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Oregon Scientific ATC3K plus 4GB card
from www.oregonscientific.com.au
If you’re into mountain biking, surfing or skydiving, this could provide hours of fun. Strap it down with one of the included clips or Velcro bands and it will capture 640 x 480 footage to an SD card. Its rubber-coated body will withstand moderate shocks and immersion in water. Unfortunately, the video is rather choppy under bumpy conditions, and the quality is poor even at the best of times. Still, you can take footage anywhere and it’s worth it for the fun of reliving those experiences.
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Microsoft Wireless 1000
from www.bidbox.com.au
Microsoft and Logitech have been dukeing it out in keyboards and mouses for some time and it’s rare to see anything game-changing. The Microsoft Wireless keyboard 1000 is a basic design with a few nicely labelled function keys and multimedia buttons adding an unobtrusive selection of simple features. The wrist rest is too slender to be of any great use, but the overall shape is curved nicely, providing a comfortable hand position. The keys themselves have good depth and size as well as being quiet. After a very short period of time, the Wireless 1000 had supplanted the existing system keyboard for good. Battery life was excellent. We happily recommend this as a good, entry-level wireless keyboard.
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Sennheiser CX-95
from www.syntec.com.au
The CX 95’s are well-built and comfortable-feeling sound isolating headphones that shout about nothing and just do everything right. The balance is spot-on — there’s plenty of bass, expressive mid-range and detailed top-end. If you want to replace iPod in-ears for less than $200, try these.
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read full review
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TIVO
from www.harveynorman.com.au
TiVo HD lets you record two shows at once, pause and rewind live television. The 160GB hard drive holds 20 to 30 hours of high-def content or 60 hours of standard-def TV. Our review unit was easy to set up and we easily created a Season Pass to regularly record our favourite shows. To stop the small hard drive filling up, it let us nominate how many episodes to keep. Old recordings would have been automatically deleted when space is required - unless we marked them to be kept - which is another important feature lacking in most PVRs. Ad-skipping has been disabled, but you can fast forward the ads. read full review
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Logitech V550 Nano
from www.mwave.com.au
This wireless travel mouse from Logitech comes with a receiver so small it barely protrudes at all when plugged into your laptop’s USB port. Better still, it slots inside the mouse itself when you’re on the move. The base of the mouse features a small groove; a separate plastic knob comes in the box that you stick to your laptop’s lid. The mouse can then be clicked into place on top of it for easy transport. The mouse itself is hardly stylish, but the Nano is nonetheless a handy addition to any briefcase.
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Laser Genius Ergo 555
from www.mwave.com.au
The Genius Ergo 555 Laser mouse markets itself as the world’s first OLED gaming mouse, which is one hell of a gimmick: a tiny OLED screen displays the mouse’s current configuration, which is neatly obscured by your hand whenever you’re actually using it. It adds nothing but price to your new mouse. More useful is the impressive ten-button array, with seven macro buttons in five game profiles. Gamers can also adjust the X and Y axis DPI from 400 to 3200. The sculpted rubber sides make it ergonomically comfortable, even after hours of use and it’s lightweight compared to other gaming mice, which might be a difficult transition for some gamers.
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Pleo
from www.harveynorman.com.au
Pleo is an AI as much as a toy – it starts off with a very basic personality and learns as it goes. In his baby form, he’s a bit of a snugglebunny. He likes to be patted, and it will even cause him to sing if you rub his chin. He’ll walk until he finds someone if you point him away from you, and knows enough to walk backwards to navigate out of corners or stop when he reaches an edge. Press his head and he goes to sleep. We took the Pleo with us on the train, and let him run loose – he was universally admired and everyone wanted to see his tricks.
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Abit Funfab P80-A1
from www.mwave.com.au
The Funfab is one of Abit’s more unusual ventures – a hybrid of photo printer and digital photo frame. To be fair, the Funfab’s main ambition in life isn’t to take over the job of printing your holiday rolls – rather, to edge its way onto your mantelpiece by letting you print arbitrary photos on a whim or when family and friends come around – and here it does a good job. Although the menu system isn’t the friendliest, for the most part you can ignore it and printing individual photos couldn’t be simpler. The Funfab is similarly priced or perhaps slightly cheaper than buying a photo frame and printer separately, but it does come with a few compromises. Most notably, the cost of supplies is quite high. Replacement paper/dye cartridges will set you back around $45 for 72 prints, or a hefty 61c per photo, and the included 10 prints won’t last long. Print quality isn’t great either, and was noticeably inferior to other purpose-built devices such as the Selphy. In particular, prints tend to lose detail in dark and bright areas. Overall it fills its niche quite well, but as a dedicated printer it really doesn’t impress.
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Canon Selphy CP770
from www.pcsolutions.com.au
Our initial impression of the Selphy had us looking for a spade and thinking of sand, but despite appearances it’s actually a very competent printer. While not the fastest printer we’ve seen, at 75 seconds a print you can do much worse. Print quality was excellent and colour realistic, and because the printer uses dye sublimation rather than ink, the usual problems with inkjet printing such as graininess and smudging aren’t an issue. Getting the images to the printer wasn’t a problem either, with support for SD, MemoryStick, Compact Flash, PictBridge and even IR from a laptop or mobile. The included media is a little lacking, with enough dye for just 5 prints, but media costs are comparable to photolab prices, with a 108 print ink/paper kit costing around the $30-35 mark or 28-32c a print. However, there’s no doubt that the Selphy’s key selling point is its design. By being entirely self-contained inside its bucket, it’s both portable and eye-catching, and the optional battery pack means you can print on the road (although the beach might be a bit ambitious). The Selphy is one of those rare devices that fills a niche market while not leaving the rest of us out in the cold. Overall it performs well as a dedicated photo printer, with the added bonus of portability.
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