Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review the battle of the mini camcorders and a brand-new prizefight how to play xbox games on your imac our coast delivers an Android tablet and our top five picks for Father's Day gift it's all coming up right now hey everyone I'm Hollywood welcome to the cnet tech review the show where we bring you the good the bad and the bottom line and tech videos from the week let's kick things off with the good with Memorial Day behind us it's time to start getting ready for your summer vacation and of course your vacation videos if you're in the market for a new mini camcorder to take on your trip let brian Tong help you pick the right one in this week's prize fight what's up prized by fans i'm brian Tong and video cameras come in all shapes and sizes so we're facing up to that fit in your pocket it's a throwdown showdown between the second generation flip minohd HD and kodak zi8 we're bringing in see that's finest from the NYC to judge this battle executive editor David Carr noite senior editor Joshua Goldman and yours truly will do the honors that will take all three judges scores and average them out to the nearest tenth each round the final prize fight score will be an average of all rounds using the same decimal system let's get physical first round of sexiness the flip mino HD is the most compact camcorder to date and we like it's classy metal finish smooth lines and it's almost buttonless design this guy screams sexy now the kodak zi8 and not so much it's not ugly but it's bulkier and not his pocket friendly I like its large 2.5 inch LCD the dark color design is nice but there's plenty of room to improve its form factor the middle HD takes this round with the 4.3 and the zi8 gets a 3.3 next round is audio and video quality audio quality is going to be about the same and codec gives you the option to connect an external mic but there were differences in the video quality both camera shoots 720p video but kodak kicks it up a notch with 1080p and 720p shooting at 60 frames per second for ultra smooth video flip has been the benchmark for video quality and we found that it had slightly warmer and fuller colors and it also performed better adjusting to different light conditions both can were shining this round but codec just gets the edge with the 4.3 and foot video gets a 4 so after averaging two rounds the minnow HD leaves by four tenths of a point there's play more battle to go next round is featured flips line of cameras are really known for their simplicity and not further features the minnow HD has built-in memory you won't need a cable to charge it since it charges through USB and all you really need is just the camera but geeks like me might want a little more if you want a little extra something kodak zi8 brings unique features like an expandable memory slot for the storage size of your choice a macro mode to switch focus on really close objects and the ability to connect an external mic + HDMI and composite video outputs the zi8 hits hard with the 4.7 and the middle HD gets a three-round for software both cameras come with built-in software to share your videos but not all things are created equal flip brings its flipshare app that is compatible with both PCs and Macs it boasts a cleaner interface and more publishing features like trading video greeting cards your own private flip channel and online publishing to Facebook YouTube and others i also found editing clips to be a lot easier with flipshare codex media impression software is only pc compatible but you can easily drag and drop files onto the mac to edit them in a different program it has basic editing and a moviemaker feature plus publishing options from the expected online services flip takes the cake here with the perfect 5 and Kodak gets up for so after averaging four rounds we are tied at 4.1 points a piece the final round its size and all is value the flip mino HD is a great pocket camcorder but for two hundred and twenty nine dollars retail price you would think they could at least throw in an hdmi cable well you won't get one here and you feel like you might not be getting a bang for every buck the kodak zi8 starts at $179 retail price and you're getting everything you can think of in this package with all of its shooting modes an expandable memory slot for up to 32 gigs plus an HDMI and composite video cable included codex shines in the final round and gets a 4.7 and flip gets a 4 so after averaging five rounds out and going into the final round type the kodak zi8 pulled out of this neck-and-neck battle 4.2 to 4.1 and is your prize 5 winner both of these are great pocket camcorders and with a prizefight this close the real winner is you I'm Brian Tom thanks to watch it will catch you guys next time for another prize five thanks Brian I do feel like a winner so those two cameras are both excellent choices but if you're looking for something a little more rugged for your summer adventures take a look at kodak playsport here's price by Judge Joshua Goldman with a first look hi I'm Josh Goldman senior editor for see no reviews and this is a look at the kodak playsport mini camcorder the place board also known as the zx3 captures video of resolutions up to 1080p at 30 frames per second can do it underwater to depths of nearly 10 feet it's also dust resistant and slightly more durable than the average pocket video camera the play sport also has an LCD glare shield that improves viewing of the small two inch screen in bright outdoor conditions in order to keep the body compact and limit opportunities for water damage this model doesn't have the built-in USB connector that's common to this type of camcorder instead you have to use the included USB cable next to USB port there's a mini HDMI port for connecting to an HDTV and an AV jack cables for both are included too what's not included is memory there's only 20 megs of internal storage so you'll need to supply an sdhc card to record to the shooting features might not be as robust as other models from Kodak but the play sport does have four capture modes including 720p at 30 and 60 frames per second and electronic image stabilization the integrated sharing software is simple it works well to the 1080p video quality is generally excellent with great color and sharpness for its class however if you're doing a lot of panning or you're shooting fast-moving subjects you want to switch to the 60 frame per second 720p setting to avoid a lot of judder in your clips the results are softer than 1080p but much smoother pocket video cameras can't compete with a full-fledged HD camcorder but for its price and size this is a fine choice I'm Josh Goldman that's the kodak playsport see i just bought a kiddie pool last week so the place for it would actually be perfect for my house because let me tell you if you've got a camera around a kid in a pool it's going to get wet turning our attention to Apple I no big surprise the apple worldwide developers conference is just around the corner and the Apple rumor mill is running full steam ahead now remember this is the event where we usually hear about new iPhones and other updates but in this episode of apple byte brian Tong seems to have other things on his mind so Brian what you got going here oh hey what's going on check this out so I have these magnets and they're like apps so I'm arranging the apps the way I'd want them to be cool man don't you have work to do no I'm on my lunch break now if I move the app store down here I have an entire line of them so I'll tell you what why don't you keep working on this okay I'll be over here talking to some girls right good job girls what's up Brian song here and welcome to the apple pie for all the good and bad inside the world of Apple now I can promise you I will not be making out with any Apple products this week so let's get to the show Apple is officially no longer the underdog earlier this week Apple past microsoft in market capitalization for the first time in their storied history it's been going back and forth now but at the time of the show apple's market cap is around two hundred and twenty six billion dollars just edgy Microsoft and it also makes them the second largest US company by market cap behind exxon mobil's 282 billion dollar value the big a now is really the big a and unfortunately they've been acting like it a lot more and more now an iPhone news according to the boy genius report AT&T has confirmed to its employees that the next-gen iphone will be available to purchase in June and they emphasize it will not be late June so start saving if you haven't already because any US customers even thinking of killing their AT&T contract for their 3gs might want to think again after ATT recently upped their early termination fee from $175 to 325 dollars that hurts daddy now in a recent digit times article it claims Apple has been working on multiple versions of the next iPhone the leaked iphone we all know about was known as the n90 but according to them Apple has been working on another product code named n91 the more closely resembles the iphone 3gs in case there were any issues or delays with the new casing display resolution digital camera and other modifications and in another downer for verizon iphone hopefuls because we keep piling them on digit times claims pegatron will build the cdma-based iphone but it will not enter mass production until at least the second half of this year if not 2011 2011 add some more you're talking about 2012 in yeah it just keeps getting worse for you guys all right let's take a look at the app of the week now the app of the week is the wired magazine app for the iPad I've been hyping this thing up and showing you snippets but this lives up to the hype it was delayed and rebuilt in objective-c after apple banned any flash based apps or software converters but the partnership between wired an adobe has given us the best digital magazine we've ever seen now there are fully interactive animations there's also panels that you can change depending on what you select and there's multimedia clips integrated into the experience now the best part about this magazine app is that the text is always readable and the page layout rearranges itself if you're reading in portrait or landscape mode many other magazines on the iPad our PDF based and that page format is natively different from an iPad so you'll have to press an option to read the text separately which takes away from enjoying the article but not on this one the wired magazine is truly made for the iPads dimensions it's 499 per issue and I'll be the first submit that's really pricey but wired says they will offer a subscription option in the fall and this is really an achievement for digital magazines and as you can tell I like it a lot alright moving on to some quick bites Apple's back to school deal has returned so if you're looking to get a macbook macbook pro or an imac you can get up to two hundred dollars off the computer and an eight gig ipod touch for free when you buy them together and it's perfect timing with the latest upgrades to the laptop line now we compared VMware and parallels in a past episode for running windows on your mac and the big knock on VMware was it sluggishness but they've released an update which claims to give you thirty five percent faster app performance and 3d graphics with five times the speed and also if you were curious about those magnets we showed off in the beginning of the show they're called the app magnets and you can get them from jailbreak collective calm it's a set of 18 for 1299 and each of these epoxy tiles are reminders of the icons on your phone and guess what I have one set to give away so all you guys have to do is send me an email to the apple bite at cnet com tell me your favorite ice cream and I'll pick a winner and I'm sure there are people trying to find a way to still carry their iPads around with them well it looks like I clothing has a solution for you with the IT and I dress now these high-end models showcase how this will change your life but in the fashion world they just call that a very large pocket in the wrong place and I couldn't even find a bad apple that looked worse than that shirt to throw out here alright that's going to do for this week's show i'm brian Tong thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next week for another bite of the Apple so I'm going to take this one I'm gonna move it what are you gonna do with this one that one's do you want to know I'm gonna take this one slide ladies love bead Tong I think it's his animal magnetism or it could be the slide and if you can't get enough of our Apple coverage be sure to check out our WWDC preview playing right now at cnet TV and of course come back on Monday June seventh when we'll be bringing you all the big announcements from the show now while you jot that down in your calendars let's take a break but stick around we'll keep a rolling with the good stuff in just a minute welcome back guys I'm Molly wood and this is the cnet tech review and some weeks there's just more good than bad so let's keep the happy train rolling now one thing people like about Apple's products is that they tend to work pretty great right out of the box but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement especially by adding accessories here are Nicole lien rich brown with a couple of nifty add-ons for your iphone and iMac and nicole lee associate editor for cnet.com and this is a first look at the sound I d510 bluetooth headset as you can see here it is a very simple-looking bluetooth headset a very slim and stylish of all blackberry minimalist appeal on the frontier is a multifunction button right here above it is a small little LED indicator you don't get a physical volume rocker with the headset but you do get a touch sensor volume control you can adjust the volume by starting your finger up and down the front of the headset on the side here is the power toggle on the backyard is the earpiece with some ideas real comfort ear loop the Sun I d510 comes with an array of different earloop sizes for a more customized fit the ear you can also be adjusted to fit either the left or right ear one of the most interesting things about the sound I d510 is that it is the first bluetooth headset with its own iphone app the iphone app is called airprint and is available free for download from the itunes app store we have the ear print iphone app you can adjust a variety of things on your sound I d510 headset you can adjust the personal sound level because you can adjust the incoming audio quality you can also find out how loud the surrounding noises you can also adjust the noise reduction demo to just find out how much noise you're cancelling there's also an environmental salmo that amplifies the sound around you when the headset is not in use this is our very handy find my headset locator function in the app so that if you lose your headset somewhere in the house for example you can just press this button and then your headset will continue beeping to let you know whether hip it is you can also find out the battery status of your headset with this app this sound I d510 is around one hundred and thirty dollars I'm Nicole Lee and this has been the first look at the sound I d510 bluetooth headset hi I'm rich brown senior editor for cnet com today we're going to take a look at the connects XD so in the back of the imac you'll find a mini displayport adapter you can use that to output video from the imac to another display but unique to the 27-inch model is it's also an input now out of the box you can connect say macbook pro to the imac with a standard mini displayport cable going both directions the problem though is that it doesn't have the ability to convert an HDMI signal technically you can do that though because it's a digital port and that's where the connects XD comes in so this is pretty straightforward little device costs about one hundred fifty dollars so yeah kind of to be serious about turning your imac into a kind of a home entertainment hub but it's got an HDMI port here mini DisplayPort Jack there a little power cable input there there's no software that comes with it there's just a little basic order of operations you need to follow in order to make sure the signal goes through and it's really pretty straightforward and we've had success with the playstation 3 xbox 360 you just see here we'll show you in a minute we've tried blu-ray players as well as cable boxes and HD camcorders the only problem we have is with a with an hdmi switch we tried a couple devices and the cable box couldn't reconcile the signal through the switch through the adapter into the imac we think there's probably a signal authentication issue the other limitation has to do with the imax display it's only encoded to support certain resolutions coming into the system solu 2560 x 1440 which is its native display which you'll see right here and then it goes down to 720p and 480p so that means a couple things first it means you need to set your video source to input the 720p so that means you may need to connect say your game console to another display first in order to drop the resolution setting down so that I might actually display when you connect it from the standpoint of display quality it's actually not that big a deal games and TV signal for example both look great and they don't really that look that much different than what you'd see in full 1080p I one complaint is actually with the blu-ray quality it's a little bit muddy than definitely not as clear as a 1080p signaling you might be used as we said getting the connects XD started is pretty simple you plug in the hdmi port then you go to the power then finally you bring the mini DisplayPort jack from the device into the imac as you can see the signal switch is over automatically and we've got our xbox screen up here and it plays games just fine there's no actual crosstalk between the imac and xbox so you can't say record gameplay and that's probably a good idea as far as copy-protection goes there are a few commands you can do though with Mac keyboard you can do volume as well as screen brightness still and you can hit command f2 to switch between the different signals the connects XD is not the only device that will go from mini displayport to hdmi into the imac there are a couple others out of the market we know of a few forthcoming as well but this is one of the first and its price is roughly the same as the others goes for about 150 bucks sorry much brown this is the connects XD there's something about playing my xbox on my imac that just seems wrong and i like it although why couldn't apple just add an hdmi port why and with that enough mrs. nice gal let's move on to what's bad this week now with the rise of netbooks tablets smartphones stand alone mp3 and video players are becoming a thing of the past so what does media player maker archos do come out with a tablet of their own and Donald Bell gives it a first look hey I'm Donald bow for cnet.com and today we're taking a first look at the Arco seven home tablet as the name implies this is a tablet computer with a 7-inch screen it runs Android OS 1.5 and comes with 8 gigabytes of internal memory and costs a shockingly low 199 dollars now arcos had to make some concessions to get the price down the resistive touchscreen is sluggish lacks multi-touch and has a bad viewing angle when you tilt it down the internal memory is meagre there's no bluetooth or GPS no camera or compass and unlike previous arcos tablets there's no dock connection on the bottom for video output or DVR accessories instead you get a micro USB port for data transfer a power and hold switch up at the top a microSD card slot headphone output and the socket for the included power adapter at full charge you can expect around 44 hours of music playback or seven hours of video there's also a pair of internal speakers on the front and a plastic kickstand on the back the OS is completely Android including the media players you can surf the web check your email or even read a book there's also an integrated app store put together by our coast where you can download compatible apps it's unfortunate that not all apps for Android are compatible with the archos seven due to the limitations of the hardware but there are still plenty of apps to play around with gripes aside if you're looking for an Android alternative to the ipad or ipod touch the archos seven gets you there on a 7-inch screen for only one hundred ninety nine dollars the experience isn't dazzling but the price is right so there you go that's the archos seven home tablet for cnet com I'm Donald up oh poor our coasts I'm not sure if this is just a glorified PvP or a puny tablet wanna be but either way I'm gonna have to pass and now the moment you've been waiting for this week's bottom line father's day is still a couple of weeks away so you've got plenty of time to shop but put down that Omaha Steaks catalog because we have the top 5 tech gifts for dad already picked out for you welcome to see top five for each time we meet we count down another hot cnet list I'm Tom Merritt fathers days coming up dads like tech but getting your dad and iPods kind of like getting them a tides pretty predictable and a TV is a little out of the budget for most fathers day gift givers unless your team up but don't worry you got the Father's Day presents sure to make your tech love and padre smile big let's count them down and number five the sonos s5 digital music system great sound no clutter no cables and controlled from an app on your iPhone or iPod Touch perfect for the Apple toten pops coming in at number for the sony bdp s570 it's not just a high-def blu-ray player it has 3d support netflix amazon youtube and slacker music support and built-in Wi-Fi you may get hugged if you give this up to number three audio engine to dad still want to impress friends and one way to impress friends is small things that do impressive stuff these compact speakers deliver phenomenal sound for their size perfect for the audiophile father sliding it a number to the amazon kindle dad's read and this helps them impress their annoying neighbors while they do it you can also fill it up with tom clancy stephen king or whatever dad loves to read before we get to number one here are five things you should absolutely not give your tech loving dad especially if you want to preserve your inheritance alright let's get to our number one the top tech gift for dad at number one it's the logitech harmony one let's assume dad already sprung for the high-def TV during the last big TV event B it's super bowl or blizzcon he needs a universal remote and this is possibly the best universal remote we've ever tested here at cnet that inheritance just got bigger well that's it for this edition of CNN top 5 you can find more great tech gift recommendations like these at our dads and grads gift guide dads cnet com and no matter what you give your dad this Father's Day forget to tell him you love him I'm Tom Merritt next time the bottom line this week it's the thought that counts but don't even think of buying your data tech gift unless you also plan to help him set it up and that's our show for this week we'll be back again next week with a whole new batch of videos including our coverage of WWDC well i have a new iphone in my hands come back next week to find out until then you can find more great video at cnet TV com see you next time and thank you for watching everyone