Filed under: Peripherals, Portable Audio
Chances are that if you do your duties on Vista and rely on one of Creative’s sound cards to get your dance on, you may have become frustrated by the firm’s inability to offer up a driver package that lived up to those loosed for Windows XP. ‘Course, if that rings a bell, you’re probably not too concerned — you know, thanks to those unofficial (but totally functional) drivers brought to you by Daniel_K. Unfortunately for users suddenly excited to gain some extra utility from their device, Creative has hopped on the offensive and is forbidding said compiler from distributing the firm’s technology / IP (not to mention collecting donations), and it’s also scouring the ‘net to remove other links to the software. Granted, we fully understand Creative’s right to disallow the distribution of untested, potentially harmful third-party drivers, but c’mon, how about redirecting the energy you’re spending on shutting this guy down to actually developing drivers that your customers are demanding?
[Via Slashdot, thanks to everyone who sent this in]
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Filed under: Portable Audio
With that little Department of Justice business out of their way, Sirius and XM have unsurprisingly been quick to start chatting up the all-important FCC, and a recent filing from the agency has now revealed that lawyers from the two companies have met with none other than FCC Chairman Kevin Martin himself, along with other higher-ups. Even more interesting, however, is that the same filing also includes a full rundown of the companies’ proposed post-merger pricing plans, which don’t appear to have changed much from those detailed way back in the early days of the merger. Starting with the basics, the Sirius and XM “Everything” plans will hang on to the same $12.95 per month price tag, and include approximately 130 and 170 channels, respectively. From there, each service has A La Carte options starting at $6.99 a month (with additional channels costing 25 cents apiece), along with the usual package options ranging in price from $9.99 for the Mostly Music and News, Sports and Talk bundles to $16.99 for the “Sirius Everything & Select XM” or “XM Everytyhing & Select Sirius” packages. Be sure to hit up the PDF available at the link below for the complete rundown.
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Filed under: Portable Audio
Those darn kids — they just don’t listen! And soon, according to a report, they won’t physically be able to listen. It seems that modern teens, with their cloaking jackets, space telephones, and telepathic headsets fail to obey the simplest tenet of leisure-time music enjoyment: keeping their iPod and Zune volumes at a semi-natural level. In focus-group discussions, researchers found that high school students in the Netherlands were aware of the potential hearing loss which can be caused by high volume listening, yet had no immediate plans to crank their jams at anything but 11. Typical of our misguided youth, the teens feel that they have a “low personal vulnerability” to hearing loss — researchers also noted that they believed they were bulletproof, could fly, and would never, ever lose touch with people who signed their yearbook. The study’s findings suggest that the answer to this problem may lie with manufacturers of hardware and solutions like volume caps or warning lights, rather than with the self-control of the end user.
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Filed under: Portable Audio
You know what kids in developing nations need besides water, vaccines, and schools? MP3 players… and laptops, lots of laptops. Meet the Cranko, at least that’s what we’re calling it since Thanko’s “Cranking MP3 Player” bores us to the point of Wal-marting razor blades. The 1GB capacity player from Thanko features a flashlight and 10 minute charge per minute of cranking. You know, just in case your spelunking adventures take you too far away from a USB port. Yours now for ¥6,000 or about $60.
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Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio
We’ve seen a number of iPod speakers with pass-through dock connectors, but we’ve never really understood the point — why would we listen to music on our iPod when we’re already sitting at the computer, which has better speakers? iHome’s latest rig, the iH69, tries to bring it all together, though, with an iPod dock integrated directly into a set of upright computer speakers. We’re not sold on the idea until we actually hear ‘em — or we get a sub in the deal — but those of you looking to save on some cable clutter should look for these bad boys to drop sometime in June.
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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
You may still not be able to get an iPhone in Canada (at least officially), but you can now at least grab a spiffy new 16GB Samsung
YP-P2, which is a whole 8GB bigger than the model currently available in the US. From the looks of it, Best Buy Canada is the among the first to offer the beefed-up, Bluetooth-packin’ PMP, with it currently demanding $330 Canadian (a $40 discount off the $370 list price) on the retailer’s website. Apart from the bump in storage, however, there doesn’t look to be any other changes to the player, with it boasting the same 3-inch touchscreen, Bluetooth 2.0 support, and H.264, OGG, and WMV playback as before. Of course, it’s
not very likely this’ll be a Canadian exclusive for long, though we’ve still yet to hear anything official on that from Samsung.
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