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- The Future Is Going Retail: Nest Thermostat Now Selling At Lowe’s
- TC/Gadgets Webcast: CTIA, The Samsung Galaxy S III, And Jawbone’s Big Jambox
- Review: Ernst Benz Officer Collection ChronoLunar
- Virgin Mobile Gets Its First Taste Of WiMax With The $299 EVO V 4G
- This Real RC Car Transformer Is Ready To Roll Out
- JumpTap: Kindle Fire Usage Has Declined After Holiday Boost, iPad Back To Pre-Fire Launch Levels
| The Future Is Going Retail: Nest Thermostat Now Selling At Lowe’s Posted: 08 May 2012 09:47 AM PDT  Nest and Lowe’s have teamed up to sell the Nest “learning thermostat” at 500 Lowe’s stores throughout the country, a first for a major bit of high-tech geekery. While Lowe’s has sold thermostats for years, they are now planning on adding a new “learning thermostats” area in the store and will include end caps where customers can learn more about the technology. This is Nest’s first retail partner and effectively legitimizes the hype around what many called a shiny wall bauble. It will definitely be interesting to see how these go through retail. Fans of tech and design will definitely be drawn to the Nest in stores, but I foresee 500 Nests hanging forlornly in cavernous Lowe’s stores, their screens and shiny wheels scratched by countless hostile interactions with two-by-fours and pipes wielded by a potentially careless, hardware-store-going public.
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| TC/Gadgets Webcast: CTIA, The Samsung Galaxy S III, And Jawbone’s Big Jambox Posted: 08 May 2012 08:44 AM PDT  We’re back and ready to attack with another episode of our TechCrunch/Gadgets Weekly webcast. Matt, unfortunately, could not make any time for us as he was in the happiest place on Earth with his family, but we still managed to cover a range of topics including CTIA, the freshly announced Samsung Galaxy S III, and Jawbone’s Big Jambox Bluetooth speaker. As far as CTIA is concerned, we came to the consensus that it is a snoozefest undeserving of most people’s time and attention. The Wi-Fi Alliance came up with some cool new technology to let you automatically connect to various hotspots around town sans the migraine of repetitive set-up, and of course there were a few new phones to chat about, including the HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE and the Samsung Focus II. But when matched up against the Galaxy S III, we care very little about these other devices. Samsung’s Galaxy S line is the reason why it’s beat out Apple as smartphone king, and this third iteration is something we’ve been waiting for for a while now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the hardware has improved all that much, especially if the jump from a 4.3-inch display to a 4.8-inch display discourages you as much as it does me. The phone is still plastic, which I’m pretty much sick to death of, but we are somewhat excited by the pop-up play feature. In other news, Jawbone recently released its Big Jambox, a 2.7lb Bluetooth speaker that can remember up to eight devices (not ten, like I said in the video), and actively pair with two at the same time. The big feature is supposed to be something called “Live Audio,” which basically takes a flat sound and gives it some extra dimension. You can’t really tell the difference unless you’re directly in front of it, but it’s certainly a step up from the usual tinny, Bluetooth sound we’re accustomed to. It costs $299 and is available May 15.
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| Review: Ernst Benz Officer Collection ChronoLunar Posted: 08 May 2012 08:43 AM PDT  As a big watch nerd, I love sharing cool watches with you guys in hopes that my obsession, as unseemly as it is, will be passed from writer to reader like an STD. This time I was lucky enough to be able to handle the new Ernst Benz Officer ChronoLunar, a huge “officer-style” chronograph with day-date-lunar cycle registers and a 24-hour dial. To be clear, this watch uses the Valjoux 7751 movement found in any number of similarly-featured watches. This includes a number of Omegas, Zenos, Glycines, and, most interestingly, custom watch projects. Think of the movement like an CPU and ETA and Valjoux as Intel and AMD. Many manufacturers use the same movements in multiple watches and the wild fluctuations in price – from a thousand or so to nearly $10 grand, are entirely based on case-type, finish, and (sadly) marketing. In the world of high-end watches, think of Ernst Benz as a boutique manufacturer like Alienware or Falcon Northwest. What Ernst Benz does best is big watches. This monster is 47mm in width and has a black and white, surprisingly readable face. The watch is almost too big for my wrist, but if you’re looking for something to signal spotter planes with, you could do worse than this shining monster. What, exactly, can this thing do? Well, the two pushers on the sides start and stop a chronograph with sweep second, 30 minute, and 12 hour counters. The thin hand with the red tip notes the day of the month while a small window at twelve o’clock notes the month and day of week. The register at nine o’clock shows 24-hour time – AM/PM, essentially – and a running seconds. In terms of durability I’d only worry about scratching the stainless steel case. The rest of the watch is sufficiently protected and the case is water resistant to 5 ATM or 10 meters. It’s obviously more of a “dress” watch – although it’s huge for a dress watch – so you probably don’t want to go mountain biking in it. The watch is almost comically large on a thin alligator strap but that doesn’t stop it from being a real looker. Ernst Benz specializes in these sorts of pieces and for them to make timepieces any smaller would be anathema to their designers. The watch was designed in Michigan by Leonid Khankin and assembled in Switzerland. Here comes the bad news: expect this model watch to hit about $6,500 in stores, which isn’t that much for this type of watch but is still far out of the range of most calm, rational people. However, if you’re looking for an example of the Valjoux 7751 that looks great on the wrist, this one deserves a chance. You can find similar pieces online and on eBay for a few thousand, as well, if you’re looking for the style and features but not the high price. Either way, it’s a fascinating artifact of the mechanical age and, if watch collectors Andy Rubin and Tony Fadell are to be believe, an obsession worth pursuing. Click to view slideshow.
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| Virgin Mobile Gets Its First Taste Of WiMax With The $299 EVO V 4G Posted: 08 May 2012 07:49 AM PDT  While Sprint customers wait with bated breath for their new LTE network to go live, the nation’s third largest wireless carrier has just announced that their no-contract subsidiary Virgin Mobile will soon launch their first 4G phone. Starting on May 31, customers will be able to pick up their very own Evo V 4G from Virgin Mobile’s website, with a wider release to come in June. Despite the device’s name, the Ice Cream Sandwich-powered EVO V 4G isn’t actually a WiMax-friendly version of HTC’s chintastic One V (bummer, I know). In fact, if the specs are any indication — it features a 4.3-inch qHD display, 1GB of RAM, and a 5-megapixel camera capable of “3D HD imaging” — we’re actually looking at a slightly revamped version of the EVO 3D. As such, you can also expect the device to come preloaded with an 8GB microSD card, an HDMI out port, and mobile hotspot functionality for up to five devices, though it seems to lack the stereoscopic display that earned its forebear some acclaim. Also gone is the older version of the Sense UI that the EVO 3D ran — the EVO V 4G instead sports the slightly new, slightly sleeker Sense 3.6 overlay, though I’m sure some people were hoping against hope for the full Sense 4.0 treatment. Alright fine, it’s not the hottest handset on the market anymore, but this EVO 3D variant is still the nicest that Virgin has ever offered and the MVNO’s cheapo rate plans only make the deal even sweeter. Just don’t go in expecting too much, because even though Virgin’s “unlimited data” rate plans start off at $35/month, you’ll soon find that 4G connection running much slower once you tiptoe over the 2.5GB mark.
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| This Real RC Car Transformer Is Ready To Roll Out Posted: 08 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT  If you watch one homemade Japanese RC car transformer video today, make it this one. This amazing little roadster switches from sports car to dancing robot in a few seconds and it can even walk while in robot mode, and, more important, transform back into a car in the blink of an eye. Made by Kenji Ishida, the robot has 22 servos that help it take on the Decepticons and/or your cat. Apparently this is the fourth version of the robot and the creator is expecting to make more over the next year. It is, in short, amazing.
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| JumpTap: Kindle Fire Usage Has Declined After Holiday Boost, iPad Back To Pre-Fire Launch Levels Posted: 08 May 2012 05:33 AM PDT  The Kindle Fire from Amazon has stolen a march in the tablet world, with some estimating that it now makes up more than half of all Android tablets in use in the U.S. today. But the latest monthly figures from mobile ad network JumpTap today paint a different picture in terms of usage. JumpTap noted that in the months after its launch, Amazon’s device rapidly picked up market share, reaching 33 percent of all traffic on its network in January 2012. But since then, the figure has gradually been in decline and is now at 22 percent. Meanwhile, Apple’s iPad — which had lost share to the Kindle Fire — is now back to 65 percent, or where it was before Amazon launched its tablet. JumpTap, which bases its numbers on ad impressions on its network, noted that the Fire tablet came its closest to the iPad’s traffic share in January, when the iPad’s share of traffic had declind down to 48 percent. Meanwhile, the rest of the tablet market seems to be stalling out: collectively, the others currently account for 14 percent of all traffic on JumpTap’s network, the same proportion they had for the past three months. In fact, the rest of the tablet market, excepting the iPad, seems to have been hit the worst by the rise of the Kindle Fire: together, they made up 31 percent of all traffic on JumpTap’s network back in November 2011 — in other words, their share has more than halved. So why the decline for the Kindle Fire, and the growth for the iPad? JumpTap attributes it to strong sales of the newest iPad. But it could also be that while the Kindle saw a big boost in purchases after its launch and during the holiday period, it could be that some of the novelty of the product has worn off and people are now using it less. However, important to note that JumpTap says that even as the Kindle’s share of traffic has declined, in real terms usage has actually increased three-fold over Q4 2011 as a result of the overall growth in tablet usage. It doesn’t give comparative traffic numbers for other devices.
Other research released by JumpTap in the same report covers some other interesting stats that get a bit more granular, and others that are slightly oddball. They include: which cities have the highest concentration of platforms and what are the most popular cars (example: San Francisco has the highest concentration of Prius cars in the U.S., and an astounding 68 percent penetration of iOS devices on Jumptap’s network).
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 5/09/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 5/09/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 5/09/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 5/09/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 5/09/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 5/09/2012 05:10:00 AM
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