Product review – TriSpecs Stereo Bluetooth sunglasses

by Scott Carmichael on

This product review is going to give you a closer look at the TriSpecs Bluetooth sunglasses.

Bluetooth added to sunglasses is nothing new, but past attempts at making Bluetooth enabled sunglasses usually resulted in something that looked more like a Star Trek prop than a fashion item.

The TriSpecs sunglasses actually look like a normal pair of sunglasses, and the optics are Sola, one of the top of the range glasses made by Carl Zeiss. Of course, since the arms house the electronics, you can easily tell them from “normal” sunglasses.

The Bluetooth portion of the TriSpecs supports handsfree communication as well as stereo Bluetooth. The specs have buttons to control your music and for controlling your call.

To turn the TriSpecs on, you simply pull on the headphone cords, turning them off involves pressing on a small “cord retract button” and pressing the stop button. All controls are accompanied by voice prompts, and the buttons are very easy to locate.

Bluetooth performance is actually very good – stereo audio sounds great, and call quality is very impressive. TriSpecs incorporated some nifty noise canceling technology in the phone portion of their product. By using dual microphones, callers on the other end will barely notice you are on a Bluetooth headset.

Using the TriSpecs with your device is simple – most mobile phones on the market support regular handsfree Bluetooth, and most advanced smartphones add support for Stereo Bluetooth. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch , you’ll be able to upgrade to Stereo Bluetooth later this year. Owners of an iPod can add Bluetooth to their player with a $50 adapter. When you pick up an incoming call, the headphones can pause the music on your device, and resume playing when you hang up.

TriSpecs are available with 2 different versions of earpieces – normal and in-ear noise isolating. The version I tested was equipped with the noise isolating earpieces, which were most certainly on par with most premium noise isolating earbuds out there.

Charging the headphones is done using MicroUSB, which is quickly becoming the standard charging plug for many major phone makers. Nokia, Motorola and RIM (Blackberry) have already made the switch to MicroUSB.

There is of course one major issue with Bluetooth enabled sunglasses (in fact – all Bluetooth headsets suffer from this) – you run the risk of looking like a bit of a dork. Sunglasses are a pretty personal thing, they are after all a fashion item.

I’ve never been very fashion conscious, and always stuck with the more basic Ray Ban sunglasses, but I’ve got to say that the TriSpecs actually look pretty damn good. The inclusion of the Carl Zeiss lenses make for a very effective pair of glasses. The sunglasses feel very sturdy and sit nice and tight on your head. Of course, for every one person that thinks they look “cool”, there will be one person who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing them.

The product is available in six different colors – black, white, blue, red, silver and gold. The black and white glasses are $199.95, all other colors are $224.99. Once you settle on a color, you can select even more tweaks – including accents, lens color and the earpiece version. A pair of black metallic TriSpecs with the in-ear noise isolating headphones retails for $244.98. Shipping is just under $10.

All in all I’m quite impressed with the TriSpecs. The Bluetooth portion functions very well, and the addition of in-ear noise isolating headphones is a real treat.

In the “minor complaints” department – I would have preferred to see the specs come with a hard case instead of a microfiber pouch.

Other than that, if you find yourself outdoors a lot, and could use a good quality pair of sunglasses with integrated Bluetooth, these are very much worth the investment. Just don’t blame me if people start laughing at you, and remember – turning the volume up will block out their laughter.

And finally, Since I have a face more suited for radio, I’ve added a photo showing the TriSpecs on someone with a face much more suitable for product reviews – Sofia Milos (of CSI:Miami and The Sopranos):

Hacking the hotel TV – making the most out of being stuck in your room

by Scott Carmichael on

We’ve probably all been there at one point – you are stuck in a boring town, with nothing more than the hotel TV to keep you occupied. It doesn’t really matter where you are, the channel selection on most hotel TV’s is going to be useless.

You’ll usually get one or two hotel welcome channels, some local news stations and a couple of sports channels. Forget HBO or any of the “other good stuff”, unless you are willing to pay for it.

In this article I’ll describe how you can use the TV for your benefit – and how you can bring your own TV programming with you.

(Despite the catchy title, this article will not describe theft of service, or physically hacking the hotel entertainment network, sorry!).





The aux input – the “holy grail” of personal in-room entertainment

On virtually every hotel TV, you’ll notice a set of connectors on the front of the unit – usually yellow, white and red connectors. These are the plugs you’ll need in order to plug some better entertainment into the tube.

On more modern TV’s they may be on the side, or even the back. Just be sure you don’t slide the TV off the dresser when you move it check on the rear, as most hotel tend to frown on a TV with a busted picture tube.

Once you find the inputs is where things can get tricky – hotels would much rather have you spend $19.95 for the latest movie than have you watch your own content for free. The agreement hotels have with their entertainment provider means they grab a pretty nice chunk of whatever they charge you.

The easiest way to check whether the inputs on the front of the TV are enabled is to simply plug something in and press “play” on your device.

I’ve been in many hotels that specifically mention that their TV video inputs are disabled, and from the remote it would indeed seem like they removed the option.

However, as soon as the TV detects a signal in those inputs, it switches right to it, without the need to press any buttons. When on the video input, the TV will usually say “camport”, “aux” or “line in”.

If you find one of those TV’s, life is easy, but if you plug something in, and nothing happens, it may be time to become a little more creative, so here are some tips to get the video channel enabled on your hotel TV:

  • Use the channel buttons on the front of the TV, not on the remote. The line-in channel is often right before, or right after the regular channels.
  • Try channel numbers not in the usual “up/down” lineup, like 00, 000 or 100.
  • Try a universal remote control and program the various codes for that specific TV into the remote, then try the “input’ button on the remote, you’ll be surprised how often a $10 remote can bypass what the hotel does not want you doing. It may take a couple of attempts, but what is 5 minutes of your day when the alternative is watching the TV welcome channel over and over again.
  • When I travel, I carry a Logitech Harmony remote, which can be programmed using my laptop – its remote code database is extremely extensive, and I have yet to run into a TV I can’t “tweak”. You can find a Harmony remote for as little as $40.

Hotels (and their entertainment providers) are getting smarter – I’ve recently seen some TV’s that allowed me to switch to the video input, using a universal remote control then move me away from it seconds later.

Unfortunately for them, simply unplugging the cable/Lodgenet/OnCommand box on the back of the TV fixes that problem.

Of course, some may ask whether any of this is ethical – in my opinion it is – as long as you leave the TV in the same condition it was when you arrived in the room, nobody should care, switching to the AUX input does not break the TV, and the only “damage” you cause, is preventing the hotel owner from making money off selling overpriced movies.

Modern TV’s make life easier (sometimes)

Some hotels are slowly coming to the realization that guest need more than just a 26″ 80’s wood grain TV.

Those hotels are beginning to replace the old tubes with nice flat panel TV’s. Of course, the less-than-smart ones replace the TV, but still broadcast non-HD stuff on it.

One disappointing trend I’ve noticed is that these hotels provide a really nice TV, with a ton of inputs, but screw a panel over said inputs to prevent you from watching your own content. Of course, this is where a screwdriver in your carry-on bag can help. In some cases, you may even be able to use a spoon to unscrew the panel and plug your cables in. Just be sure to remove your own cables and replace the panel before you leave.

Then there are the hotel chains that really care for their guests, and understand that you’d like to have access to all those plugs. Those hotels are installing “AV boxes” next to the desk, which let you access all the ports without having to reach behind the TV. A good example of such a hotel chain is Aloft, which is part of Starwood.

Connecting a media player

Once you figure out how to change the TV input, it is time to connect your media player. I’ll focus on the player I personally find the most pleasant for travel – the Microsoft Zune.

Why the Zune? Its AV connection kit is affordable, and the docking station comes with a remote control. The Zune also displays its menu on the TV, unlike the iPod which forces you to pick your movie on the device, then switches the TV output on.

Trust me, it is much more comfortable when you can lie in bed and use your remote to pick a movie instead of having to get up all the time (and yes, I am that lazy).

The Microsoft Zune AV kit retails for about $55, and comes with a video cable, docking base, power supply and remote control. The kit is nice and compact, and provides everything you need to entertain yourself in your room.

A similar branded solution for the Apple iPod/iPhone costs $100 and still doesn’t provide the ease of use found on the Zune.

Connecting your laptop

If you’d prefer to use your laptop computer to watch movies, you’ll usually need to invest in a special video cable. Almost every laptop on the market can output its video to a TV, as long as it has the right cable.

A compatible video cable can be found on places like Ebay for as little as $5, or you can check with the manufacturer of your laptop and order an (overpriced) cable from them.

Take TiVo with you!

Anyone with a TiVo back home probably hates being stuck in a hotel. Whenever I am watching TV in my hotel room, I always find myself reaching for the remote to skip commercials, only to find the sticky hotel remote.

There is thankfully a way you can bring TiVo with you, get access to digital programming and your familiar TiVo remote.

Last year, Nero (of the famous CD recording software) teamed up with TiVo to release Nero Liquid TV.

This software/hardware package turns your computer into a full TiVo, with all the features you’d expect, including season passes.

The $125 package includes a digital TV tuner, a TiVo remote control, a remote control receiver and a 12 month subscription to the TiVo service.

The package allows you to do several things – it can network with your home TiVo and transfer recordings from the box to your laptop (and the other way around), plus it can use the included TV tuner to record shows with the included antenna when you get to your hotel.

Just to clarify – this is not the same as TiVo desktop – Nero Liquid TV actually turns your computer into a TiVo, which goes way beyond what TiVo desktop can do.

When you get to your hotel, you simply configure your location (based on zip code), and you can immediately start watching live TV, and schedule recordings.

If you’d rather not bother with a tuner, you can watch programs you transferred off your home TiVo, or even watch movies in one of the many media formats supported by the application.

There are one or two minor limitations to the software – it does not work with digital cable, even though the included tuner is compatible, and I found the TiVo to PC transfer option to be a little unreliable at times, but being able to turn your laptop into a TiVo is absolutely fantastic, and helps you feel a little more at home when you are stuck in a hotel.

You will need a fairly powerful laptop to run Nero Liquid TV, but I’ve found that it actually works fairly well on a 1.6GHz Netbook, as long as you have a fast hard drive and 2GB of memory.

Watch your home TV – away from home

The final option I’ll be describing in this article is potentially one of the coolest – it involves “streaming” your home TV signal, over the Internet to your hotel. No matter where in the world you are, as long as you have a reliable Internet connection, you can use your computer to watch whatever is on back home.

One of the more advanced products for TV streaming is the HAVA Titanium HD WiFi. This $249 device (currently on sale for $179) combines several devices in one – it can stream your home signal inside your house to other PC’s, or over the Internet to a PC, smartphone or Internet tablet. It can also act as a DVR, and finally, it is also a media player (when you plug an external hard drive into it).

The HAVA Titanium goes between your cable box/satellite receiver/DVR/TiVo and your TV, and broadcasts that signal wherever you want. The included infra-red dongle controls your devices, and you are presented with an on-screen remote on your PC that looks just like the one back home.

The quality of the streamed image is great – as long as your Internet connection is reliable. The Hava can adjust the quality of the image based on the speed of your co
nnection.

Of course, the final stage of watching your home TV in your hotel room, is connecting your laptop to the TV, and sitting back to relax, and watch all the channels you have back home.

Product Review – HTC Touch Cruise with “Footprints”

by Scott Carmichael on

The HTC Touch Cruise is a quadband GSM mobile phone with 3G. Packed inside the sleek interior is where you’ll find GPS, WiFi, a 3.2 megapixel camera and a MicroSD memory card slot.

The Touch Cruise runs on Windows Mobile 6.1, the most up to date version of the Microsoft smartphone operating system available at the moment.

The outside of the phone is quite a treat – the phone marks a real departure from boring Windows powered phones, and it is obvious that quite a bit of effort went into making the phone look this good.

On the front is where you’ll find the dual-function D-Pad/scroll wheel, call pickup/hangup buttons and 2 dedicated buttons for GPS navigation and the Footprints application.
The phone is a little over 4″ x 2″ and a tad over half an inch thick. At 3.6 ounces it is one of the lightest smartphones on the market at the moment.

In the photo above, you can see the Touch cruise next to the HTC Touch Pro (the Touch Pro has a sliding keyboard, making it thicker).

Included with the Touch Cruise is a very complete set of accessories – a home charger, stereo headset, a 2GB microSD memory card (containing the maps required for the navigation package), a car charger cord and car windshield mounting cradle.

These accessories make it clear that HTC is serious when it comes to selling this device as a navigation system as well as a smartphone.

Now on to the software – all the basics you’d expect from Windows Mobile are there. You get a media player, Office Mobile and various other Windows applications. In addition to this, HTC has included some of their own apps, including their fantastic TouchFlo interface.

TouchFlo places itself on top of the often clunky Windows interface, and provides a very nice touch enabled tab based home screen for all the various portions of the device. HTC also added Footprints (which I’ll describe in a moment), as well as full navigation package (Copilot), several games and a couple of additional control panel options.

Footprints is designed to capture your trips. It combines the GPS and camera portions of the phone, into a nice and easy to use interface. Essentially, it allows you to make GPS enabled “breadcrumbs” of where you have been.

Once you snap a photo, it is automatically tagged with your location, and you are free to store it in the correct category and add written or voice notes. The concept is great – you travel, and your footprints can be traced back with photos and notes.

There is however one fatal flaw with Footprints – despite the very easy to use interface, and the great amount of thought that went into designing the application, nobody at HTC realized you’d probably want to do a little more with your memories than just leave them on your phone. That’s right – there is no export feature, or any way to move your “Footprints” to your computer, upload them to Google Maps or anything else.

You can save your file and import it on a different HTC device with Footprints, but that is the limit of its usability.

This is, in my opinion, something that makes Footprints about as useful as a fart in a spacesuit. What good are all these memories and photos, if you can’t do anything decent with them? At the very least I’d like to be able to import them into Google maps or Earth, and share them with the world.

It gets worse – the Footprints application saves the geotagging information in a separate file, so even when you copy the photos off the device, your GPS information is not embedded in the photo. To make matters even worse – Footprint photos are only saved as small thumbnails, so despite having a 3.2 megapixel camera, the only photos linked to your “Footprints” are tiny thumbnail images.

Despite this monumental flaw, the phone itself is a real pleasure to use – I would have personally preferred to see a VGA resolution screen, but its small size makes it a very worthwhile smartphone.

The CoPilot navigation software is quite good – not perfect, but not bad either. It has some quirks when it tries to navigate you through town, and its routing skills are not always perfect.

CoPilot is normally a $100 purchase, so receiving it for free with the Touch Cruise is a very nice bonus.

One navigation feature I’d like to point out is the smart car cradle – when you insert the Touch Cruise in its car mount, it automatically switches to a menu called “Navpanel”, allowing you to instantly start the navigation software.

GPS reception is fantastic, and I had no problems getting a very quick fix on the satellites, even indoors.

There are one or two other issues I need to point out. The 3G support in the Touch Cruise does not include the oddball frequency used by T-Mobile in the US. This means that only customers with AT&T will be able to get 3G speeds, T-Mobile users will be stuck on the slower EDGE system.

The Touch Cruise is currently not available from any US mobile operator, which means you will have to purchase it from an HTC dealer, and pay the full unsubsidized price.

True mobile phone fans won’t find this too hard to do, but anyone who is used to paying no more than $10 for their phone will be slightly disappointed to learn that the Touch Cruise will cost them about $515, which is still cheaper than many other contract free smartphones.

One final word of warning – there are 2 different versions of the Touch Cruise out there at the moment; one version released last year, and the newest version I reviewed here today, I’m not entirely sure why HTC decided to release an upgraded version without changing the name.

All in all an impressive little device, not completely without its quirks, but since those are mainly software related, I’m going to go easy on it and wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone looking for a compact 3G enabled Windows smartphone with GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi, especially if you like your smartphone unlocked and without any contractual obligations.

Product review – Air-O-Swiss ultrasonic travel humidfier

by Scott Carmichael on

No amount of luxury at a hotel can help prevent me from waking up with a dry throat in the middle of the night – for some reason, the climate control at most hotels seems to keep the room a very unpleasant 30% humidity, and for some reason, I am very sensitive to dry air.

Last year I mentioned the Air-O-Swiss “AOS 7146” ultrasonic travel humidifier. I finally ordered one and am happy to report that it really does work as advertised. The humidifier itself is small at just 4.5″x2.5″x3″ and at tad over 0.7lbs it will barely take up any room in your bag.

Included in the box is the humidifier itself, a bottle adapter, a carrying pouch and a power supply with a set of international prongs.

To use the humidifier, you simply grab a water bottle (no larger than half a liter), insert the adapter in the bottle, and place the bottle in the humidifier. On the back of the unit is a knob to adjust the humidity level. On the bottom of the unit are 2 folding stands, which should prevent a heavy bottle from tipping the humidifier over.

The unit produces a very fine mist of cool water, which is easily absorbed into the air. The unit does lack a hygrometer, so you’ll either need to keep it on “high” all day, or adjust it when you feel things are getting too humid.

For my test, I brought along a pocket digital hygrometer. When I entered the hotel room, the meter read 34%, which is usually too dry for me. After about an hour with the travel humidifier the humidity level had reached a comfortable 46%.

The Air-O-Swiss AOS 7146 ultrasonic travel humidifier retails for $59.99, but can be found for at your local Bed Bath and Beyond store, which means you can pick one up with one of their easily obtainable 20% off coupons. I ended up paying a little over $48 for mine, which is quite a good bargain.

Product review – Joby Gorillapod Go-Go!

by Scott Carmichael on

The Joby Gorillapod has long been a photographers favorite – the bendy tripod allows you to place your camera on a table or hang it from a tree.

The Gorillapod Go-Go! expands on that concept and offers a multifunctional Gorillapod with interchangeable base plates. The Go-Go! includes a conventional camera screw thread mount, a suction cup mount and 2 self adhesive mounts.

With these 3 different mounting options, the original Gorillapod suddenly becomes compatible with your iPod, PDA, smartphone, GPS or pretty much any other portable device you carry. As with the original Gorillapod, the Go-Go! has non-slip rubber feet, and each joint can be bent and rotated in any direction.

The mounting plates slide onto the Go-Go! and stay in place with a small locking ring . To release them, you simply unlock the ring and press the release button. When attached, the plate feels very sturdy with no wiggle room. The Go-Go! weighs just 1.6 ounces, so when you store it in your carryon bag, you won’t even notice it.

The maximum weight limit on each mounting plate is listed on the Gorillapod site (11.5 ounces on the screw mount, 10.6 ounces on the adhesive clip and 7.1 ounces with the suction cup). This should be more than sufficient for most gadgets out there. A large hard drive based MP3 player usually weighs about 5 ounces.

One minor issue I ran into is that the Gorillapod Go-Go! does not come with a carrying pouch. This may not be an issue with the original Gorillapod, but when you are carrying the Go-Go! with its multiple mounting options, it would have been nice to have a safe place to store them. Of course, a simple Ziploc bag resolves this.

The Gorillapod Go-Go! retails for $29.95, which includes free ground shipping. This is just $5 more than the original Gorillapod, which makes this new version a very good deal.