Hasta La Gadget!

For folks who have not heard about Polk before, well, here we are with a short note on them. Polk happens to be a high-performance audio brand that comes with 40 years of sound, engineering and design expertise, and they have recently announced that they will be making available a couple of products available to the masses. First of all would be the Melee gaming headset that was specially developed for the Xbox 360 console, while there is also the Polk N1 sound bar that delivers an immersive soundstage for gaming as well as entertainment regardless of the gaming platform, with the new Xbox One included. I guess the Xbox 360 still has some life left in its legs despite all of the recent buzz that surrounded next generation game consoles.

Why would we recommend either one of these to those who game on Microsoft’s consoles? Well, that is because Polk has also extended its partnership with Microsoft all the way until the end of next year, which would result in additional opportunities for product development in the gaming category, while Polk’s sound engineers continue to work with Microsoft’s 343 and Turn 10 Studios to deliver better quality audio in their titles.

The Melee gaming headset will boast of Polk’s proprietary electronic and acoustic tuning in addition to a DSP Amplifier, ensuring that your ears are treated to a richer, fuller listening experience. Accompanied by a retractable near-field microphone, users are able to carry out chats with one another, as well as to take calls. It will tuck itself smoothly into the ear cup whenever it is not in use. Other than that, Polk’s thumb-reach Audio Mixer would also enable users to adjust listening modes, audio and chat levels, all without the need to remove their hands from the controller.

As for the N1 sound bar, it has been licensed by Microsoft and designed for the newest Xbox One and Xbox 360 consoles. You will be treated to an upscale design which complements the console’s slimmer form factor, while the sound bar leverages Dolby Digital and a quartet of immersion modes which will enable gamers to achieve a balance between unique listening scenarios in addition to music, ambient details, special effects and dialogue.

The Polk Melee and N1 sound bar will retail for $199.95 and $299.95, respectively.

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[ Polk announces N1 sound bar and Melee gaming headset copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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On the morning after the Oppo N1 launch, Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik was surrounded by several Oppo ambassadors and tech writers at a hotel lounge in Beijing. It’s a far cry from where he began: toying with Android ROMs out of “boredom” about five years ago.

“When I started this thing, I had, like, no idea that people would actually care,” said Kondik, the creator of CyanogenMod. “I was kind of watching out to see who was going to bring Linux to the first mobile device, in a way that it didn’t absolutely suck.”

In the end, it was Android that stood out with its open-source development, and Kondik saw the potential of adding his own enhancements to devices running on this OS. By day, the Seattle-based developer was a lead engineer at a bioinformatics startup in Pittsburgh; but during his free time, he worked on what later became CyanogenMod for the legendary T-Mobile G1, the world’s first commercial Android device. And of course, he bought it on the day it came out.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

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Oppo’s already made quite an impression with its N1 earlier today, and now that we’ve gotten our hands dirty with said Android phone, we can confirm that it’s just as dandy in real life. As per usual Oppo standard, the N1 comes with a solid plastic build around an aluminum alloy frame, and we dig the silky matte finish that keeps fingerprints off the body. The O-Touch panel on the back is indicated by some tiny glossy marks, without which it’d be totally invisible. It took some getting used to in order to avoid accidental camera shots, as a one-second press on the panel triggers the shutter; but otherwise, we found the design to be very handy (literally!) and natural for taking selfies. And of course, O-Touch is also great for scrolling. %Gallery-slideshow89992%

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Oppo’s N1 smartphone has been sitting on our watch list ever since we first got wind of its strange N-Lens camera add-ons, which will apparently offer a choice of zooms up to 15x. Now we can flesh out another key spec: the Chinese handset will run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 processor, which should more than cope with its equally unusual dual touch inputs and possibly help it to rival other imaging-centric Androids like the Galaxy S4 Zoom and Sony’s upcoming Honami. The HSPA+ Snapdragon processor (MSM8274) was shown on a photo of the N1’s internals that was “leaked” by an Oppo marketing staffer on Sina Weibo — and unless we’re horribly, horribly mistaken, the photo also seems to show a microSD slot to store all those optically stabilized, 16-megapixel images. Barring other significant pseudo-leaks, you can expect the next big N1 update on September 23rd.

Update: Oops! Oppo just reached out to us to say that the N1 doesn’t actually use the Snapdragon 800. Looking back at the original Sina Weibo post, the leakster only said “large screen, flagship” and not “N1,” so perhaps this is actually the rumoured Find 7 instead?

Filed under: Cellphones, Cameras, Mobile

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Source: Oppo N1 (Sina Weibo)