Reviews

Xbox One Accessory Prices Announced: Controller $60, Headset $25

2013-08-07

Microsoft revealed Xbox One accessory prices: the controllers will list for $59.99 and the wireless headsets for $24.99. The bad news for current owners of the Xbox 360, the current headset and controllers will not work with the Xbox One. This is good to know in case you plan on a multiplayer experience. The new Xbox One provides a single controller included in the box, so you’ll have to buy extra controllers and a headset, or headsets, separately. As a comparison, the PlayStation 4 comes with a headset and is $100 cheaper than the Xbox One, and there is forward compatibility with the PS3 headsets to the new PS4. However every Xbox console comes with Kinect, which Microsoft says can double as a headset for online gaming.

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PlayStation 4 More Specs & Latest Updates

2013-08-06

The next generation Sony PlayStation 4 was announced back in February 2013 with a few hardware specs but not much else. Now more fully revealed at E3 2013, the PS4 attempts to be Sony’s answer to a gaming focused console, rather than trying to be an all-in-one media center. Based on a “supercharged PC architecture,” it features 8GB of GDDR5 unified high-speed memory, an X86 processor, and enhanced PC-style GPU, the PS4 seems to be a bit smaller of a unit than the XBOX One while still managing to be slightly more powerful.

The launch date of the Sony PlayStation 4 is still set to make it available for the holiday 2013 season. It should be priced at $399.00. Luckily there won’t be any restrictions on first-party used games, meaning that you will be able to freely trade and re-sell, however third party developers likeActivision or EA will now be able to add DRM to games to limit the user’s ability to do that if they should choose. Unfortunately, while there is no backwards compatibility with PS3 games, it will support Gaikai cloud game streaming in 2014.

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Moto X Phone – Revealed by Google at Last

2013-08-03

The Moto X! Finally revealed by Google it represents a bid to revive the once mighty mobile tech giant. We here at QTOOTH remember having several Motorola phones over the years. We loved them. Durable with excellent call quality. Nothing else compared. The ultimate benchmark for quality was a Motorola phone on the Verizon network. We were huge, devoted fans. Remember those days?

And then the smart phone revolution began and Motorola was completely cut out of the loop. How they didn’t see it coming is a mystery. Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, LG, even Blackberry had at least something going on. But not Motorola.

So, after much hype and anticipation, Motorola Mobile’s new owner Google finally rolled out their new offering. The general consensus? Better luck next time. Overpriced, under-performing and laden with curious choices, including NOT including the latest version of the Android operating system. This has to be one of the biggest mysteries, after all, Google makes Android and Google owns Motorola. Why wouldn’t it be sporting you latest offering? Baffling…

The biggest feature that they are touting? It’s ability to come in different colors… after being special ordered… and taking at a few days to get to you. Really? When most people want a phone they want it immediately. They want to walk into a store and by it today. And in the end, who really cares what color your phone is when you are just going to cover it with a case or some type of protector? That’s where the real style choices happen, not with the phone itself.

The phone features a 4.7-inch screen device is aimed at the iPhone and the Galaxy S phones. The Moto X features “all-day” battery life, a choice of colors and materials, and an instant-start camera, the company said today at a press event in New York. The Moto X is priced starting at $199 with a two-year contract and will only be available on all AT&T by the end of August or early September. That’s about the same time that the new Apple iPhone is set to hit the market and will probably make the Moto X completely irrelevant.

The device is the first homegrown smartphone from Motorola since Google acquired the business last year for $12.4 billion, as the Internet giant ramps up its hardware ambitions against Apple and others.

There is some claim to being made in U.S.A. and are hoping to attract fans because of this. The reality is that it will only be assembled in Texas at a former Nokia factory and that this will mostly involve the customizing of the color options. Customers can choose the colors of the front, back and accents of the Moto X on the website Motomaker.com. Motorola guarantees phone delivery in four days. One of the custom options is to have a wooden back made from a choice of ebony, teak, rosewood, or bamboo. Only that last choice is remotely sustainable. So? Not exactly hi-tech and not exactly made in America. Unlikely that they will fool anyone with this ruse.

Here are a few good details:A curved, ergonomic back and 10-megapixel camera. Similar to the Motorola Droids on Verizon Wireless, the Moto X runs on a chip system known as X8. Motorola developed twin lower-powered chips to run alongside the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro main processor.

The multichip system is designed to conserve battery life by letting the processor sleep while the lower-power chips work in the background — sensing location, speed and message notifications, as well as listening for voice commands. As an example, even if the phone is locked, the user can say, “OK Google now,” to create and send a message, or open turn-by-turn navigation through Google Maps. And with two flips of the wrist, sensors will turn on the camera and be ready to shoot in 2 seconds, said Rick Osterloh, product chief for Motorola.

As we see it here at QTOOTH maybe Google/Motorola will make more of their investment back when they introduce it to the international market. Maybe they are just trying to establish value by charging $199 with a two year contract but it should be half the price, or less, for what it offers. We’ll take an iPhone 4s or a Galaxy S3 over this anytime. Also, maybe they have plans to roll out instant upgrades to the latest Android OS. Whatever their plans are, they better move quickly to save this phone from an early death.

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Google Chromecast – What Is It… and Why You Should Care!

2013-08-01

What is Chromecast? Chromecast is a brilliantly simple product: plug it into your TV and stream video and music to it from apps running on your Android device, iPhone, or laptop. Chromecast has no need for a remote; just use whatever device you’re streaming from as the remote. Instead of Chromecast having its own dedicated user interface it’s got a single screen that displays the time and, if nothing is being streamed, an indicator as to whether or not it’s connected to your WiFi. How can it be so simple? Because the device you’re streaming from acts as the primary interface. Chromecast is simply a wireless media streamer to your TV and doesn’t try to be anything more.

What’s in the Box?

First, the price of Chromecast is only $35. Google felt compelled to assure the media that they’re not selling them at a loss. I believe them. Even though it has a Wi-Fi chip, a basic CPU, 2GB of flash memory, RAM, a licensing fee to use HDMI, the cost of these parts are pretty cheap these days. Plus it is really a re-purposing of existent, very common technologies so the R & D I’m sure was next to nil. And yet we love it. There’s is so much brilliant technology already in existence and we here at QTOOTH know that most of us, whether as developers or as the end-user customer, barely scratch the surface of the devices that we already own.

The setup is ridiculously easy. Plug it into an HDMI port, give it some juice (through USB, which most new TVs have, or a standard adaptor), then run the Chromecast app on a laptop or other compatible device so that it can connect to your Wi-Fi network. That’s it!

From the day of its release, the Chromecast App has been compatible with some of the most popular online video apps, including Netflix and YouTube. No need to update these apps either, just launched them and the Chromecast button is already there. There is even an extension for Chrome that promises to greatly expand the functionality of the device. It is an early, Beta release and I’m sure it will improve over time.

It’s interesting to note that Google released this with very little fanfare, even though in our eyes this is one of the coolest things they’ve ever released as a physical product (here’s looking at you Google Glass).

There are a few things that will need to be improved, but this is off to a great start. It will be interesting to see how competitors respond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKG5HDyTW8o

So far the video streaming quality seems to be on par with Apple TV or the Xbox 360, especially when using an app or website like Netflix, Youtube, or Google Play, that been designed for compatibility.

If you’re using the Chromecast extension for Chrome on your laptop to project an otherwise incompatible video site (like Hulu or HBOGO), however, video quality can dump quite a bit depending on your setup. It’s using your laptop as a middle man to encode the video signal and broadcast it to the Chromecast, whereas the aforementioned compatible sites just send video straight to the dongle, mostly removing your laptop from the mix. When casting video tabs on a 2012 MacBook Air running on an 802.11n network, the framerate was noticeably lower and there were occasional audio syncing issues.

While we’re on the topic, the Chrome extension packs a bit of an easter egg: the ability to stream local videos from your laptop to the Chromecast. Just drag a video into Chrome, and it’ll start playing in a new tab. Use the Chrome extension to cast that tab, and ta da! You’re streaming your (totally legitimate, not-at-all-pirated-am-i-right) videos without bringing any other software into the mix. I tried it with a bunch of video formats (mostly AVIs and MKVs. MOVs kinda-sorta work, though most won’t push audio from the laptop to the TV for some reason), and they all seemed to work quite well, albeit with the lowered framerate I mentioned earlier.

Even within the apps that have already been tweaked for Chromecast compatibility, there are some day-one bugs. Sometimes videos don’t play the first time you ask them to, instead dropping you into a never-ending loading screen. Other times, the video’s audio will start playing on top of a black screen. These bugs aren’t painfully common, but they’re not rare, either.

As compared to AirPlay, AppleTV’s built-in streaming feature, Chromecast’s wins because of its cross-platform compatibility. Whereas AirPlay is restricted to Macs and iOS devices and only has limited support for Windows through iTunes, Chromecast works well with any iOS, Android, Mac, or Windows app that utilizes Google’s Cast SDK (or software development kit). although Chromecast just launched, we would be very surprised if developers didn’t jump on this and expand upon the universe of applications that are possible. That means it could be adopted by TV, speaker, entertainment device manufacturers and more, putting the AirPlay protocol in certain jeopardy of being the odd man out.

As expected the experience on Android is a slightly better than it is on iOS. Google has considerably more freedom on their own platform; as an example, apps that use Chromecast can take priority over the lockscreen so that the user can operate the controls, like play/pause/skip, of a video without having to fully unlock their Android device. But that’s a minor thing and, for the most part, all of the primary features work just as well on iOS as they do on Android.

Conclusion

This is the future. It’s probably in all of our futures. If not Chromecast then something almost exactly like Chromecast.

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Polar Stride Sensor Bluetooth Smart for iPhone 5 and 4S

2013-07-13

One of the the world’s first, the Polar Stride Sensor Bluetooth Smart connects directly to iPhone 5 or 4S to deliver speed, distance and run cadence. The sensor provides all the data needed for running with the exception of heart rate and you can add a Polar H7 heart rate monitor to receive that data. A great way to realize the full potential of the Smart Stride Sensor is to pair it with the Polar H7 Bluetooth Smart Heart Rate Sensor, an armband for iPhone and a tube of heart rate monitor electrode cream.

The Polar Stride Sensor Bluetooth Smart comes with a Polar S3+ Stride Holder that threads directly into the show laces. It is worth having a couple of these if you have more than one pair of running shoes so you don’t have to re-thread the pod, simply move it from holder to holder.

The Polar Bluetooth Stride Sensor also has a user changeable battery and complete stride sensor calibration instructions are available on the Polar website.

For folks that bring an iPhone 5 or 4S with them for exercise, or have to have it for work, this is a good solution. Competitive runners will be much more apt to stick with GPS watches.

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NuForce Introduces the BTR-100, a High-Fidelity Bluetooth Digital Receiver

2013-07-10

With the NuForce BTR-100, users can stream CD quality digital audio directly to their high performance digital home stereo system.

NuForce, Inc., a leader in professional and consumer audio gear, introduces the BTR-100, a high-fidelity Bluetooth digital receiver that enables users to stream CD-quality audio directly to their home stereo systems. With their mass-market DACs and analog output stages, the majority of Bluetooth receivers achieve no more than mediocre audio performance. The BTR-100 delivers audiophile-grade fidelity via state-of-the-art aptX-enabled Bluetooth technology and direct optical connectivity, features that permit CD-quality audio to be streamed wirelessly to your NuForce digital integrated amplifier or other digital-input DAC/amp devices.

In those instances where the user prefers to connect directly to an analog amplifier or powered speakers, the BTR-100 also offers stereo analog outputs. Whatever connection you choose, with the BTR-100, you can be sure that your system will perform to the limits of its ability.

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Based in Fremont, California, NuForce first gained acclaim for its patented audiophile-grade Class-D power amplifiers, earning numerous awards from audio publications in the U.S. and Japan. Building upon its reputation as a company that develops state-of-the-art audio products, NuForce has worked diligently to expand its product line with digital-to-analog converters, in-ear and over-the-ear headphones, speakers and subwoofers, cables, additional home and headphone amplifiers, and other quality audio accessories. In every product and in every way, the NuForce brand offers superior engineering in designs of simple elegance.

Sold internationally, NuForce remains firmly committed to value and integrity in the production of high-performance consumer electronics adhering to stringent quality standards.

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