 is expected to be “generally available” to consumers – well ahead of its original schedule. Windows 7 will begin shipping to OEMs at the end of July, and by late October, you’ll be able to pick up a boxed copy or get it preinstalled on a new computer.

Source: Reuters

With quirky, no longer will budding James Dysons have to move Down Under or enter humiliating reality TV shows, in order to bring their inventions to market.

Quirky is an “online social product development company”. For a non-refundable $99 fee, you get to submit an idea for a product that, if selected (by the quirky community, ostensibly), will be developed (again, by said community) and sold on the quirky website. Profits are distributed amongst the “influencers” according to their amount of input. Pictured is their first product, a cable storage case called… the Slingback.

We’ve all had our “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” moments, so if you don’t want to end up crying over missed billion-dollar opportunities, go on and show off your quirks. Who knows, your product might be gracing these pages sometime in the future.

quirky

A while ago, I ranted on a Symbian forum about what a piece of cr disappointment the Nokia N96 was, and how it’d put me off Nokia smartphones forever. Until a recent firmware update, the N96 was slow, buggy and practically unusable. It creaks so much, I’ve actually come to think of the squishy casing as a feature – use it as an expensive stress ball, and it’s entertaining; the built-in DVB-H TV tuner is essentially useless anyway. Given the vitriol, you can imagine that it’d take a lot to get me interested in using the N96 again.

Spb TV has temporarily saved the N96 from The Drawer of Forgotten Gadgets. Spb TV is an IPTV client for Symbian S60 devices. It receives streaming live television over a mobile internet connection, and includes an electronic program guide (EPG) for supported channels; if you’ve ever used Livestation on your desktop computer, Spb TV is just like a mobile version of it.

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My review of SpiderOak (Online Backup, File and Folder Sync) isn’t quite finished yet, but it suffices to say that I’m using it on my Mac Pro and it’s replaced Mozy on my MacBook. I found it to have the best balance of price, speed and functionality amongst the services I evaluated (Diino, Memopal, SpiderOak and SugarSync) and now SpiderOak has increased their value proposition by offering a very, very time-limited 50% discount on all annual plans. To take advantage of this offer, sign up for a free 2 GB account if you don’t already have one, and use the coupon code ‘recovery’ when upgrading. The code is only valid for 6 hours today May 20, 2009, from 10 AM to 4 PM EST (3 PM to 9 PM GMT) and brings the cost of a 100 GB plan down to $50 a year.

There was a miscommunication and the above promo has ended, but you can still use ’spring’ for a 25% discount.

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