CrunchGear |  |
- HA-FX700: JVC’s wooden (and pricey) earphones
- Daily Crunch: So This Is Christmas Edition
- Barnes & Noble Will Ship Around 60,000 Nooks This Year
- Review: Aerial7 Sound Disk Beanie headphone-hat
- Buy a Kindle, get free one-day shipping
- Nexus One specs leaked, limited launch date revealed?
- UFC targets online piracy. Let’s just hope it doesn’t go all RIAA on us.
- Motorola to show “whats next” at CES
- The next logical step for both bacon and popcorn is bacon-flavored popcorn
- Video: Borderlands’ second DLC expansion
- Nook shipping update: Pre-ordered Nooks should arrive before Santa
- PyramidTalk: Seiko updates their cult clocks from the 1980s
- How many times do you have to be burned by BlackBerry to consider your options?
- Viliv N5 clamshell to be revealed at CES ‘10
- Giant Gundam statue to make a comeback next year
| HA-FX700: JVC’s wooden (and pricey) earphones Posted: 24 Dec 2009 04:20 AM PST
About a year ago, JVC started selling headphones with wooden housing in Japan, claiming the superior sound quality they bring justify the high price ($730). And today the company announced the HA-FX700 [JP], earphones partly made of wood. And we have the same things coming with it again: JVC promising high sound quality and a relatively high price.
The earphones operate in a 6Hz to 26kHz frequency at 16Ω, feature an overpressure value of 104dB/mW and support a maximum input of 200mW (IEC). They weigh 9.6g and come with ear pieces sized at S/M/L. Technically, the HA-FX700 is based on the HP-FX500 JVC introduced back in 2007. The updated version will hit Japanese stores in February next year, costing a whopping $330. Ask Geek Stuff 4 U or the Japan Trend Shop in case you live outside Japan and are interested in these earphones.
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| Daily Crunch: So This Is Christmas Edition Posted: 24 Dec 2009 12:00 AM PST |
| Barnes & Noble Will Ship Around 60,000 Nooks This Year Posted: 23 Dec 2009 01:44 PM PST  A lot more people have ordered the Barnes & Noble Nook, first announced on October 20, than the company expected (despite getting panned by the officialreviewers). The company had Foxconn, their ODM, build far fewer of them than they should have. The original plan was to ship pre-orders by November 30 but that date was pushed back to December 7. It took a mere month for the entire order process to break down. Now a small number of pre-orders still haven't arrived and most brick and mortar stores are sold out and even then they were only available in "higher volume" stores on December 7.
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| Review: Aerial7 Sound Disk Beanie headphone-hat Posted: 23 Dec 2009 01:40 PM PST
Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Full Review: I have to say that when I first tried these out, biking about a mile over to the Central District, I was pretty disappointed. I found the fit too tight and the sound tinny. But a friend tried the hat on and pronounced it perfectly comfortable, and on the way back I played a different playlist and found that they really didn’t sound so bad after all. I mean, let’s be honest here. You’re going to be walking, running, biking, or skiing while listening to these, and if you can make out the lyrics over the wind rush, that’s better than nothing. And while they weren’t beating my eardrums with their bass or allowing me to marvel and their crisp highs, they did sound clear enough once I got the alignment right. The hat itself is a plain cotton, quite decently made, with a red patterned interior that showed as a sort of rim. It fit snugly — almost too snugly for me, but I tend to prefer looser knit caps. Why I didn’t review a knit one is beyond me. But this one was a bit tall and narrow for me; it fully covered my ears and still had a little poof at the top. Not Smurf levels of poof, but enough that I felt I had to pat it down. I wore it during a cold snap a while ago here in Seattle and it did all right, though it took forever to dry out when I got rained on. The headphones themselves are touted as having a flat design, which is true, but then again so do most headphones once you take the padding off. Yeah, there’s no padding on them at all except for the millimeter-thin material making up the inner lining of the headphone pockets in the hat. That can be pretty rough on your ears if you have a helmet pushing on them or if they’re just not aligned over your ears just right. In the next generation of this product I’d really appreciate a little bit of padding in the headphone pocket. The sound is what you’d expect from a plain pair of traditional headphones — something you’d pick up at a drugstore for $15-20. They’re loud enough if you want to push them and I didn’t hear a lot of distortion, but there wasn’t too much clarity either. But the fact is I could hear my music perfectly well while zooming around on my bike, so really, mission accomplished there. I’m not expecting a high-fidelity audio experience while trucking down to the coffee shop. Conclusion: I think $60 is a little steep for what they’re offering. However, if you do spend a lot of time on the slopes, for instance, or riding your bike around, and want to listen to music or talk on the phone, this is definitely a simple and workable solution. I’d go with the knit version, though.
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| Buy a Kindle, get free one-day shipping Posted: 23 Dec 2009 12:45 PM PST |
| Nexus One specs leaked, limited launch date revealed? Posted: 23 Dec 2009 12:07 PM PST  Google's semi-secret Nexus One handset has been more or less exhaustively leaked at this point, with very few cats left to let out of the bag. The only two major points left were the tech specs and the release date - and now, even those have made their way out.
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| UFC targets online piracy. Let’s just hope it doesn’t go all RIAA on us. Posted: 23 Dec 2009 12:00 PM PST
It’s been a running theme for the past few years, and as more and more people get faster Internet connections, and as video compression technology continues to improve, we’re going to be hearing a lot more about it. I refer, of course (of course!), to illegal streams of live sporting events. Whether you’re firing up TVAnts on Sunday to watch Arsenal take on Aston Villa, or trolling USTREAM for a live feed of WWE’s Royal Rumble, or looking for MMA-TV to watch this month’s UFC pay-per-view, you are, in fact, breaking the law. Not only are you breaking the law, but you may even be taking money away from the companies/teams/sports you purport to support. But is that all there is to it? Lorenzo Fertitta, the co-owner of UFC (the more famous Dana White is the company’s president), recently went to Capitol Hill to discuss the problems facing UFC with respect to online piracy. He told the House Judiciary Committee that some 140,000 people watched UFC 106, the company’s November pay-per-view event headline by Tito Ortiz vs. Forrest Grifin, online using various streaming sites. UFC had identified 271 unauthorized streams, which is where the 140,000-person estimate comes from. Surely there were more streams that UFC didn’t find—how can you patrol the entire Internet?—and the numbers don’t include non-live viewership. You know, BitTorrent and the like. I can’t help but think that they are people out there who avoid reading UFC results until they are able to download a torrent the next day. You’ll recall that WWE started going after illegal online streams earlier this year. The thing is, WWE claimed, quite like Fertitta here, that online streams were damaging its bottom line. That’s not necessarily the case. The very first pay-per-view that WWE actively patrolled illegal streams for, June’s The Bash, was among the least purchased pay-per-views of the year. If we were to follow WWE’s logic, that buyrates (the number of people who buy a pay-per-view) would increase once the streams were eliminated, well, then The Bash would have done better than the previous pay-per-view, May’s Extreme Rules. It didn’t: The Bash did 178,000 buys to Extreme Rules’ 213,000. (I would suggest that the best way for WWE to improve its bottom line is to improve its product and not blame externalities like illegal online streams. You cannot expect people to continue to buy pay-per-view events or watch the TV shows when the talent roster is stale, bland, and woefully misused (see: pushes starting and stopping to the point of destroying a wrestler’s future credibility); when storylines make little to no sense, even accounting for the suspension of disbelief required to watch pro wrestling in the first place; when comedy, and I use the word lightly, becomes the focal point of each and every show at the expense of, I don’t know, wrestling (see: The Little People’s Court and the Tiger Woods gag from last Monday’s Raw–what does Tiger Woods’ current pickle have to do with WWE?); when guest hosts, who have no business being on its television, act as if they’re “above” the crowd and people watching at home (insulting the audience isn’t exactly a good idea) or refer to non-existent events like “SummerFest”; when a wrestler who co-headlined the biggest WreslteMania ever (buyrate-wise) dies and not a single word is mentioned on television. I could go on but that would be boring. The point is, WWE isn’t very good these days and illegal streams have nothing to do with that.) All of this assumes, of course, that people viewing illegal online streams are inherently lost customers. That’s the same argument the RIAA tried to make, and look where it got those guys. Believe it or not, but people do exist who have zero intention of purchasing a pay-per-view. If the stream goes down they’re not going to call their cable company to buy the event, but rather will go about their business as if nothing happened. You don’t have to worry about these guys: pay-per-views could cost $2 and they still wouldn’t buy ‘em Here’s how I look at it: you have to figure that the people who are watching these illegal streams are younger people. What 50-year-old man is going to sit down and figure out how to forward his router’s ports so that some Chinese-made P2P application works properly? Piracy is a young person’s game. Now, if you’re UFC or WWE you can look at this as they currently look at it, which is to freak out and yell, You’re stealing our money! Or, you can look at it like this: let’s assume some 15-year-old kid is tooling around on a message board in one window with a UFC stream in another window. This kid doesn’t have $50 per month to pay for UFC pay-per-views, and maybe his parents wouldn’t let him buy one in the first place. So rather than eliminating this kid’s exposure to your product, why not bank on the fact that, in a few years when this kid has a proper job and can afford to buy things, he’ll throw some of his new-found discretionary income your way? “Oh man, I remember UFC from a few years back. I used to love that shit. Let me order a pizza and invite my friends over so we can watch the fight tonight on my huge TV.” Does anybody in these organizations think like that? Yes, I understand that that’s an unorthodox way of looking at things, but what great company or organization didn’t think “outside of the box” every once in a while? Again, to make the music industry comparison, they tried to sue everyone under the sun to bring things back to the way they were. That clearly didn’t happen, and it only served to harm the music industy’s image in the eyes of the public. So to the UFC and WWE I say this: chill out. You don’t want to end up like the music industry, especially when you (well, mainly the UFC) have the potential to be absolutely huge. Don’t mess it up by overreacting to your piracy problem.
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| Motorola to show “whats next” at CES Posted: 23 Dec 2009 11:49 AM PST  The rumor mill has been cranking way too hard over Motorola as of late for us to feel confident in taking a stab at what they may launch, but Motorola has just more or less confirmed that they'll be launching something at CES. Got any guesses as to what it is? Drop it in the comments. We'll come back on January 7th, run through all of them, and pick someone at random from those who got it right and send them a box of fun stuff we've got laying around the office.
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| The next logical step for both bacon and popcorn is bacon-flavored popcorn Posted: 23 Dec 2009 11:30 AM PST
"Damn your tempations, Aamoth!" you scream. "I only eat Kosher food! I can't eat bacon!" Well this has no actual bacon in it, just bacon flavoring. Although BaconPop NOW WITH REAL BACON CHUNKS! might be the next, next logical step for both bacon and popcorn. Five dollars gets you three microwaveable bags and a whole lot of weird looks at work as you moan with delight inside your cubicle. BaconPop – Bacon Flavored Popcorn [ThinkGeek.com]
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| Video: Borderlands’ second DLC expansion Posted: 23 Dec 2009 10:40 AM PST
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| Nook shipping update: Pre-ordered Nooks should arrive before Santa Posted: 23 Dec 2009 09:01 AM PST
Also, new orders will not ship out until February 1, 2010 so you may want to hold on to your money a bit longer. Your local B&N store might get a few in before then. B&N’s full statement is after the jump.
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| PyramidTalk: Seiko updates their cult clocks from the 1980s Posted: 23 Dec 2009 09:01 AM PST
Some of the older CrunchGear readers will surely remember the PyramidTalk, a clock that verbally announced the time and other information. Seiko started selling the clock in 1984, and it turned out to be a big worldwide hit, with sales ballooning to 200,000 units per year at its peak. And now, just in time for Christmas, consumers (in Japan, at least) can lay their hands on an updated version [JP].
The device is about 8cm tall, 10cm square and weighs 260g. Press the apex of the PyramidTalk once to hear what time it is and to see a blue LED lighting up (see picture below). Press it twice and the radio wave clock will verbally tell you the date, current temperature and humidity (in either Japanese or English). Needless to say, the PyramidTalk also serves as an alarm clock.
The clock is already available in Japan (in gold or white) where it costs $120. If you're interested in getting one, I'd suggest you contact import/export specialists Japan Trend Shop, Geek Stuff 4 U or Rinkya (Seiko itself hasn’t made an announcement yet concerning markets outside Japan).
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| How many times do you have to be burned by BlackBerry to consider your options? Posted: 23 Dec 2009 09:00 AM PST  What's the phrase? Oh, yeah: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. BlackBerry went down yesterday across North and South America. Users couldn't send or receive e-mail, and some complained that they couldn't connect to the Internet. It's the second time in a week that BlackBerry has failed. Considering how important the service is to some people—I dare you to go to Wall Street and not see everyone using the device—you really do wonder: how long will people tolerate this shoddy service? It also raises the related question of, How wise is it to rely on "the cloud" to host all of your important data? Surely you wouldn't leave "mission critical" information in the hands of someone else, someone who's unsettling opaque when it comes to explaining outages?
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| Viliv N5 clamshell to be revealed at CES ‘10 Posted: 23 Dec 2009 08:10 AM PST
Now all we need is the expected battery life and price, but as with all the other Viliv models, both will probably be up there.
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| Giant Gundam statue to make a comeback next year Posted: 23 Dec 2009 05:41 AM PST
He’ll be back: The awesome 1/1 scale Gundam statue that was erected on Tokyo’s artificial island Odaiba in June and that was deconstructed in September this year, will be seen again in its full glory. We reported several times about the statue, which stands 60 feet tall and shows some cool special effects (see video below). The only problem is that this time, Bandai, the company behind the PR stunt, decided to relocate the big guy to Shizuoka, a city 125 miles west of Tokyo. A Bandai spokesperson said Gundam will come to life again in June next year, at the East exit of Shizuoka Main Station. Shizuoka isn’t really that famous a place for tourists, but I guess the statue’s awesomeness might even be enough for visitors from other countries to make the trip from Tokyo (where Bandai says a total of four million people came to see it in the summer). And Gundam is much cooler than the Gigantor statue standing in Kobe anyway. Here’s a Gundam video showing the Gundam statue in Tokyo in action: Via Danny Choo
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Just saying… [
You like bacon? Who doesn't?! Howsabout popcorn? Yes? If you find yourself short on time every day, perhaps you could combine bacon and popcorn by using BaconPop. Each bag is filled "with delicious, buttery, bacontastic popcorn," according to ThinkGeek.
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