Tag Archives: iPhone

Zagg SmartBuds Review

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Zagg SmartBuds

For the Memorial Day holiday weekend, Zagg.com had a super sell. Just about everything in their store was 50% off or more. I am a big fan of Zagg’s InvisibleSHIELD screen protectors and ZaggWipes so I thought I would take advantage of their sale.

For whatever reason I didn’t order any InvisibleSHIELDs for my new iPhone or new iPad. Instead I purchased the Zagg Sparq 2.0 battery for Ryan’s Android phone. Its battery life is abysmal. I also picked up a pair of Zagg SmartBuds. I’m in the market for some good workout headphones that don’t cost the $350 my Klipsch Image X10i headphones cost and thought these would be a great alternative.

The normal retail price for the headphones is around $50 but the sale brought them down to $25.

Typically I only review products that I have purchased for myself and typically those products have been heavily researched before I make that purchase. Thus, most of my reviews are positive, glowing even. This is not one of those reviews.

If you learn one thing from this review it will be that the Zagg SmartBuds are perhaps the worst headphones I have ever purchased. Want to know why?

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Visiting the TWiT Studios

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Today is probably the last day you will find people wandering around San Francisco in their black, mock-collar, WWDC jackets before their head off to their places of origin to share their knowledge. Well, share what wasn’t suffocated by one of Apple’s infamous non-disclosure agreements.

WWDC 2011This is the first year that I have lived in San Francisco for WWDC, Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. It didn’t make a huge difference in my life as I was not in attendance at WWDC. At $1,500 for a ticket, I decided I’d be better off catching up via TUAW and MacRumors. I did benefit from some of the awesome people that came into my city for the week-long conference.

The first night of WWDC I had dinner with a fellow Mizzou alumni Geoff Pado and Tyten Teegarden as well as Twitter friend Luke Irvin. After a few drinks, Luke and I decided we should rent a car and drive up to Petaluma California for a visit to the TWiT Studios. There maybe, just maybe, we could meet one of our favorite nerds, Leo Laporte.

And that’s what we did. Thursday morning I picked up Luke and we made our voyage north. After we reached the TWiT studios, we nervously gathered our things and headed up the steps.

We were immediately greeted with the friendly smile of a TWiT staffer. She provided a quick tour of the operations and then lead us on set where we watched the making of Windows Weekly. If you look carefully during that episode, you’ll see the right side of my body enter the frame a few times. Oops!

One of the guests on the show was Aaron Hillegrass from Big Nerd Ranch. He was super interesting and fun to listen to, equally as congenial.

When the show was over, Leo talked a little tech, signed some autographs and posed for some photos. You always hope that the people you look up to are as cool in real life as you think they are from your side of the screen. In this case, Leo was even cooler. Just so down to Earth and genuinely interested.

Luke Irvin, Me and Leo Laporte

He asked us what we did, if we were from the area, did we go to WWDC, etc etc. Some how we got onto the topic that I am a blogger, I had brought up earlier that I once wrote about him winning an Emmy… Anyways, he pulled up my blog on the live stream and began reading my blog post about the mysterious iPhone I saw last week.

Leo Laporte checking out my blog

That was super cool, I must say. He even left my blog up on the live stream while everyone else went out for lunch. Though it didn’t have much affect on my blog traffic. :-\

Afterwards we checked out the new TWiT studios which look pretty awesome.

New TWiT Studios Panorama

We rounded out the trip with a jaunt a little further north to Healdsburg where Luke and I did a wine tasting at Seghesio Family Vineyards. Quick introductions to all of my friends there, tasted around eight wines from Arneis to Zinfandel to Omaggio.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to hit up any other wineries or check out the amazing food in Healdsburg. Perhaps next time.

I (think I) Saw the iPhone 5

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Device in question is against the wall on the left, dark restaurant with an iPhone 4 camera.

Last week I saw a guy using a touch-screen phone that was super thin with a big bright screen and almost zero bezel.

It immediately caught my attention and I asked my friend Kayla, who was facing the table, to let me know if the guy picked it up and used it. It had been, until then, left to sit on the table unused.

The guy this friend was talking to said something that made the guy pull out his phone and pull up the notepad. This was when Kayla and I realized, this super thin phone was an iPhone. Sure enough, the home screen came back up and it was iOS.

It appeared that the screen took up most of the device, it was super thin, and shorter than the current iPhone. The phone was wrapped in matte black, almost like gaffers tape. It is thinner than I was able to convey in this mockup, almost as thin as a Motorola Razor screen.

I’m no good at making mockups but I did my best to illustrate what we saw.

iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4 mockup

These guys were talking about a new cloud service that was similar to “AWS” but had “no net loss.” AWS, for those who don’t know, means “Amazon Web Services” which provide a plethora of syncing and data hosting services, as well as Amazon’s new cloud music system.

We did our best to listen to their conversation as they drank beers but didn’t pull too much from it. Watching the WWDC live right now I now understand more of what they were talking about, which leads credence to the theory that this phone was indeed an iPhone 5.

All this said, I’m pretty sure that some blog like The Unofficial Apple Weblog will see this, post it and turn out that I’m totally high and these two dude work for IBM and everything is totally coincidental. However, I’m hoping that isn’t the case. 🙂

UPDATE: So after being mentioned on the TWiT Network and WWDC coming to pass, a post by Joshua Topolsky came to my attention about the design of the iPhone 5 via another blog post on some other tech site (too many to remember).

Joshua (or his people) made their own mockup and it is scary similar to the design I saw (and tried to mockup myself).

 

This is My Next iPhone 5 Mockup

This is My Next iPhone 5 Mockup

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White iPhone 4 Unicorn Arrives with Sense of Humor

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Finally. The White iPhone 4 is Here

I find it pretty awesome that Apple actually is making fun of themselves on the front page of their website right now. Yeah, it might be nearly a year late but the “magical” Apple unicorn is finally available to buy. Hats off to you Apple for keeping your sense of humor, you know, the one we never thought you had.

And you know the whole reason I waited from June 24th until September to get my iPhone 4 strictly because I wanted the white version. I eventually gave up and honestly don’t care. For the first time ever I own a black iPhone and my world didn’t turn upside down.

But back on topic. The white iPhone is here, it’s a tiny bit thicker than the black iPhone 4 and we can stop reading rumor posts on it. Thank G-d. Now let’s get those iPhone 5 rumors ramped up. Oiy… Continue reading →

Jawbone JAMBOX Review

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Unless you have had your head in the sand for the last five years you know the name Jawbone, the bluetooth headset with the infamous NoiseAssassin technology. The name “NoiseAssassin” takes greater importance (is even scarier) when paired with ti’s definition “[an] adaptive signal processing technology, which was originally developed for DARPA…”

Government conspiracy theories aside, the technology behind Aliph‘s headsets has been an industry leader since its inception. The JAMBOX represents a diversion for the company from headsets to speakers. And for a first effort, it isn’t so bad.

The JAMBOX is a marvel of design and sound output versus physical size. It is feature-rich and about as sexy as a tiny speaker can get. It is also too expensive for what it actually accomplishes (depending on your use case).

If you’re looking for a bedside iPhone speaker/alarm/dock system that just might fill a room with sound, charge your iPhone and not costa  bundle, check out the offerings from Altec Lansing, Logitech, Klipsch and iHome. For the full review, read on.

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Klipsch Image One Review

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I cannot believe it has taken me this long to write a review of the Klipsch Image One headphones. It was last November that I first posted about these over ear headphones, the first on-ear headphones made by Klipsch. And yes, one of these days, I will write a review that doesn’t take an hour to read. Brevity is not my strength.

I’ve decided to edit the introduction to this review with a summary of my thoughts. The full review is posted below, but if you’re in a rush, digest the following. Continue reading →

Night Light

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What an awesome night tonight turned out to be. Twitter buddies @Airrun, @JHolman23, @jasetrevino and @Marris_Returns came over for wine, bread, cheese, and fun.

It was my first pseudo tweetup since moving back to San Francisco, the first time I had seen Jimmy since he moved here from Missouri and the first time I had the pleasure of meeting Jason or Aaron. We listened to music, watched some hilarious YouTube videos, talked about everything and nothing at the same time.

It was a pretty awesome night. Even Ryan got to join in on the fun which was such a pleasant surprise. Seems any other time we do something like this, his hectic work schedule gets in the way. Now I just can’t wait for the next time I have friends over for wine and a great time.

The photo of the day, way up there, is yet another one from the roof of our apartment shooting into the neighboring backyard. There is something about this particular apartment and their 6000 watt light that shines light pollution across the common grassy space between the buildings that is so romantic to me. It’s what I imagine a Gregory Crewdson photo would look like if he had a crew of one and a budget of none.

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