GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

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This amazing hack-job is the NES Guitar, fashioned almost entirely from recycled parts by the appropriately-named Circuitmaster.

The body is, of course, an old SNES console, combined with a reused guitar neck, a new bridge, a single-coil, height-adjustable pickup, a pair of strap buttons, a volume knob and of course a jack for your cable. Inside you won’t find anything much but empty space – Circuitmaster removed the guts of the console so that you, the buyer, can add in your own custom electronics. And if you’re wondering how the thin plastic case of a SNES can possibly be strong enough to keep the strings in tension, then don’t: it doesn’t. The neck and bridge are mounted on a piece of solid oak inside.

The video below shows you how it sounds, which is honestly not so good, likely thanks to the lack of sustain given by the flimsy plastic box. That doesn’t make this any less awesome, though.

Circuitmaster has made precisely one of these so far, and availability is currently marked as “sold out”. No surprise, really, when you look at the price tag: a ridiculously low $150 (especially considering that the neck is from Ibanez).

NES Guitar [GetLoFi via Geekologie]

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As if the iGrill thermometer wasn’t enough to convince you that pretty much every gadget will be replaced by the iPhone, what about this? The O’Car – despite sounding like an Irish, erm, car, is in fact a car stereo which uses the iPhone as its display and control panel.

The O’Car comes from Oxygen Audio, hence the “O” on the name. As befits a dumb head-unit, it does almost nothing. Apart from the iPhone slot, there is an RDS radio tuner and an 4×55-watt amp, so you can still tune in to something when you forget your phone.

But plug in the iPhone and you get everything. The O’ar will hold the phone vertically or horizontally, so you can use any app, turning this humble stereo into a GPS navigator, Pandora radio, or even – should you feel like killing some other road users while you drive distracted – Angry Birds.

The integration goes further. The iPhone charges when it’s docked, and you can make and receive calls via the integrated Bluetooth hands-free kit.

O’Car is set to debut at CES next month, when the price will be announced. Given its lack of, well, anything, it should really be pretty cheap.

O’Car product page [Oxygen Audio via Andrew Liszewski]

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For the last few weeks, I have been living with the Supertooth Disco, a Bluetooth speaker seemingly named after a singles night at a dentists’ convention. It’s a battery-powered stereo-speaker with a hefty subwoofer inside and, while it will never make its way onto an audiophiles shopping list, it’s a pretty impressive box for its size.

First, the specs. The speaker weighs in at 1,140-grams, or 2.5-pounds, and has two eight-watt drivers. Also in the case is that subwoofer, which blows its sound out through a rear-facing hole. Battery life is claimed to be 3-4 hours at high volume, up to 10 hours at medium volume. Standby is rated at an almost untestable 1,500 hours, or 62.5 days. The Bluetooth is A2DP and AVRCP, meaning you can beam straight from a phone, computer or iPad (where it shows up in the AirPlay menu) and also use the buttons clustered around the volume knob to play, pause and skip tracks remotely

The battery life is indeed impressive, lasting me for days of casual listening (I left the Supertooth in the kitchen and used it to play music and podcasts whenever I was in there). I couldn’t test the battery life at “high volume”, as I live in an apartment with neighbors stacked all around me, but in general use it’s long enough not to worry about, and you can always just plug the thing in (and it takes just three hours to charge from empty).

So how does it sound? That depends on what you’re listening to. Rock sounds pretty rushed and jangly, classical music – notoriously demanding on stereo equipment – is equally bad. But try some jazz, some spoken-word or anything warm and funky and it sounds very good indeed. I have been obsessed with Nol Akchot’s So Lucky these past weeks, which is an album of instrumental acoustic guitar covers of Kylie Minogue’s hits (don’t laugh – it’s pretty awesome). The guitar and the squeaking of fingers on strings are projected into an impressively big sound by the Supertooth. Which brings us onto the subwoofer.

You can really crank this speaker. At full volume it distorts, but it’s loud enough to stop any conversations well before you get that far up the dial. Press the bass-boost button by the main dial and you’ll get mixed results. Sometimes it overpowers the music, other times it adds the right amount of warmth and kick. It’s not set-and-forget: You’ll be tweaking this on a per-album basis. The bass itself is big, though, and even with the volume less than halfway up you can feel the air punching out of the rear hole.

The Supertooth comes with a case, a spongy neoprene-type thing with a mesh hole for the bass-port and a Velcro-shut flap for the ports around back (power and line-in via jack). It seems perfect for keeping splashes off in the bathroom, or for taking the speaker out for a trip.

Would I buy the Supertooth (it costs $150)? Sure. It’s not as good as the sub’n’satellite speakers I have hooked up elsewhere, but considering its size the speaker sounds fantastic (just steer clear of the White Stripes) and the portability will be a huge bonus once my leg is no longer broken. And before I go, here’s one great extra use for the Supertooth. Because Bluetooth-streamed audio is in sync with any on-screen video from the same device, you can sit the Supertooth behind your iPad when watching movies and enjoy a pretty good mini-home-theater experience. Add in a pico-projector and… Well, that’s something coming in a future post.

Supertooth Disco product page [Supertooth]

Photo: Charlie Sorrel

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The Pocket Piano might not look like much. Or it might look like an awesome, handmade marriage of craftwork and electronics (a Kraftwerk, if you will). Either way, it does a lot more than you think it does.

Built by Critter and Guitari, the handsome aluminum and hardwood case houses a mini electronic synthesizer with six different modes. You play it using the little wooden buttons which you may notice are in two rows, representing the black and white keys on a real piano. For the music nerds, here’s a list of the modes:

Vibrato Synth
Harmonic Sweeper
Two-Octave Arpeggiator
Octave Cascade
Mono FM Synth
FM Arpeggiator

For the rest of us, here’s how it works. The buttons play notes, and you can extend the small keyboard to a full two-octaves by turning a knob. Other buttons allow mode selection, and knobs control waveform along with rate and decay, depending on which moe you are currently in.

The box runs on a single 9V battery, or can be hooked up to a DC adapter (not included). It also has a standard quarter-inch jack line-out to hook it up to amps or guitar pedals, for even weirder sounds. The Pocket Piano costs $150.

Critter and Guitari have a few other neat music gizmos you can buy, including the Television Oscilloscope, which take the input from a musical instrument and pipes it onto your TV, turning out the kind of nightmarish jumping, pulsing patterns that only a 1970s acid-head could love, and the Kaleidoloop, which is, well, which is rather hard to describe.

And if that weren’t enough to tempt you to the analog side, think how much cooler you’d look tooting one of these devices in public than you would with the alternative – an old SNES console, a soldering iron and a whole bagful of wire.

Pocket Piano product page [Critter and Guitari. Thanks, Eliot!]

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Is this “The World’s Most Advanced Guitar”? Gibson certainly thinks so, and going on the amount of tech squeezed into the Les Paul-shaped body of the Dusk Tiger, it just might be true.

First, the body. It might look like a Les Paul, but the top is flat, not contoured, and the mahogany back of the marblewood body covers a chambered interior which reduces weight and tweaks tonality. The neck is pretty standard, made from mahogany and featuring tiger-tooth shaped markers on the fretboard.

But let’s get to the real meat, which is inside the guitar. This thing has enough gadgetry to put a tin-can of people up on the Moon. The tuning keys are smaller versions of Gibson’s “Robot Tuners”, and can quickly switch between various alternate tunings on-the-fly, or just tune the guitar for you (500 times on a single battery charge).

The bridge is pretty much a standard Tune-o-Matic bridge, but incorporates a piezo pickup into each saddle, and has separate outputs for all six strings. God know what kind of devilish effects that will allow.

The regular pickups also differ from the Les Paul standard setup. The neck pickup is a hum-canceling single-coil model (P-90h), and the bridge pickup is a Burst Bucker 3, a slightly over-wound humbucker.

Then things go crazy. You get an internal pre-amp and parametric EQ, and if you hook up the Dusk Tiger to its companion “Robot Interface Pack (RIP)”, a little box of magic, you can send a FireWire output to any computer. Software, like Ableton Live Lite 8, is even included in the package.

But best of all is the Master Control Knob, a single circular knob which not only controls the guitar but lights up like a Daft Punk helmet thanks to an integral LED display.

All this doesn’t come cheap. For this handsome piece of gizmo-stuffed craftsmanship you’re looking at $4,150. We suggest you fire a
roadie or two.

Dusk Tiger product page [Gibson]

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The Pick Punch should be a Steetfighter special move, but it is in fact much more mundane, and arguably more useful. Looking a lot like an office stapler, the Pick Punch works like a paper hole-punch, only it is strong enough to cut through old credit cards, and deposits 351-style guitar-picks instead of confetti.

According to a review by the Gadgeteer, the resulting picks are smooth edged. The problem is, they’re not sharp-edged. If you have used a store-bought pick, you’ll know that the sides taper to a single edge, sharp (ish) and not squared off. You could address this problem with a file, but as picks are about the same cost as the small-change people sometimes uses to play their guitars (and damage their strings), then it’s hardly worth the bother.

On the other hand, this will let you use all the plastic crap that drops through the mailbox for purposes of good, instead of for landfilling evil. Credit cards, store-cards, over-packaged CF-card boxes, anything that will be stiff enough to twang a string can be recycled for your musical experimentation.

It even offers a measure of security: chop the chip, and a section of numbers, from your Visa card and you can toss away the rest free of fears of identity-theft. The price for this fun, practical yet ultimately superfluous piece of musical stationery? $25, and the company will even sell you sheets of plastic to chop through.

Pick Punch product page [Pick Punch via Gadgeteer]

Photo: Gadgeteer

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While riding the Subway this week, New York resident Brittany Tucker spotted the band Atomic Tom pulling a musical stunt on the train, jamming out their song “Take Me Out” on their iPhones. Each band member used an iPhone app to play a different part (drums, guitar, keyboard, vocals), and the end result is quite an ear worm.

Imagine if you were on that train. I’d be thinking, “Only in New York. Awesome.”

We’ve seen a number of geeky performers create experiment noises with iOS apps, and Atomic Tom’s performance is one of the better ones. Tune in by playing the video above.

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If you’re deaf, you don’t have many choices when it comes to portable music. The best way is probably some over-the-ear headphones which don’t touch your hearing aids and send them into a squealing feedback loop. But why not ditch the cans altogether and beam the music straight to the hi-fi buds already nestling in your canals?

That’s exactly what Siemens miniTek will do. It’s a little black box, slightly larger than the current iPod Nano, which can be combined with any of Siemen’s “wireless hearing instruments”. It receives audio from any Bluetooth device (like your phone), equipment that uses an e2e wireless connection, T-coil systems (found in theaters, bank-tellers’ booths and other public places) or a special adapter that can hook into TVs and so on. The remote-like box also has switches to control volume and answer calls, and has a jack for hooking up any other source.

The miniTek is pictured with some rather large earpieces, but will also work with hearing-aids which are recessed completely in the canal. It will run for five hours while streaming, or “several days” as a remote, and charges fully in three hours. For the price, you’ll have to ask your hearing specialist.

This stuff is important. I have a very good friend who has been profoundly deaf since birth. Some years ago, she went to an fancy clinic and they hooked her up to a new kind of machine which let her hear things she’d never heard before. They played classical music. She cried.

Siemens miniTek [Siemens via Engadget]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Spotify, the frankly awesome music-streaming service, will be on Windows Phone 7 at launch. It is available now for Windows Mobile 6.x (now confusingly named Windows Phone), and will be in the Windows Marketplace ready to go when the new Windows 7 handsets ship. Spotify is an ad-supported, all-you-can-eat music player which offers instant access to millions of tracks and, on the Mac at least, manages to be faster and more responsive than the awful iTunes.

The announcement, from the Spotify blog, shows that Microsoft continues to get things right with its new mobile OS. The Windows Phone 7 app will support the same functions as the iPhone and Android versions, with offline playlists and streaming over 3G as well as Wi-Fi. To use the WinMo and Windows Phone 7 versions you’ll need to subscribe to the paid version of Spotify, which also removes ads and lets you store files locally on your computer.

As Windows Phone 7 won’t have an App store, we’re assuming that the handsets will come with the app pre-installed.. It’s possible that Spotify will be in the Windows Phone Marketplace for the WP7 launch. There’s one big question, though. Spotify is currently only available in select European countries, and not at all in the U.S. The phones will be likely be shipping in Europe on October 21st, and the U.S on November 8th. Could this mean that Spotify is finally hopping across the pond?

Spotify debuts on Windows Phone [Spotify]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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AirTurn’s Bluetooth foot-switch for iPad turns pages with the tap of a foot. It’s designed for keeping both hands free to play an instrument while reading digital sheet music. However, it may turn out to be an important technology for e-book readers with disabilities.

Gadget Lab wrote about AirTurn’s BT-105 prototype in July, but I discovered its accessibility potential in this thread at e-reading site TeleRead. A reader wrote the following email to TeleRead editor Paul Biba:

My friends grandson is bright, loves to read, but doesnt speak and lacks the fine motor skill to turn pages on his iPad book reader. Is there any software or device that could turn the pages for him?

Could you also ask if they know of an input device, do they know how a non-technical person would hook the input device to the iPad or computer?

I did my own research and was discouraged not to be able to find any purpose-built software or hardware to do the job. Late last night, reader “possentespirto” mentioned the AirTurn, which is still scheduled to be available sometime in Q4 of this year. Bluetooth pairing doesn’t require a great deal of technical wizardry, and the AirTurn foot pedal is already compatible with third-party software. This could be a terrific solution.

Users lacking either full control of their arms and hands or the limbs themselves could use the foot pedal to turn pages and zoom in on text; users with other disabilities could convert the foot clicker into a hand-clicker. In fact, the device reminds me of nothing so much as the clicker Stephen Hawking used to select text before he eventually lost control of his hands as well.

AirTurn’s foot-clicker may be too heavy or require too much force to be usable for some disabled users. Here’s where there’s a natural opportunity for an accessibility-minded company to build on this technology, make something explicitly for these readers and do it right.

Source:wired.com

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If you play the guitar, and you have an iPad, you should buy TabToolkit. Short of having a teacher with you all the time, it’s probably the best way I have seen to learn new music.

Guitar Tab is a way of writing down music specifically for the guitar. It’s not as information-rich as standard musical notation, but it’s a lot easier to follow. At its core, TabToolkit will display tabs for you, just like they’d look on paper. But if you use Power Tab or Guitar Pro files, both designed to be read on by computer, then TabToolkit goes into overdrive.

Load in a song (from your computer or via the built-in web-browser) and you’ll see the tab along with musical notation, and below that there is a picture of a guitar’s fretboard and strings. Press play and things really get going. A line runs along the notation to show you where you are in the song, and red dots appear on the fretboard to show you where your fingers should be. Better still, the app actually plays the song thanks to a built-in multi-track synthesizer. That’s right, you get a whole band to play along with, only they never get tired and they never drink all your beer.

There are various controls and options. The best is the speed-dial: spin the wheel and you can slow the music down (or speed it up, should you really hate yourself). you can also choose which instrument you want to learn. Tabs default to the main guitar track, but you can choose to see any instrument for which a sequencer track has been included. You can also switch off the standard musical notation, change the size of the display, switch to left-handed mode (try that with printed tabs) and have a keyboard instead of a fretboard shown at the bottom.

There are some problems with this iPad version (launched in April – there’s an older iPhone version). While you can tap-to-stop the music, doing so skips the “playhead” to wherever you touch on-screen. Further, you need to hit the tiny play-button to resume. But that’s about it. As I said, if you’re learning the guitar, you owe it to yourself to spend $10 on this app. My favorite part? Take a look at the screenshot at the top: You can choose to have the metronome sound as a cow-bell. Just where might that be useful?

I played the guitar a lot when I was younger. Back then, there was no internet. Songs came in books, or on pieces of paper scribbled by friends. If something like TabToolkit had existed back then, I wouldn’t be such a terrible player today.

TabToolkit product page [Agile]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Mikey Wally is serious about bikes. He’s also serious about gadgets, and he snapped this shot of an amazing but rather dangerous-looking iPad-powered bike stereo at June’s Subway Series Ride in Los Angles

The iPad handlebar mount, seen here on a BMX, appears to be as sturdy as the bike itself. It looks like nothing more than a sign-holder from a conference-center, with rubber strips slid in to offer a little protection against the rattling steel (take a peek at the full-sized picture, though, and you’ll see it is custom-built). It also shows just how perfect a ten-inch screen is for in-bike entertainment. Sure, here it’s just using iTunes to feed the stereo, but maps, movies and anything else would work great on the big (ish) screen.

So how serious is Mikey about his bicycles? First, he lives in LA and doesn’t use a car. Second, according to his Flickr profile, last summer he rode from New York to LA. That’s as bad-ass as the 40 Glocc track playing on the bike stereo.

BMX bike-stereo [Mikey Wally / Flickr]

My June Subway Series Ride Photos [Mikey Wally]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Awareness is an iPhone app that lets you hold a conversation whilst listening to music with a pair of earbuds jammed into your canals. It does this by piping sounds through to the headphones via the iPhone’s own microphone.

Amazingly, this feature was found on some of the original Sony Walkmans back in the mists of time. You would press the big orange button and hold the Walkman up towards anyone you wanted to hear. They would look at you strangely and ask “can you hear me?” The conversation would then move onto the subject of your Walkman.

It’s rude to talk to people whilst wearing headphones, but there are other uses. Cyclists, or even pedestrians, might like to hear honking horns or shouted warnings. People waiting in airports or railway stations might like to hear announcements but drown out general noise.

Awareness does this automatically. You fire it up and it monitors the ambient noise level. Go ahead and switch to your music (Awareness runs in the background) and whenever the trigger level is broken, the mic sends its input to your ears. You can also adjust the level manually, and the music will duck (get quieter) automatically when external sound is coming through.

There are other options, too, but the ability to have important events intrude on your sonic bubble is worth the $5 for many. I shall be trying the app out on my bike this afternoon. The app requires an iDevice running iOS4 and equipped with an internal or external mic.

Awareness! The Headphone App [iTunes]

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If you’re using both hands to play a musical instrument, the last thing you want to worry about is turning the pages of sheet-music as you play. The traditional solution was to make somebody do it for you, or to quickly reach up and do it yourself.

Tech has helped. These days a laptop with a USB foot-pedal is the way to go, but there have been all manner of spring-loaded and hydraulic contraptions invented to turn actual paper pages. These were, as you might expect, less than reliable.

Airturn, maker of sheet-music-reading software and hardware, has come up with a solution for the iPad. Apple’s tablet would seem to be the perfect device for reading music: it’s big enough to replace a piece of paper, whilst still slim and light enough to put on a music stand. Combined with Airturn’s new Bluetooth foot-switch, it makes a reliable, wire-free and practical solution.

The BT-105, as it is called, has a pair of switches, one to page forward, and one to page back. The switch doesn’t just work with the company’s own software, either. The video demo shows it controlling a third-party app with a zoom feature. In this case, the switch can tell the app to flip half a page at a time or, more accurately, to show the second half of the page before it flips to the next one.

The switch is in development right now, but should be available in the last quarter of this year.

iPad Bluetooth page turner footswitch prototype [Airturn. Thanks, Hugh!]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Spotify, the jukebox-in-the-cloud which is still not available in the US has been updated to work with iOS4. This adds several new features, but the game-changer is that it can now run in the background, replacing the iPod app almost completely.

Spotify is a free, ad-supported or paid application for Mac, PC, iOS, Symbian and Android which lets you play any music in the catalog as if it were iTunes. Unlike Pandora, the US-only music streaming service, you can actually choose an artist and track, and organize music into playlists, even saving them for offline listening.

Now, with iOS4’s multitasking, you can continue to listen to Spotify in the background as you send mail, read Instapaper or do pretty much anything else. Just as planned, the music controls in the app-switching dock control Spotify instead of the iPod app, the inline remote on the headphones does the same, as do the music controls on the iPhone’s lock-screen. If your iPhone or iPad is in the universal dock, using the Apple remote will also let you control Spotify. In short, it takes over all iPhone music functions while running.

Further, if you play a track from Spotify that is already on your iPhone, it will be pulled from the local copy rather than over the network (currently, this causes the app to pause if running in the background).

There are more new features in this release. Just like the latest desktop client, Spotify mobile lets you send music to your Spotify and Facebook friends, as well as browsing the “top lists”, charts based on new and popular tracks.

The only thing that keeps Spotify completely replacing your iPod app is podcasts, which can be accessed but cannot be updated automatically. The usability is also a little clunky. Searching the gazillion songs in Spotify’s catalog is fast and easy, but browsing your own saved playlists is an annoyingly linear affair, with much scrolling and clicking to find what you want.

Spotify is free, but to use it on your iPhone or iPod Touch you have to pay the premium 10-per-month subscription. I do. I figure its worth it to have 8 million track on my iPad and iPod Touch.

Bonus tip: Did you know that in iOS4, music keeps playing even whilst you sync to iTunes?

iPhone app updated – background listening arrives! [Spotify]

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could listen to internet radio in your car? With Livio’s new Carmen, you can, provided you’re happy with a rather weird, convoluted, time-consuming and almost Rube Goldberg-esque experience.

The best way to give you an idea of the whole complicated mess is to describe the process. First, plug the Carmen into your computer, fire up the companion software and then choose the from the internet radio stations available (“more than 42,000 stations”). The Carmen will then record these for you, DVR-style, in real-time. To make that clear, you won’t be downloading an hour-long show in seconds like you would with a podcast: you’ll be waiting an hour for it.

Once the 2GB stick is loaded up, you take it to the car and plug it into the cigarette-lighter socket. Then you turn on the car’s radio. The Carmen works by sending the MP3s via FM (although you can opt for an aux cable). It even comes with a small remote control so you can search on the floor for that instead of squeezing the Carmen’s tiny buttons.

To recap: You spend hours recording radio shows only to re-broadcast them to your car stereo. And for this you spend $60. Alternatively you could just use the radio in your car, or hook up the cellphone or MP3 player you already have to your car stereo. That would cost you nothing.

For all my complaints, I admit I have a soft spot for the Carmen: the idea of recording songs and shows off the radio to listen to in the car takes me back to my childhood. Thank goodness somebody is applying today’s tech to 1970s problems.

Available for pre-order now.

Carmen Car Audio Player [Livio. Thanks, Joe!]

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Music WithMe will wirelessly sync the music on your computer with your BlackBerry, wherever you happen to be. Specifically, it will sync selected playlists in iTunes over a Wi-Fi or cellular network so your mobile music library is always up to date.

The app, from a company named ParkVu, works with a piece of client software on your Windows PC to read your iTunes library database. Whenever you add or change something in iTunes, those changes are pushed to an app running in the background on your BlackBerry and added to its standard music-player.

It sound a little gimmicky at first, although when on the same Wi-Fi network, auto-syncing would certainly be helpful. But it somewhat ironically solves one of the biggest problems of the iPad or iPhone: the lack of auto-updating podcasts. If you are away from your home machine and you want to update your podcasts on an Apple device, you have to search them out one at a time and download manually. With Music WithMe, you could just check your podcast playlist and have new episodes pushed to your BlackBerry.

Sadly, Music WithMe won’t be coming to iOS anytime soon, although Android, Symbian and Maemo users (yes, both of you) will be getting versions. The trial price, when the app launches any day now, will be $15. The final price has yet to be announced.

Music WithMe puts your iTunes library on your smartphone [Music WithMe. Thanks, Roseann!]

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