Archive for the ‘MP3 Players’ Category

The new iHome’s product, a iH15W iPod stereo; Which contains a Subwoofer and a LED colour system, which will change colour randomly throughout play-time. As far as anyone knows, the color depends on the track, for example a more depressing song may have lighter-colours, or a girly-song might have a pink/purple colour. If you can afford to buy one of these and you are looking for some home iPod speakers, I’d suggest getting this speaker system, it’s worth it. Although you are looking at paying $59.99 but if you are willing to pay that much, check out the website here.

I’m not sure what the fascination is with plastering diamonds on everything, but the trend shows no signs of dying down. In the latest bit of news, you can purchase covers, that’s right. Covers, for your iPod earphones, which are encrusted in diamonds. The diamonds are worth $60,000 dollars. If you’re troubled by recent the recent economic crisis and don’t want to fork over quite that much cash, you could always opt to purchase a $4,500 set which is encrusted wit black or white diamonds, or even cheaper, a set covered in Swarvoski crystals for just $110.

Personal Media Players have been around for quite awhile now, and they’re just the answer for people who want to take their media on the go with them but don’t want a more expensive device with a strange format. (I’m looking at you, PSP UMD.) While lots of these things have been coming out of China recently, the most interesting of the bunch is being developed by Ainol. The huge-screened PMP has been in news articles on various different websites, but until now, there’s been no mention of a price. Recently it was found out that Ainol plans to charge around $102 for the device. Your $102 will net you 4GBs of internal space, a 4.3 inch 800 X 480 screen, FM tuner, and TV output with a rechargeable battery. The only challenge will be finding one of these babies. eBay, anyone?

If you think way back, or just view our old post, you may remember us talking about the Clarion MiND. The whole debacle focused mostly around a company giving yet another name to something we already know as a MID. But it’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from them, so here’s the big news: The ClarionMiND is scheduled for a release in both the US and Canada this upcoming November. If you’re over in Europe, you’ll have to wait until January 2009.

The ClarionMiND is equipped with an Intel Atom CPU, a 4.8 in screen running at 800 x 480 resolution, 512mb of internal RAM, a 4GB SSD, 802.11b/g Wifi, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, and it even has a built in SiRFstarIII GPS module. The entire unit should last you fully charged about 2 hours on the normal battery and 4 on the extended. The price? $649.99

Really? Other companies are still out there making PMP’s? We’d have figured that besides Creative, all but Apple had hung up their hat for the day. Apparently nobody told SmartQ. Their latest device, the TAO, is actually not too shabby looking. It’s got a nice 3.3 inch 480 x 320 HVGA screen offering 262,000 colors and is a code beast (it’s capable of handling MP3, OGG, WMA, FLAC, APE, AAC, WAV, PCM, and ADPCM for audio. Xvid, Divx, FLV, WMV, ASF, 3GP, MPEG, DAT, and MP4  for video). All of this running on a handy dandy 500mhz Blackfin processor.

This device seems to be China only as of now, but considering it’s only around $100 for the 4GB model, we may see it making it’s way over sooner rather than later.

After three long years, Rockbox 3.0 is available for iPod, iRiver, Sansa, iAudio, Gigabeat, and Archos media players. This open source firmware offers up a lot of different options for those of you looking to spice up your media player. Features include a codec support for over 15 different formats, 5-ban parametric EQ, MPEG video support, a multilingual interface, a butt-load of video games (including the shareware version of Doom), plus the firmware can talk to you through it’s spoken interface which is pretty handy. If you’re using this firmware on an iPod, you also no longer have to use iTunes to sync everything together.

We’ve been trying to grasp why Apple keeps blacklisting useful apps. For example, the latest app blacklisted that we find extremely useful is Podcaster.

Now, Podcaster was built exactly to the SDK specifications and actually allows you to download and manage any podcast you would like on the fly. Sounds really useful, doesn’t it?

Well Apple decided that it shouldn’t be on the App Store for the following reason: “Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.”

Think about it for a second. As David Chartier from ArsTechnica made clear, there are a clear abundance of calculator and stopwatch apps for the iPhone. Doesn’t the iPhone do that on it’s own already?

The developers are doing their best to keep this app alive by providing it Ad Hoc for a donation of $9.99. While Apple can shut that down at any point, the developers claim to be trying their hardest to keep everything together for at least one year. Check out their website for more info.

While there was clearly a bit of a head start to be had by the fact that the iPod Touch 2.1 firmware had already been jailbroken, it only took ONE DAY for the DevTeam to officially jailbreak the iPhone 2.1 firmware. This firmware update will allow you to run third party/non-app store apps as well as 2.5G/EDGE unlock your iPhone. There still isn’t an unlock for the 3G band as of yet, but you’ll be happy to know that this process has become a lot easier.

PwnageTool and QuickPwn have both been updated to handle all 2.1 devices EXCEPT the new 2G iPod Touch, so hold off on that for a bit.

Last week was a week of new firmware and new cracks apparently.

The iPod Touch firmware 2.1 launched just last Tuesday and by Friday it was already QuickPwn’d. The process isn’t exactly the one click solution that we’ve all grown accustom to, but if you’re the type that just can’t wait for the DevTeam to make things a little bit more noob friendly, you can go ahead and give it a shot. the whole process isn’t that difficult to handle.

While this method does work, the DevTeam has made it clear that this isn’t one of their official releases, so keep that in mind!

On Friday, Apple released firmware update 2.1 for the iPhone officially. It had previously been released to the iPod Touch community earlier during the week. While the results have yet to come in clearly, the promises made for this patch were fairly significant. Steve Jobs himself promised a laundry list of fixes, including fewer dropped calls, improved battery life, less app related crashes, and a much faster back up time to iTunes.

The update process took a significant amount of time as they always do and overall the iPhone is performing a lot smoother. But that’s just what this writer has experienced. Many other users have found themselves having to completely restore their phone due to this update. Hopefully we’ll be hearing more in later this week.