Hasta La Gadget!

Thunderbolt, you were a tech with near unlimited promise when first introduced, but what have you done with all that power? Since my first Thunderbolt-equipped Mac, I’ve essentially been using the ports as straight up Mini DisplayPort replacements, and using them exclusively for powering external screens. But now the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock has arrived, and Thunderbolt finally makes sense. Pricey, $300 sense, mind you.

• 2 Thunderbolt ports, with daisy-chain capabilities to connect up to 5 additional Thunderbolt devices.
• Gigabit Ethernet port
• 3 USB 3.0 ports
• 1 FireWire 800 port
• 3.5mm headphone output and mic in ports

The Belkin Thunderbolt dock’s design is understated, and will fit with the rest of your black and aluminum standard Mac kit. It’s basically just a box with rounded edges, a cable management channel running through the middle underside of the device, and a row of ports at the back, but it works and it can tuck nicely under your MacBook if you’re using a desktop stand, or underneath the screen of your iMac. There’s even a pair of flashing indicators for network traffic on the Ethernet port, which makes me nostalgic for the days of desktop PC towers that told you everything you needed to know with just a series of blinking lights.

If anything it’s a little bulky, but considering everything it’s bringing to the table, that’s not really all that surprising. Note that this also requires an AC adapter to work, so you’ll have to clear up space on your office power bar.

Computer makers don’t tend to be looking for more ways to fit extra ports in their hardware designs, and the Retina MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines are perfect examples of where things are headed. As a result, I find myself with only two USB ports on an $1,800 computer, no Ethernet port, a single input for both mic and headphones, and no Firewire 800 for my legacy devices, like portable hard drives. The Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock fixes all those things.

The three USB 3.0 ports are possibly the best part of the arrangement, as they more than double to total load-out of USB ports on your average lightning-equipped MacBook Pro. Even with an iMac, you get 7 USB ports total instead of just three, turning it into a dream machine for someone like a video, design or audio professional who probably has tons of accessories they need to connect and/or switch out at any given time. The first time you don’t have to decide which crucial USB accessory to unplug in order to charge your iPhone, the Dock proves its worth.

The Thunderbolt daisy-chaining also means I can still attach my 27-inch iMac as an external monitor, though that means the chain ends there. But if I had a Thunderbolt drive with two ports, I can easily slot that in between the two, and still use the display as the terminal end of the chain. Finally, the return of Firewire 800 and the Ethernet provide some much-needed tools for using more old-school, but still very effective technologies, including the various Firewire 800 external drives I have sitting around.

All of these ports and additional bits worked flawlessly in my experience, and the headphone jack actually seems to operate as an external sound card to some degree, boosting volume levels and giving you more flexibility in terms of playback options.

If you ever feel like your Mac doesn’t have enough hardware input/output options, then the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock is for you. It took long enough to get here, and it’s pretty expensive at $299 (plus the price of Thunderbolt cable, which ships separately). The Matrox DS1 is another option at $249, but it only has one Thunderbolt port and just one USB 3.0, though it adds both an HDMI and DVI-D output. For my money, the Belkin is the way to go, especially if you use your Mac as your main workstation.

After over a year of waiting, Belkin has finally released its Thunderbolt Express Dock. It was originally announced last year in January and was slated for a September 2012 release, but that obviously never happened. However, Belkin just launched the $299 dock yesterday, and we’ve taken the time to give it a good look-over and test it out for ourselves. Personally, as a MacBook Pro user who is constantly docking and undocking my laptop at my desk, I wanted to see if Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock would make the whole process easier. Let’s find out how it fared.

Design-wise, the Express Dock is made to blend in perfectly with Apple’s line of Mac machines. It rocks an aluminum unibody shell with black plastic panels on the sides and back, and just like a good mullet, there’s not a lot going on in the front, but there’s a party in the back — all the ports are situated on the rear of the dock. You’ll find an ethernet port, a FireWire 800 port, three USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt ports (which support daisy-chaining), and separate 3.5mm audio-out and audio-in jacks.

One of the two Thunderbolt ports is used to plug the dock into your Mac, but that’s all it takes to get access to all the other ports. Instead of having to plug all of your peripherals in one after another every time you dock your MacBook at your desk, all you have to do is plug everything into the Express Dock when setting it up, and then just simply plug in the dock into your Thunderbolt port. At that point, you’ll be all set to go. This fact alone I found really convenient as I didn’t have all these cables that I had to keep plugging and unplugging every time I wanted to undock my MacBook. It’s just one single cable and you’re good to go.

While the Express Dock will work for desktop Macs like the iMac and Mac Pro, it’s essentially meant for those with MacBooks, which don’t have a lot of options when it comes to ports, especially MacBook Air users. If you use a MacBook as your main machine and want more port options, the Express Dock is about the only convenient option out there. Simply plug in the dock into your Thunderbolt port and you’ll instantly have eight more ports at your perusal, which is pretty fantastic.

However, there are some caveats. The Express Dock doesn’t come with a Thunderbolt cable in the box, so you’ll want to make sure that you have one on hand in order to connect it to your Mac. Secondly, the Express Dock requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to take advantage of all its capabilities. The dock will at least work on older versions of OS X, and I was able to hook up a Thunderbolt display to the dock, but it wouldn’t recognize any of the USB 3.0 drives that I had on hand, nor would the audio ports work. However, once I connected it to a Mountain Lion machine, everything worked flawlessly.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the USB 3.0 ports on the Express Dock are limited to 2.5Gbps, which is almost half the speed of what it’s supposed to be at (4.8Gbps). We’re not exactly sure why this is, but it’s still much faster than USB 2.0, which Macs are still sadly stuck at (unless you have one of the newest models). I also noticed that the dock would get hot after a short while, including both ends of the Thunderbolt cable. Nothing exploded, thankfully, but it was always a bit of a concern after I had it plugged in for an hour or so and had tons of things plugged into it. It never got hot enough that I couldn’t touch it, but I was certainly surprised that it gets a bit warm.

Portability is another thing to consider, especially since the dock is catered towards MacBooks. The Express Dock is lightweight and can easily fit into a backpack to take with you. However, the power adapter that’s required to power the Express Dock makes the device not too portable-friendly. It’s about the same size as a typical laptop power adapter, which isn’t a bad thing, since they’re also made to be portable along with the laptop its charging, but if you were to take both your MacBook and the Express Dock with you on the road, you now have two bulky power adapters to deal with. The dock can certainly be portable, but it’s really up to the user whether or not lugging it along will be worth it.

In the end, Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock is the perfect companion to a MacBook power user. However, you’ll have to think long and hard about whether or not you truly need it, since it costs a whopping $300, so it isn’t just something that you can buy impulsively. There is a cheaper option available for $250, but that’s still a hard pill to swallow. Then again, if you’re like me and constantly find yourself docking and undocking your MacBook, dealing with a tangle of numerous wires at the same time, the Express Dock could be one of the best convenience products that you ever buy. Plus, if you’re rocking a MacBook Air and wish you had more ports at your disposal, the Express Dock is a good choice for that too.

Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock Review is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s taken a while – a very long while – but Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock has finally hit shelves, offering Mac users a simple way to hook up a workstation’s-worth of peripherals by stringing a single cable. First announced back in January 2012, and clearly missing its original release date in September of the same year, the $299.99 Thunderbolt Express Dock offers three USB 3.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, and a pass-through Thunderbolt connector of its own, among other things.

That second Thunderbolt (the first hooking the dock up to your Mac or MacBook) means you can attach up to five more Thunderbolt devices to the same machine. As we’ve already seen, Thunderbolt’s hefty throughput – bidirectional 10Gbps, in fact – means you can have RAID arrays, Full HD displays, A/V interfaces, and more, all connected and operating simultaneously.

The dock also includes a single FireWire 800 port, handy if you’ve got legacy devices but a newer Mac which dropped the connection, and both audio-in and audio-out. In total, Belkin says, you can hook up eight devices with a single cable to your Mac.

It’s not exactly cheap for a dock, and we’re a little unimpressed that Belkin doesn’t even include the Thunderbolt cable you’ll need in order to use it. Still, if you want to make your MacBook Pro the hub of a desktop setup, it’s a straightforward way to do that without needing to hook up half a dozen cables every time you get home or into the office.

Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock finally arrives, only seven months late is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Many see Apple and Volkswagen as two peas in a pod given their similar marketing, even if previous talk of collaborations amounted to little more than speculation. That purported dream team will soon become real through the iBeetle, an adaptation of the modern VW Bug designed with a little help from Apple. Don’t get your hopes up for a tie-in on the level of VW’s iPad-friendly Bulli concept, however. The integration mostly amounts to an iPhone dock as well as a car-optimized iOS app that can play music, read messages aloud, take photos and augment the instrument cluster. It’s a solid idea, especially when a large number of us already use our smartphones this way, but it isn’t very adventurous — the iPhone won’t coordinate extensively with the center stack, unlike smartphone-aware infotainment platforms such as GM’s MyLink or Ford Sync. We’d still take a close look at the iBeetle when coupe and convertible models reach US dealerships in early 2014, but it may be best for those already bent on getting some fahrvergnügen from their next ride.

Filed under: Cellphones, Transportation, Apple

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Via: Autoblog

Source: Volkswagen

Everyone needs a place to stow the stuff that fills their pockets. As for myself, I tend to leave my keys in my pockets at all times, because I’ve forgotten them before, my smartphone is near me most of the day, and I usually keep my wallet on a cupboard in my bedroom. However, the Butler looks like a good centralized location for all of your stuff so you don’t lose track of it.

Designed by Curtis Micklish, the wall-mounted Butler will fit your wallet and keys in its top cubby, and your smartphone on the side slot, letting it do double-duty as a clock. There’s a concealed space for your charging cord, glasses, hats, scarves, or whatever other items you absolutely need to carry with you during the day. The backside has a section to route your charging cord and extension cord, in case your are mounting it farther away from an outlet.

While the default slot will hold any iPhone, you can also order it for a Samsung Galaxy if you’d like.

The Butler is available from Curtis’ Etsy store for $170 (USD).

[via FancyCrave]