Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve been following the surge of AirPlay speakers that started hitting the market in 2011, you’ve likely feasted your eyes on the spendy wool-clad systems by Libratone. While its larger Live and Lounge units have primarily been purposed for households, its new Zipp speaker is the being touted as the “first and only” portable AirPlay speaker. Make no mistake, unlike B&O Play’s portable AirPlay-equipped Beolit 12 ($800), the Zipp’s loaded with Libratone’s proprietary PlayDirect protocol, meaning it doesn’t require a separate wireless network / router for iDevices to connect to it over the air. The Zipp moniker is a play on the swappable wool grill which cozies around its vertically-standing tubular enclosures. Weighing four pounds and measuring in at 10.2 inches high by 4.8 inches in diameter, this “portable” unit is a good bit larger than the Blutooth-equipped Jawbone Big Jambox placed sideways, but it’ll certainly fit in a backpack — hey, it does have a leather carrying strap. Thankfully, that weight is partially due to its internal rechargeable battery, which should last up to eight hours.

As far as the speakers go, you’ll find a duo of 1-inch ribbon tweeters facing the sides for the left and right channels, along with a 4-inch up-firing woofer. The rig also features Libratone’s signature FullRoom design, which forces a 360-degree dispersion of the sound by way of deflectors in front of the tweeters. Beyond that, it’ll naturally work with Libratone’s existing iPhone app, allowing you to change the DSP on the fly for optimal output regardless of its placement in a room. The Zipp will hit Apple Stores later this October wrapped with a single red or grey zippered grill for $399, while other retailers will carry the $449 Classic Color and Funky Color editions, which each come with a trio of those wool grills (black, blue and red for the Classic, and black, pink and yellow for the Funky). Past that, a single grill by itself will cost you a relatively expensive $49 directly from Libratone. In the meantime, join us past the break for more details about the unit itself and PlayDirect, our initial impressions and a hands-on video overview.

Continue reading Libratone intros Zipp portable AirPlay speaker with DirectPlay, expectedly wrapped in wool (update)

Filed under: Portable Audio/Video

Libratone intros Zipp portable AirPlay speaker with DirectPlay, expectedly wrapped in wool (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It looks like Nokia’s controversial marketing move, which involved using pro DSLRs to “simulate” low-light shooting, was even less necessary than the smartphone maker may have thought. During our visit to the company’s Tampere, Finland research and development complex, we were given access to a comprehensive testing suite, enabling us to shoot with a Lumia 920 prototype and a handful of competing products in a controlled lighting environment. Technicians dimmed the lights and let us snap a static scene with each handset at just 5 lux — a level on par with what you may expect on a dimly lit city street in the middle of the night. The 920 took the cake, without question, but the iPhone didn’t fare too poorly itself, snatching up nearly as much light as the Nokia device. The 808 PureView also performed quite well, but the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III yielded unusable results.

It’s one thing to snag proper exposure, though — capturing sharp details with little noise and superior color balance is an entirely different beast, and the Lumia managed to do just that, as you’ll see in our 100-percent-view shots further on. Later in the evening we hit the streets of Helsinki for a real-world shootout. The 920 did present some issues with exaggerated shake and other rapid movements, but it offered up excellent results overall, even in scenes that were too dark for us to make out any details with our own eyes. Our nighttime shoot can be found in the gallery below, followed by plenty of comparison photos after the break.

Continue reading From the lab: Lumia 920 low-light shootout with Nokia 808, iPhone 5, HTC One X and Galaxy S III

Filed under: Cellphones, Cameras, Mobile

From the lab: Lumia 920 low-light shootout with Nokia 808, iPhone 5, HTC One X and Galaxy S III originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Finnish game studio Rovio went from relatively unknown to center stage with the Angry Birds franchise. And in record time, too — the first Angry Birds landed on Apple’s iOS App Store in December 2009, less than three years ago, and has since become an international sensation. The birds spawned a flock of sequels, branded tie-ins, and tons of merchandise. All this adds up to quite a bit of chicken scratch for Rovio, and also quite a bit of pressure to keep the money train rolling.

Today marks Rovio’s first true sequel to the original Angry Birds, and it’s focused on the other side of the farm: the pigs. Enter Bad Piggies. Unlike Angry Birds, Bad Piggies isn’t about flinging anything towards a complicated structure in order to knock it down. Instead, it’s about moving one very green, goofy sounding pig to various points on a map to collect items and reach a goal — it’s much more Cut the Rope than Angry Birds. The same physics-based game mechanics are at play in Bad Piggies that made both Cut the Rope and Angry Birds so popular, and they’re just as fun in this time around. But how do you get said piggy to the goals? You build a contraption, of course.

Each level starts with a build section, allowing players to create all types of vehicles in order to transport the pig from point A to point B (while grabbing collectibles along the way). Only a small handful of build options are available, keeping Bad Piggies just as speedy of a game — to pick up and play while commuting or while waiting at the dentist’s office — as its wildly successful progenitor. It’s hard to say if Bad Piggies will recapture the success that Rovio found with Angry Birds proper, but all the hallmarks are there: quick, fun gameplay, colorful characters, goofy sounds, and accessibility (we couldn’t help but get all three stars on every level, but you don’t have to in order to proceed, should it prove too difficult). Bad Piggies launches tomorrow morning for iOS devices, Mac, and Android.

Filed under: Gaming, Mobile, Alt

Angry Birds sequel ‘Bad Piggies’ launches tomorrow, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 08:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was roughly this time last year that Amazon’s Kindle Fire showed us just how successful an aggressively priced 7-inch tablet could be, becoming, arguably the go-to gift of the last holiday season. This summer, Google upped the ante, showing the world that a $200 tablet could be more than just an OEM-ed content delivery device, enlisting ASUS to design a really solid piece of hardware at a seemingly impossible price.

Barnes & Noble’s journey in the space, meanwhile, has been decidedly more convoluted. In mid-October of 2010, the company gave the world the Nook Color — a product with a wildly original industrial design, but decidedly limited functionality, which was, for most intents and purposes, an LCD-based color e-reader. Halfway through the following year, the device got a Pinocchio-like upgrade, transforming it into an honest-to-goodness tablet, apps and all. The device’s celebration was cut short, however, eclipsed entirely by the arrival of the aesthetically (nearly) identical, but internally superior Nook Tablet.

When Amazon announced the release of the Kindle Fire HD and all of its many variants, there was little question that Barnes & Noble had something waiting in the wings as well. After all, much of the bookseller’s hardware game plan seems to revolve around going toe-to-toe against Amazon offerings, and since the company beat its chief competition to the market with a glowing reader, a Nook Tablet seemed all but inevitable. With this week’s announcements, however, the company has managed to offer up some surprises — for starters, there’s the fact that it’s doubled its efforts with the release of two tablets — with the 7-inch Nook HD and the 9-inch Nook HD+. Then there’s the fact that the company has clearly put great effort into the hardware this go-round, rather than offering up yet another rehash of the Color / Tablet lineage. Let’s start with the Nook HD, shall we? Join us after the break.

Continue reading Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD 7-inch Android tablet, hands-on (video)

Filed under: Tablets

Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD 7-inch Android tablet, hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 01:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Telepresence is a booming business these days, with high speed wireless networks enabling plenty of folks to enjoy the pleasures of working (or attending class) from the comfort of home. While some such devices leverage the power of tablets or smartphones, the visual and audio quality such systems deliver often isn’t up to corporate standards. Enter Suitable Technologies and its Beam remote presence device (RPD). As a spinoff of famed ‘bot builder Willow Garage, the folks at Suitable figured they could provide a high-fidelity telepresence experience by building an RPD from scratch, and that’s precisely what they’ve done with Beam. Its brain is a 1.3Ghz Intel Core i3 CPU and it moves around courtesy of dual brushless electric motors driven by an integrated car battery. That battery fills up in right around six hours using the Beam Dock, and the LED lamps underneath the screen shine whenever Beam is being used. Users, or “pilots” see where they’re going via two Logitech HD webcams sporting custom lenses that grant near 180-degree views and zoom capability — one’s front-facing, and one points down for easy navigation in tight spaces. Connectivity comes courtesy of four WiFi antennas (two 2.4 GHz and two 5GHz) to ensure a solid connection at all times, while the seven microphones provide top-notch voice quality and noise cancellation. Oh, and there’s a 17-inch monitor and a speaker on board to faithfully replicate what pilots look and sound like.

We got a chance to meet the Beam’s makers and take the RPD for a spin, so join us after the break to see a video of the thing in action and learn more about Beam’s development.

Continue reading Suitable Technologies introduces Beam, the remote presence device (hands-on)

Filed under: Misc

Suitable Technologies introduces Beam, the remote presence device (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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