News

CES 2011: Sonos Wants to Give You Access to All the World’s Music

You make high-end, expensive audio components for household use and the world falls apart financially–what do you do? If you are a company like Sonos the answer is clear–you stay true to your mission and continue to make the best possible devices for in home music streaming. Clearly this approach worked. In the last year the company’s business doubled. Yes, the world is still in financial turmoil the company with relatively high-priced audio components was able to double their business. Clearly people like what they’re offering. I have long been an admirer of Sonos audio components. The high-end audio company…






Toyota Appears Near Top of Both Brand Perception Survey and ‘Most Hated Company’ List

David Goodspeed writes amazing articles about cars and the automotive industry for Gear Diary, and I love reading them. Personally I am fairly utilitarian in my auto pursuits, but my statistician avocation makes me sit up and take notice when what looks like inherently contradictory data comes along. In this case it is Toyota and their public image. First off they find themselves along BP, airlines and others on the ’15 most hated companies’ list. Toyota had what could be described as a ‘rough’ 2010 in terms of public relations, to the point where the former leader of product quality…


NAIAS 2011: Day One and Only, Dawn of a new Detroit Auto Show

Day one of the 2011 North American International Auto Show is going to be a very busy one, mainly because it is the only day that automakers will host press conferences. Given the congested nature of the day’s schedule I will break it down into several parts with a few brands already taking stage before many have had the opportunity to down their first cup of joe. Porsche, Chevy, Ford and Volkswagen lead off the morning.


2011 North American Car and Truck of the Year winners announced

The 2011 Ford Explorer has been named North American Truck of the Year at the 2011 North American International Auto Show in Detroit this morning. As a finalist it beat out the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango for top honors. In the North American Car of the Year competition, two of the three finalists are electric vehicles, although one does have a range extending gas engine on-board and this is what clinched it to make the Chevrolet Volt as the top car over the Nissan Leaf and Hyundai Sonata.


Ilium Software Launches eWallet GO! – Their First App for WP7

Well established mobile software companies are slowly rolling out apps for Windows Phone 7.  Ilium Software, a long-standing mobile software company, has just released its first WP7 app, eWallet GO! (the ! is theirs – not [necessarily] an indication of my excitement). eWallet is a secure information manager (password protector, etc.) that has been around for quite a few years, expanding to new platforms as they are introduced.  It’s an old favorite of many – I myself have used eWallet on several different platforms in the past. eWallet GO! offers over 30 card templates, ranging from credit cards to website…


Contour GPS Adds Bluetooth to Hands-Free Video

It’s an issue as old as Xtreme Sportz. You’ve strapped a video camera to your helmet, and you’re convinced it’s absolutely killer footage. Unfortunately, you taped the camera at the wrong angle, and instead of seeing your wicked skating set everyone sees the sky. Luckily, ContourGPS has a hands-free video camera that solves this issue by turning your phone into the viewfinder via Bluetooth. I can see where this would be helpful since without some sort of screen you don’t know that your camera is aimed properly. However, may I make a suggestion? If you’re going to be using this…


First Ever Demo- Motorola Atrix 4? Phone To 20? Desktop to… 24? iMac

Francis and I got to spend some intimate time with Motorola’s Xoom powerhouse tablet and Atrix smartphone and we came away impressed. Toward the end of the demo we asked for a chance to try something new; we asked to take over the Atrix while it was connected to a 20″ monitor, keyboard and mouse and use it, in conjunction with LogMeIn, to take over my 24″ iMac in New Jersey. The result… The smartphone took over and controlled my Mac seamlessly. We asked if anyone else had done this, and were told this was, at least in their experience,…


2011 May Actually BE the Year of the Tablet

It is actually looking like the tablet bonanza promised last year will finally arrive. Francis and I just found ourselves in tablet-Ville. Prototypes and actual shipping models were everywhere and almost all were running some version of Android.


ProClip Makes Francis’ Day

Francis doesn’t own a single Apple product. Yeah I know… some day he will come to his senses but for now he is committed to remaining unenlightened. His phone of choose right now… the Samsung Vibrant. The problem with that is that there are tons of accessors for iPhones but when it comes to phones like the Captivate there are few choices. Francis was sharing his tale of woe when we stumbled upon our friend Johan at his ProClip booth and… wouldn’t you know it, ProClip has a carholder that IA designed specifically for the Captivate and its top-positioned microUSB.


CES Garage, Day Four

Day Four is all about the unveiling of the new Ford Focus Electric, an all-electric version of the next-generation Focus subcompact. The all-new Focus Electric is Ford’s first-ever all-electric passenger car. (OK, maybe its first-ever mass-produced electric car as Mrs. Henry Ford was reported to spin around the Dearborn countryside in an electric car in 1914.) The zero-CO2-emissions, gasoline-free version of Ford’s popular small car is the flagship of the company’s growing fleet of hybrid, plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles coming to North America and Europe by 2013.


Gear Diary Live at CES- The Lenovo U1: A Year Later It Looks Better than Ever

Dino and I spent some time this afternoon at the Lenovo display. We had the opportunity to look at all of the new computers that will be offered by Lenovo this year. Trust us, there are a ton of them and we will have a look at many over the next few days. Right now, however, we wanted to take a few minutes to look a little more closely at their most unusual and innovative product–the Lenovo U1. This is both a tablet and a notebook computer. We saw a version of this computer last year when we were here…


Vision Objects Makes Their CES Debut

Vision Objects has been developing and refining handwriting recognition technology since 1998, with their software being partnered with some well known products, such as the Livescribe pen series so well loved by several Gear Diary writers (including yours truly).  Despite being well known for their handwriting recognition prowess, which is available in different forms for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, this is the first year that Vision Objects set up shop at CES. To coincide with its first CES appearance, Vision Objects is introducing several new products.  As described by their press release: MyScript Studio…


Casio- “Viva LaRevolution”; Us “Revolution? What Revolution”

What do you do when you have nothing of substance to say but it’s the biggest technology event of the year? Why you hold a press conference of course! And then you use words like “digital revolution” and “create fantastic works of art” over and over and over and over again. That was the experience we had yesterday afternoon at the Casio press conference. Yes, the company that first brought digital photography to the world had nothing of substance to offer today but that didn’t keep them from holding a press conference and talking for a seemingly endless period of…


CES: Handsets and Tablets, Oh MY! All from Motorola!

Today at CES Verizon had their day in the sun! During that announcement they officially announced what looks like a great handset in the new Droid Bionic, plus the new Xoom Tablet.  Both are due to hit Verizon early this year. The Droid Bionic boasts from the press release: Packing a dual core processor with each core running at 1GHz, delivering up to two GHz of processing power, and 512 MB RAM, the sleekly designed DROID BIONIC smartphone with 4G LTE delivers a mobile Internet experience that’s up to 10 times faster than 3G. This means consumers can stream their favorite…


Nike Introduces the Nike+ SportWatch

Garmin has been the undisputed leader of GPS running watches for several years. Timex and Polar have similar devices, but neither has captured running hearts quite like the Garmin Forerunner line. Nike has the “poor man’s Garmin” with their Nike+ system, and at CES they stepped it up with a new GPS-based Nike watch. According to Nike: Starting April 1st, get the extra push you need with the Nike+ SportWatch GPS powered by TomTom. Not only does it track what you do, it tracks how you do it, then makes you want to do it again and again. Here’s how:…


A Huge Gear Diary Thank You to Card Munch

So CES is well underway, and we are running from sun-up until late at night. Along the way we are seeing all kinds of great tech, speaking to awesome people and… collecting tons of business cards. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. If this were last year we would be collecting tons of business cards but this isn’t last year and we aren’t collecting any business cards at all. Thanks to the Card Munch iPhone app and the generosity of the folks at Card Munch, Judie and I haven’t collected a single business card. Instead we take the cards, grab…


CES- Iomega Superhero Dock

I spent some time this morning at the Iomega booth and had a chance to see their news Superhero dock for backing up and charging iPhones and iPod touches. The unassuming dock does a trick that, surprisingly had not been done before. The dock will charge your device but it will also backup photos and contacts to the included SD card. To use it you download the free app that will be available soon and then, whenever the device is docked the app will launch and back up the most precious content on it. It works with all generations of…