When the iPad was first announced, I really didn’t see the point. Like a lot of people, I was hoping for a tablet-style version of a MacBook; surely it wouldn’t be too hard to take a MacBook Air, put a touchscreen where the keyboard is, and sell that? But Apple had other ideas; iPhones have been so successful largely because they are so easy to use, so they decided to build on that instead.

So is the iPad simply “a large iPod touch”? After my first day of use, I’ve got to say that yes, it is-and yet, it isn’t… It’s all the good stuff we’re used to (apps, touchscreen, browser, email, ease of use) plus some extra good stuff (speed, larger screen area, better keyboard, increased battery life). There is a small amount of added bad stuff: it’s a bit heavier than I’d like; I can’t hold it in one hand for as long as I can hold my E-reader, for example. It only has one speaker, despite it being billed as an ideal way to watch movies on the go. And the dock connector is in the wrong place for using the iPad as a video player or photo frame- would it have killed them to put a second connector on the side so it could be docked in landscape mode? The last bad thing I can think of is the price- I know first versions of products do tend to be more pricey, so hopefully we’ll see the price drop by £100-£150 or so in the future.

All that aside, though, I’m pleasantly surprised by the iPad. It’s a fantastic way of surfing the web, doing email and updating a blog whilst on the sofa. I’m not convinced that it will make a good ereader- I’ve tried some sample books and as I expected, the screen is nowhere as good as the one on my Sony ereader. Add in the increase in size and weight and the dedicated ereaders have nothing to worry about.

I’ll post another blog once I’ve had some more use out of it, but so far, I’m impressed. And yes, this was written on the iPad, using the Wordpress app.

iHome IP99 clock radio

Looking for a decent clock radio that is iPhone 3G certified? So was I. So my wife gave me one of these for my birthday – but is it any good?

Although the iPhone holds all my favourite music, I still prefer waking up to the radio – mainly so I can hear the news. At night, though, it’s nice to have some iPod music, so I started looking for a clock radio that was also an iPhone dock. That way, I wouldn’t need two sets of speakers by the bed.

It turns out that there are quite a few iPod-compatible clock radios out there, but not many that are iPhone compatible. The difference is that an iPhone-compatible device has extra shielding, to prevent the annoying bip-bippy-bip-bip-bip noise that you get when a mobile phone comes near a speaker.

So that narrowed my choices down – and then when i started looking at the few that were left, almost all of them had pretty poor alarms. I eventually settled on the iHome IP99, as it had the ability to set an alarm that only worked Monday to Friday – most other clock radios only gave you the ability to set one alarm that went off every day. That might be OK for most people, but I’d spent the last few years with a Pure Bug DAB radio which let me set a different alarm for every single day, if I wanted – so I wasn’t used to turning off the alarm for the weekend.

So, after living with it for six months, what do I think of it?

Sound

The IP99 produces really nice sound. Whether it’s presenters talking, or music from the iPhone, the sound is very impressive for something that’s quite small. I can turn it up to louder-than-a-bedroom-needs levels and it doesn’t distort. I’m not an audiophile, though.

Operation

Here’s where the problems start to appear. The IP99 has a pretty simple button layout – most of the controls are on the top of the radio. A very nice touch is the little switch on the back, which instantly flips it between GMT and BST. It only gets used twice a year, but it’s so simple you wonder why more companies don’t do it. The IP99 comes with a remote control, but I don’t use it because this is a clock radio – not a home entertainment centre. It’s right beside my bed; I don’t need a remote!

Sadly, the rest of the iHome IP99 isn’t as well thought out.

Let’s start with the volume and tuning controls – these are large rings that surround the Power and Play/Pause buttons. If you want to adjust the volume in the dark (like if you’re trying to go to sleep, or don’t want your alarm so loud) then you end up slapping your hand onto the top of the radio and sliding it around until you find the ring, and then trying to rotate it – the rings are very smooth and you have to press down to get them to move. First off, it’s far too much work for what should be a very simple job, and secondly, it’s too easy to end up turning the radio off – and if it was in “alarm” mode, you’ve just lost your snooze capability.

Speaking of snooze, the snooze bar doubles as the control for the light intensity. The IP99 follows the annoying trend that a lot of manufacturers have jumped on recently; that of having a backlit LCD display. You have to wonder if any of them actually test these things; if they did, they’d realise that a backlit LCD is basically a big light – not ideal for an alarm clock! Even at the lowest brightness setting, the IP99’s display is too bright to have by the side of your bed. I’ve ended up turning off the light altogether. If I need to know the time in the night, I can press the snooze bar to turn it on again, which is OK, but it comes on at full brightness – I then have to press it another six or seven times to turn it off again. And, since it’s the snooze button, if you do that when the alarm has activated, you’ve just snoozed it.

The problems don’t stop there – even the seemingly simple act of choosing an input has been ruined. You can switch between radio stations by pressing one of the three radio buttons to access a stored channel. If you’re not listening to the radio at the time, pressing the button will switch over to the radio. Similarly, pressing the line-in button will switch you to the line-in socket (useful for attaching something that isn’t an iPod) or, if you’re on line-in, it will switch you back to the radio. But, and here’s the weird bit, there is no way of switching to the iPhone’s dock input. You CAN press the play/pause button, but this is less than ideal – it activates the iPod playback function; useless if you don’t want to listen to the iPod! If you want to listen to, say, internet radio via an App in the iPhone, you have to press the play/pause button, go into the iPod app, stop playing, come out of the iPod app, switch to the radio app and then play. A simple way around this would be to have the line-in button double as a “dock input” button – press once for line-in; press again for dock – simples. But no, iHome make it hard. Why do you need another way of switching to the radio?

If you’re lucky, sometimes you can get the iPhone’s non-iPod audio by launching whatever app you want, and then docking the iPhone into the IP99 – after a few seconds it will usually detect the iPhone and switch the input for you, but not always. And on some of the occasions it does switch, it will also start playing the iPod as well as whatever other app you’re running- very annoying.

Finally, there is one last problem – and it’s the biggest: the IP99 is not suitable for use with an iPhone 3G. There are two reasons why I say this: First, sometimes the iPhone will pop up that little “This device is not iPhone compatible” message when you dock the phone. Oopsy. Second, the IP99 STILL emits the horrible bip-bippy-bip bip-bip-bip noise if the radio is on while the iPhone is docked. It’s OK if you’re using the iPod, but terrible if you want to listen to the radio. And it does it LOUDLY. Even if the IP99 is turned off, you can still hear it – especially at night. When you’re trying to sleep.

So, to sum up:

Pros

• Great sound
• Remote control is pretty comprehensive

Cons

• Terrible controls
• Not iPhone-friendly
• Display is too bright for bedside use
• No way of switching to iPhone input

Opinion: Don’t bother

I’ve had a chance to try out the Ear Force X41 wireless 5.1 headphones for a while now, so here’s what I think of them.

Overview

X41 package

One of the first things you notice with these headphones is that Turtle Beach have thought them out quite well. You get an optical cable in the packaging, so no need to buy an extra one, and they’re powered by USB. This might seem a bit strange, but they’re primarily designed to be used with an Xbox 360 which has plenty of USB ports (it’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t mean they can only be used with an Xbox, – they’ll work with any optical input).The chances are pretty good that someone interested in this sort of device will have an HDTV, and probably either an Xbox 360 or PS3, but if not then a USB power adapter should sort you out. The base station has a hanger on top to hold the headphones, although there is no built-in recharging function – the headphones run off 2 AAA batteries. You can also connect a second set of headphones via the 3.5mm socket on the front, so two people can share the experience (after fighting over who gets the wireless ones, presumably). The last bit of good thinking to point out is that the gaming microphone can be removed – ideal if you’re not going to be using it with an Xbox.

Set up

There’s no setting up involved – simply plug in the power cable and optical cables (the base unit has a pass-through optical port so you can still use a normal amp if you don’t need the headphones), put batteries in the headphones, and turn everything on. The headphones themselves are very comfortable – they’re lighter than the wired headphones I was using previously. There’s plenty of adjustability, so getting a good fit is easy. The volume control is very easy to find, so quick adjustments are simple – no hunting around needed.

Audio quality

Now, I’m not an audiophile – I don’t have any complaints about listening to music on my iPhone, I can’t tell the difference between a B&O CD player or a Sony player, and the thought of spending hundreds of pounds on speaker cabling is ridiculous. So, with that in mind, here’s what I think about listening through these headphones: they’re fine. Movies weren’t muffled or distorted; dialogue was clear; and there was decent bass – there’s also a bass boost switch if you need a bit more. The surround sound effect was also pretty good – I’ll do some more tests on that, though. So, they’re comfortable and sound great – so far so good. I tried them with Xbox 360 games (the surround sound aspect here was excellent), blurays on my PS3 (also good, but with a big drawback – see the next section), and also watching movies via an Apple TV (perfectly fine).

Are there any downsides?

Well, yes, actually. Two big downsides. First, they interfered with my Apple TV’s wireless connection. The base station sits behind my Apple TV, and when it was turned on, the Apple TV would drop its wireless connection if transferring a video file. If you happened to be listening to the headphones at the time, you’d hear a regular (and loud) popping noise.

The second downside is that these headphones don’t work with the newer DTS HD spec – so if I’m watching a Blu-ray on my PS3 that doesn’t have a 5.1 soundtrack (such as Transformers 2), I have to switch it to PCM and make do with Pro Logic surround.  Some discs have both DTS HD and Dolby 5.1, so you can switch to the 5.1 audio, but it’s very annoying on discs that don’t have the option.

Conclusion

The Turtle Beach Ear Force X41 wireless 5.1 headphones are pretty good, and as a replacement for my old wired 5.1 headphones, they’re fine. However, the prospect of wifi interference, and lack of DTS HD support, is disappointing. Hopefully Turtle Beach will produce a more capable product in future; for now these are good, but not as good as they could be.

Rating: Worth a look

Turtle Beach Ear Force X41

Surround sound is good. I like my surround sound system. My neighbours, on the other hand, aren’t so fond of it! So, to be neighbourly, I’ve been on the lookout for a decent set of wireless surround sound headphones, and at long last I think I’ve found the ideal solution.

Up until now I’ve been using a Creative HQ-2300D Dolby surround processor. It’s a little box of tricks that takes an optical input and enables a normal pair of headphones to simulate a surround sound experience. It works really well, too. The only drawback is that it isn’t wireless – which means I end up with cables stretched across the lounge, and the weight of the box dragging down the headphones. It’s not ideal.

Despite the fact that this technology has been around for a few years now, there are precious few ‘real’ 5.1 surround-sound headphones available. There are plenty of headphones that take a normal two-channel stereo signal and try to make it seem like surround,  and a few gaming headsets, but they tend to be dedicated PC sets which only work with a special soundcard – not a regular toslink cable. A few years ago Philips came out with a set – wireless, too – but they were quite hard to get hold of- despite being around £300…

So it seems that home cinema enthusiasts aren’t a suitable target market for this sort of thing. Gamers, on the other hand, apparently are – and one company, Turtle Beach, is just about to release what seems to be the perfect set of 7.1 wireless surround sound headphones…

The Turtle Beach Ear Force X41 Wireless Headset is due to be released in late 2009. Currently it’s listed at £149.99 at Amazon and Play. It follows on from the Ear Force X4 Wireless 5.1 Dolby Pro Logic 2 Headset, which seems to have had good reviews, so the X41 hopefully won’t suck either. Both sets are actually aimed at Xbox 360 owners, as they also incorporate a microphone for in-game chat. Fortunately the mic can be removed, so you shouldn’t feel like an air traffic controller when watching a movie. And, since they take a regular toslink cable input, they’ll actually work with any player that has an optical out for audio – in my case, they’ll probably end up connected to my PS3 more often than my 360!

I’m looking forward to the Ear Force X41 – and I suspect my neighbours are, too – and as soon as I have a chance to try them out I’ll be posting a follow-up.

For more information, check out the product page on the Turtle Beach website or watch their YouTube video below…

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s been a steady increase in interest around Ebook readers in the UK recently, and since I’ve switched back to reading instead of watching video on the tube to and from work (no, really, I must be growing up or something), I decided it was time to have a proper look and see what’s what.

What is an Ebook Reader, then?

Ok, let’s start with a quick explanation of exactly what an Ebook Reader (or Ereader) is. The simple answer is: it’s a battery-powered screen you can read books on. You buy electronic copies of books online, transfer them to the device, and read them on the screen.

However, the simple answer is not the best answer. The key thing about Ereaders is the type of screen they have, and how this makes an Ereader a viable alternative to a normal book.

Normal computer displays are backlit, and this can make lengthy reading sessions uncomfortable since you’re basically staring at a light all the time, which can make your eyes tired. Ereader displays, on the other hand, aren’t backlit – so, just like paper, there’s nothing to strain your eyes.

Not only that, but Ereader displays look very similar to printed paper – they’re black and off-white (just like paper), and have a similar resolution to print. In fact, the first time I saw an Ereader in a shop I had to check that wasn’t just a non-working mock-up – the display really does look like it’s printed text. A few people have commented on the lack of colour, or lack of a backlight, but that’s the whole point – it really is just like a book, only more convenient (and I’ll come back to that point later).

There is one final important thing to note with Ereader displays, and that’s how little power they use. Normal LCD displays constantly use power to keep the picture on the screen. Ereader displays, on the other hand, use something called “E-ink”, and these displays only use power to change the screen – so when you “turn” a page, the display uses power to change the text – but once the text has changed, it will stay on the screen without using additional power. This means that Ereaders can last a very, very long time without needing to be recharged. Indeed, rather than measuring battery life in hours (like a laptop), it is measured by how many times you can turn a page on a single charge – and this is usually in the thousands. You could probably read at least eight average novels on a single charge – that’s not bad going!

How much do they cost?

Well, that’s the bad news about Ereaders – they’re not cheap. You’re looking at over a hundred quid for an Ereader – currently the Sony PRS-505 is going for £150 from John Lewis, which is cheaper than most other retailers, but still quite pricey for a book! The books themselves are pretty much the same price as normal books – which is odd, when you think that there’s no printing or shipping involved, but then there are websites to run so perhaps it balances out…

Where do I get the books from?

At the moment the main retailers for Ebooks in the UK are WH Smiths, Waterstones and Borders. There is also BooksOnBoard, a US website which sells to UK customers, but due to different licencing deals between the US and UK, not all books on their site can be bought if you’ve a UK customer. However, BoB do have books which aren’t available from the other three sites. It’s worth checking all four sites for a particular book, as prices often vary – for example, I bought The Lost Symbol for around £7 from Waterstones, the others were charging anywhere between £9 and £16. Ok, in this case it was more of a P.R. thing – like Amazon and Asda selling the hardback for £4.99 – but you get the idea. Shop around.

Once you’ve bought a book, you’ll be given a link to download the file, and once you’ve got it you can load the file onto your reader. Each reader can hold a large number of books at once, so you don’t have to worry about deleting books when you’ve finished them (unless you really want to).

The only thing to be careful of here is that you buy the correct format of book. Just like PCs and Macs use different software, some readers use different formats of books. However, recently a consensus has been reached between most of the manufacturers to support the “ePub” format, so this should make things simpler.

Some readers can also handle normal Acrobat PDF files – useful for taking a copy of your posh digital camera manual on holiday with you!

So why on earth would I buy an Ereader?

This was the question I asked myself a month ago. My first thought was that the average book costs around a fiver (from Amazon), so why not just keep buying normal books, the normal way? What’s so special about an Ebook reader that makes it worth that sort of money? Well, in my opinion, I can sum it up in one word – convenience. I was reading a 400-odd page novel on the tube the other week, and it was a bit awkward and uncomfortable trying to hold it with one hand (and I hate holding books with two hands for some reason). It was just too thick, and every time the train jolted it slipped in my hand. An Ebook reader, however, is slim enough that it can be held with one hand easily – no matter how many pages are in the book! Also, it takes up hardly any space in my bag (unlike the latest Dan Brown hardback would), which also means that, when we go on our cruise, it’ll be so much easier to take a load of books loaded on the Ereader rather than trying to fit real ones in my luggage.

Aren’t real books just, y’know, better?

I’m actually going off real books. As far as I can see, the only way real books are better at the moment is in the way you can very quickly flick through them to see what’s on each page. You can easily jump to the start of a chapter, or even a specific page, in an Ebook, but you can’t quickly flick through every page, front to back, to find that diagram or whatever. Ereaders take a second or so to turn a page, so fast flicking, in current models at least, is out. But it’s not like I do that all the time, so actually, it doesn’t bother me. There are a few other possible drawbacks, but I guess it just depends on your personal opinion as to whether they’re dealbreakers – to me, they’re not:

Sure, if the battery runs out, you’re kinda stuffed – but as I said earlier, you could easily read eight novels on a single charge, so the chances of you having to go that long without a chance to top it up are pretty remote (and if you were going to carry eight novels around with you, you might just as well carry the Ereader and a spare novel in case the battery runs out…!).

And of course, since it’s electronic, if you drop it in the bath it’ll probably be ruined – but then so would a normal book (albeit slightly cheaper to replace).

And finally, you wouldn’t be able to lend a book to someone else once you’d read it – Ebooks are tied to the buyer.

So, compared to the hassle of carrying ruddy big books around, I think an Ereader is pretty neat!

And finally – what’s the deal with the Amazon Kindle?

There’s been a few mentions of Amazon’s Kindle Ereader in the press this year, which is odd considering it’s not available in the UK yet. It’s been out in the States for over a year, though, and has proven to be quite popular.

The main thing with the Kindle is that you can easily buy books for it from Amazon – straight from the device itself, without having to use a computer. However, unlike readers from other manufacturers, you can’t buy books from other websites for it (and Amazon books won’t work on other readers). Is this a bad thing? Well, yes and no. The downside is that there is no competition – you can only buy the books Amazon sell, at their prices. The upside is that Amazon do seem to have a wider selection of books available (in the US anyway) and they seem to have a bit more influence over publishers than smaller retailers. And there’s also the fact you can browse and buy books on-the-go, and even download a sample chapter to see if it’s worth buying that book from the writer you’ve never heard of.

Anyway, until the Kindle is available in the UK – and currently there’s no firm date – we won’t know how the UK service compares to the existing offerings from Borders, Waterstones and WH Smiths.

Answer the question, then – are Ebook readers worth buying?

In my opinion, yes. I like that they’re smaller and more convenient to carry than real books, and you can slap a bunch of different books (and other documents) on an Ereader so you’ve always got a choice of what to read. I don’t like that they are relatively expensive, and the convenience may not be worth it to some people, but I’m not one of them!

I’ve bought the Sony PRS-505 and – so far – I’m happy with it. I’ll be writing another post on it soon.

One problem with having a love of gadgets is that you’re always in need of batteries. I’ve been “upgrading” my stock of rechargeables with better ones from Aldi (high capacity, low price), but all my chargers were old, slow, and designed for lower capacity batteries. So the hunt began for the perfect new charger – and I found it!

Step forward the Energizer Portable Charger,(£15 – £30 on Amazon) a nice bit of kit that is the best thought-out battery charger I’ve ever seen. First, the basics – it charges AA and AAA sizes, and comes with a pair each of high-capacity AA and AAA batteries. It has two “pods” for holding the batteries – each pod holds four batteries, and the charger will charge one pod at a time. There are lights on the top of each pod, so you know if they’re charging, waiting to charge, or ready to use. There’s also a flashing red/green signal which means that something’s wrong – either the batteries aren’t fitted properly, they’re not a matching pair(s), or they’re just not chargeable.

I know it sounds silly, and believe me, I feel a bit silly typing this, but this really is a very nice charger. The things I like most of all are that it uses a dock, rather than being a block you just plug into the mains socket, and it charges high-capacity batteries in about three hours. Once one pod has finished charging, you can whip it out and put in more batteries ready to start charging later – it’s kinda like having two chargers for the price of one, really.

Anyway, the Energizer Portable Charger is well worth getting hold of – then nip down to Aldi and stock up on batteries for it!

Update and summary: I’ve noticed a lot of people hitting this page by Googling “Tomtom 930 vs 940″. If you want to know which is better, I’d say the 930 – it’s around £45 cheaper on Amazon, but with the 940 you’d need to buy the remote, and you might also want the TMC receiver (more on that below), so it’s actually £90 cheaper to get the 930. And with the Tomtom “Latest Maps” gaurantee, you won’t be buying an out-of-date unit – you can download the latest map for free, same as on the 940. For more of my thoughts on the two units, read on…

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Earlier this year, I bought the TomTom GO 930T Satellite Navigation System.Since I had a new car, I figured I might as well get a new Satnav to go with it, and I’ve always been a TomTom fan so it was the obvious choice. It’s a lovely bit of kit, as Satnavs go, and has done a great job so far – although it does have a couple of drawbacks.

The first problem, and this is only a minor thing as it can be easily turned off, is the “Lane Assistance” option. This is a great thing in theory, but in reality it is quite possibly the most stupid and potentially dangerous “feature” you could have on a Satnav, and I’ll tell you why. The theory is that as you approach a motorway junction, it will replace your usual map view with a 2D “picture” of the junction, complete with gantry signs and even scenery. It will then flash big-ass green arrows on the screen showing you exactly which lane you should be in.

Here’s the thing, though. Most junctions are fairly straightforward – you get in the exit lane and keep left or right as appropriate. No use for Lane Assistance there. Where you do need Lane Assistance, though, is on complicated junctions – and that’s exactly where it’s completely useless, if not dangerous. The reason is that the TomTom will flash up the junction image around half a mile before the junction, and complicated junctions tend to have multiple exits quite close together. Because the usual map view has been replaced, it is very difficult to work out which exit you should be taking, and a couple of times I’ve followed the Lane Assistance instructions only to realise, at the last moment, that I was too early and was taking the wrong exit. We’ve all seen idiots join the exit lane only to swerve back onto the main carriageway for no apparent reason, and this isn’t going to help!

So, that’s my first moan about the 930, but I’ve turned off Lane Assistance so it doesn’t bother me (unless TomTom Home installs an update, in which case it gets turned back on… Gah!).

My second moan is a bigger issue, and what led to this entry. The 930 comes with the RDS-TMC receiver, usually an optional extra. The RDS-TMC receiver picks up traffic data which the 930 can use to avoid traffic jams. Only problem is, it’s not very useful near north London or the northern half of the M25; for some reason, it just can’t lock on to a frequency and get data with any reliability. As soon as I get 15-20 miles outside the M25 it’s OK, but I can never get a signal on the M25 or thereabouts. It worked fine all the way to Europe and back, but as soon as I got within signage distance of the M25 it gave up. I figure there’s too much radio “noise” around London so the RDS signal isn’t strong enough. I was all set to buy the Traffic HD device TomTom were advertising, as it used a mobile phone data connection (with a built-in SIM), but it never appeared.

Instead, they’ve launched the next range of Go devices – the x40 range. They’ve got the Live service built in, meaning there is a mobile SIM card in the Go, and it receives traffic – and other – data over GSM instead of the less reliable RDS-TMC method. I was sorely tempted to upgrade and sell my 930 on eBay, but after careful consideration, I might give it a miss, and here’s why…

The TomTom GO 940 Live,and indeed the TomTom GO 740 Liveare cheeky little teases! They go on about how you get traffic information and petrol prices and whatnot, but it’s only if you dig a little deeper that you find out that these services only work in the country where you bought the device. Now this might sound fairly obvious – it’s using a GSM connection which has a fixed monthly subscription and would therefore be hard to allow for roaming charges – but the main selling point of the Go 740 Live and Go 940 Live are that they include maps of Europe, and even America in the case of the 940. So, you can drive all over Europe, but you can forget about getting traffic info as soon as you leave Blighty! So, on the one hand, you’ve got a great Traffic info service; on the other, it’s only available on a small percentage of the maps the device includes.

You can now buy an TomTom RDS-TMC Traffic Receiverfor the Go x40 which plugs into the USB socket, but it’s an extra £28 (on Amazon) on top of the Go itself. Plus, they don’t include the remote control any more, so you’ll need to buy the TomTom GO Bluetooth Remote, £25 from Amazon.So, in order to match the 930 I have to spend at least another £50 on the 940, and that’s on top of the fact it costs around £50 more than the 930. And then you’ve got the monthly sub for the Traffic service which you won’t always be able to use if you’re not in the country.

So, all in all, I think the 940 is a giant leap backwards for TomTom. Looks like I might be updating my 930 maps instead…