Hasta La Gadget!

The Bluetooth speaker market is very crowded, so it’s quite difficult to decide what speaker to go with. Well, the portable speaker that has now jumped to the top of my list is the Grain PWS (Packable Wireless Speaker). This compact Bluetooth speaker measures just 7″(W) x 2 3/8″ (D) x 3 1/8″(H), but it packs a punch, and looks great doing it.

The first thing you’ll notice about the PWS is just how substantial it looks and feels. Its case is made from solid walnut, so right there it’s got a big advantage over other portable speakers. Wood is just a much better material for speaker enclosures than plastic. There’s a reason that high end audiophile speakers are made of the stuff. Grain is quick to point out that the wood will change color with time, which just adds to its design panache. In addition to the wood enclosure, the speaker has metal grilles with a soft rubberized bezel which just looks sharp.

Of course, a case does not a speaker make. Inside, you’ll find a pair of 2″ drivers and a passive radiator, backed by a stereo amp and Waves award-winning MaxxAudio sound processing. While the wattage of the amplification system isn’t specified, the speaker pushes out sufficient volume to fill my 15′ x 20′ living room. At full volume, distortion was inaudible to my reasonably well-trained ear, and at normal listening volumes, audio was well-rounded and warm, without the tinniness usually associated with small speakers.

Connecting your wireless device to the PWS is brilliantly simple too. Just press the power button for five seconds, and a voice will announce “pairing mode”. Then select the PWS with your mobile device’s Bluetooth settings and the voice will announce “pairing complete”.  The Other than play/pause, the speaker forgoes any sort of remote track control feature like some Bluetooth speakers, but this is okay by me. I use the controls on my mobile gadgets to choose tracks and playlists anyhow, and I’m pretty sure that most of you do too.

Naturally, the PWS has a built-in rechargeable battery too, so you can take it wherever you go. Battery life for the PWS is rated at eight hours, and I had no problem achieving (and slightly exceeding) this in my testing at medium volume levels. A handy LED indicator inside the rubberized power switch changes color to indicate when the battery is at 25% remaining, and then again when it’s at 10%. When you plug it in to charge, a voice announcement says “charging” and then “charge complete” when it’s done. Charging an empty battery takes somewhere between two to three hours.

Not only does the Grain look and sound great, its packaging is top notch. Inside the box, you’ll find a soft carrying pouch, a matching dark grey Grain USB power adapter, a MicroUSB to USB cable and a 3.5mm stereo cable for directly connecting audio sources.

To sum up, I’m impressed with this little speaker, and it’s currently my favorite Bluetooth travel speaker. While other speakers may be more rugged or waterproof, or offer more bells and whistles, I’m giving the Grain PWS the win on sheer sound quality and aesthetics.

The Grain PWS is available for order now, and sells for $249(USD).

Chinese company Coi+ recently released a portable battery that not only works with LEGO pieces, it comes with a few bricks too. It’s called the Power Brick. It has a 4200mAh battery inside and it charges gadgets via USB.

I’m not sure if the bricks that are included with the battery actually came from LEGO. Whatever the case, you can use them and the battery to make an impromptu stand or dock for your phone.

Snap together a browser tab and head to our old friend Brando to get the Power Brick. It costs $49(USD) and comes in red, blue, yellow or white.

[via Chip Chick]

Mobile devices let us look up practically anything we want to know about anywhere and anytime, but there’s nothing like looking at the real deal. Relics and artifacts invoke a sense of wonder and fire up our imagination. Product designer Hans Fex thought of a brilliant way for us to experience that spark anytime and anywhere with his Mini Museums.

Hans says he’s wanted to make the Mini Museum since he was seven years-old. He got the idea from his father, a research scientist. In 1970 the elder Fex brought his son some artifacts that he embedded in clear resin, perhaps to protect them from his child’s curious and unsteady hands.

Now in his forties, Hans has gathered 33 very rare specimens that he’s chopping into tiny bits to share with you. These include a meteorite from the Moon, a T-rex tooth and even a 4,568,200-year old object, the oldest piece of matter ever collected.

Help Hans feed his growing beard. Pledge at least $99 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a Mini Museum as a reward. Pledge at least $230 if you want to get the Mini Museum that has all 33 specimens.

[via NOTCOT]

Here’s another computer looking for a dumb terminal to mate with. Like the ICE xPC, Tango crams in the main components of a computer into a palm-sized case. It also uses a dock to connect to an HDMI display and other peripherals.

Tango has a 2GHz quad-core AMD A6-5200 CPU with an integrated Radeon HD 8400 GPU. It can have between 2GB to 8GB RAM as well as a 32GB to 512GB SSD. Like the ICE xPC, Tango can be loaded with pretty much any desktop operating system.

Unlike ICE xPC, Tango keeps it simple and only has one dock. That dock has an HDMI port, three USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, an Ethernet jack and a Wi-Fi adapter. The dock of course needs to be plugged into an outlet for the whole setup to work.

Pledge at least $349 (USD) on Indiegogo to get a Tango PC and a docking station as a reward; there are also separate pledges for additional docking stations.

I still don’t think that this is the best solution to portable computing on a budget. Yes, it has decent specs and is quite cheap, but it’s clunky and messy. You’ll need multiple docks, keyboards, mice and a whole lot of cables for it to be worth it. Windows 8.1 tablets like the ASUS Transformer Book T100, the Dell Venue 11 Pro and the new ThinkPad 8 are more useful than the Tango, but they also cost more and run only Windows. Chromebooks are cheap and come with a keyboard and screen but they might not have access to the programs you need. I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

The past couple of years saw the launch of tiny computers meant to replace the traditional desktop setup. We have Android mobile devices that dock into larger devices, Android-on-a-stick HDMI devices, Windows 8 and its hybrid army and Canonical’s vision of a smartphone that’s also an Ubuntu desktop computer. A company called ICE wants to join the race with its xPC.

Like hybrid Android devices such as the ASUS Padfone and the Motorola Atrix, the xPC uses docks to change forms. However unlike those devices the current xPC prototype is not a smartphone and is thus useless by itself. It’s main advantage is that it can run the desktop versions of Windows. It houses an unspecified Intel Atom, Intel Core i5 or an ARM CPU, 2GB to 4GB RAM, 32 to 128GB SSD, a camera, an accelerometer, a gyro sensor and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity.

ICE plans to launch three docks with the xPC: a tablet dock, a mini-HTPC dock and a mini-desktop dock. The last two docks both have a couple of USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, an earphone jack and a speaker, but the mini-desktop dock will also have a hard drive bay.

Pledge at least $259 (USD) on Indiegogo to get an ICE xPC and a mini-HTPC dock. I think the mass market will soon be flooded with cheap display-less computers like the xPC. But if I had to buy a budget work computer right now I’d still go for a cheap laptop.

[via Gadgetify]