Reviews

Mini-Review: Pocket Dish Tries to be iPod Video

Mini-Review: Pocket Dish Tries to be iPod Video

Reviewed by Shawn Conaway

Who says you can’t take it with you? The Archos AV700E PocketDISH lets you take your favorite movies and TV shows anywhere at anytime. The PocketDISH is a portable DVR designed for recording content from the DISH Network like a regular VCR. However, it is not limited to just recording from the DISH Network. When in the TV docking pod, the AV700E is able to capture video or audio from any standard video or audio source, capturing audio as WAV and video as MPEG-47 video or AVI. You can even use it to capture audio from your old audio cassettes. Content can be moved the PocketDISH from your Mac, PC, digital camera, external hard drive, or camcorder using the enclosed USB cable.

Review: aXbo Sleep Phase Alarm Clock – wakes you at the optimal point in your sleep cycle

axbo sleep phaseFollowing up on the heels of the SleepTracker is a sleek, gorgeously designed alarm clock from European company, aXbo, that uses an accompanying wristband to track your body’s movements throughout your sleep.

Based on those movements, it can determine where you are in your sleep cycle. Research has shown that there is an optimum point in your sleep cycle to awaken to feel refreshed.

Set your aXbo Sleep Phase Alarm Clock for the latest time that you wish to awake. It will start looking for your optimal waking point 30 minutes prior to that and will sound an alarm, which include some more gentle nature sounds.

Having tried the aXbo, there is no question that it finds a better point in time to awaken. Is it extremely accurate? That’s hard to tell based only on how refreshed you feel, because how well you sleep and how energetic you feel depends on many factors outside of just your ideal wake time.

The aXbo has a unique, yet easy to use interface and the buttons have an ideal feel to them. It’s easy to get lost in the semi-transparent display as well. aXbo recharges via USB or the included adapter.

Buy now!

More info from the manufacturer
Price: $349.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Mini-Review: Kensington 120W Power Adapter

Mini-Review: Kensington 120W Power Adapter

Here’s a quick review of the Kensington 120W notebook power adapter. The 120W AC/DC adapter comes with 8 different power tips that fit 100s of different notebooks. Also, you can buy additional tips for other notebook, as well as MP3 players (including iPods), and dozens of cell phones. As a Dell Latitude user, the first (and really nice) thing that I noticed was the size and weight of this adapter: it is wider and longer than my standard Dell ‘brick’ power adapter, but significantly thinner at less than 1 inch (0.66″ to be exact). This makes it a lot easier to fit into my laptop bag. Also, it’s so much lighter at 11.4oz. Again, really nice when I’m travelling.

Review: Nintendo DS Lite

Review: Nintendo DS Lite

Fresh from the midnight madness pre-order rush is our newest toy – the Nintendo DS Lite, an updated version of the popular Nintendo DS handheld video game system released in 2004. The DS Lite features include a 20% smaller body, lighter weight, increased battery life, newly optimized layout of controls, and much brighter LCD screens. Since the new system is essentially identical to the older DS in terms of gameplay support, does it really make sense to make the Lite upgrade? Read on to find out!

Review: Dell 24″ Widescreen Flat Panel LCD

Review: Dell 24

Dell 24 Today the Geeks are looking at the Dell 24″ Widescreen Flat Panel LCDs. Dell has built a reputation in the industry for selling high quality LCDs. This tradition started with their fantastic 2001FP, a favorite among many gamers as it was one of the first to have the refresh rates fast enough for game play while providing excellent size to cost ratio. Dell followed up the 2001 with the 2001 FPW widescreen display, and more recently with the 2007FP. Let’s see how the colossal 24″ wide screen LCD stacks up…

Review: SENA Blackberry 8700 Leather Case

Review: SENA Blackberry 8700 Leather Case

The Geeks received a SENA Blackberry 8700 Leather Case to review and since I’m a Treo guy and don’t have a Crackberry, I asked one of the executives at my company to give the SENA case a full test. Using the SENA case with his Blackberry for a few weeks, he performed real world tests that any executive would encounter including carrying the Blackberry everywhere and even dropping it a couple times! Read on to see what he thought of the case.

Review: FM Transmitters: Roadmaster VRFM8/VRFM9, Kensington Pico

Review: FM Transmitters: Roadmaster VRFM8/VRFM9, Kensington Pico

We started out reviewing the VRFM8 from Roadmaster, which is an FM transmitter for wirelessly broadcasting music from your iPod, USB stick or other music source over your car’s stereo, but then also got the VRFM9. At about the same time, Kensington was good enough to send us a Pico FM transmitter, so this review turned into a bit of a comparitive review. Other vendors that produce FM transmitters declined to send us review samples (although we did review a Belkin TuneBase late last year). Since the Kensington Pico is built for an iPod Nano, that’s what we used for the majority of the review. The VRFM8 and VFRM9 also take USB thumbdrives which plug directly into the units, so we tested those as well.

Review: Kensington SaddleBag Ultra Laptop Carrying Case

Kensington SaddleBag Ultra At one time or another, every geek has owned at least one Kensington product considering Kensington has been around for twenty-five years and now have an inventory of over three hundred computer accessory products. Kensington creates products that can be categorized into six divisions: “power it”, “control it”, “carry it”, “secure it”, “connect it” and “play it”. The Geeks have been testing one of their “carry it” products over the past couple of weeks called the Saddlebag Ultra computer case. If you are looking for a new laptop case, you should check out our review.

Review: iSound Tripod Portable Speakers

Review: iSound Tripod Portable Speakers

iSound Tripod While the Geeks were at CES earlier this year, we ran across a company that tingled our gizmo senses on Day 3 called dreamGEAR. dreamGEAR carries quite a few gizmos from speakers whose styles really fit the whole Apple and iPod look to PSP accessories to general gaming accessories for PC, PS2, GameCube, XBox, Xbox 360, Game Boy and Nintendo DS. dreamGEAR was kind enough to send us a iSound Tripod to review. Read on to see if the stylish speakers are worth listening to.

Review: GoodSync Data Synchronization Software

Review: GoodSync Data Synchronization Software

Slashdot ran an article last year titled “Condensing Your Life on to a USB Flash Drive?” and inspired me to modify how I use USB flash drives. I now use USB flash drives as portable backups in case of a disaster. While that may sound drastic, I didn’t think so as I had already started planning on using USB drives in this manner after Hurricane Katrina. While I created a portable backup solution using a couple of USB flash drives (one for personal information and one for work information), I also created a file synchronization nightmare. If I modified files on a USB drive, I had to make sure I copied it over to the folder in “My Documents” where I usually work on the file and vice versa. GoodSync uses a synchronization algorithm to synchronize data between PCs and USB drives. While other synchronization software simply copies files from place to place, GoodSync offers true bi-directional synchronization preventing data loss. Read the rest of the review to see how the Geeks feel about GoodSync’s synchronization algorithm.

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