10/27/2006, With ultra-thin phones, wireless carriers have learned that good design sells. Virtually every manufacturer produce thin models and carriers want more because they sell. The Sprint Sanyo Katana is a potentially popular phone: it’s simple, elegant and works well as a telephone. So what do we think of it and how does it compare with similar phones? Obviously, anyone who’s thinking about getting a Katana will also look at the […]

10/23/2006, We were invited on Friday at the Miuro press conference held in a very nice French restaurant in the Silicon Valley. The cheese was awesome and God knows how we miss it (we lived in Paris for a while), but the real surprise was this amazing Network Music Player Robot coming directly from Japan. This fun, all rounded, device dances around while playing music from an iPod (hidden inside the […]

10/23/2006, Last week, I was looking for a speaker system for my iPod, so I walked to the Apple Store on University Avenue and got an Apple Hi-Fi. I was looking for something with a clean design and sound quality. The Apple Hi-Fi seemed like the perfect candidate. I even tried it a little in the store, but the environment was too noisy and I didn’t want to be a jerk […]

10/10/2006, The Sandisk Sansa e280 offers music-savvy consumers an alternative to buying music: renting it! For 6 to 10 dollars a month, you can have (real) access to more music than iTunes users could ever dream of buying. The Sansa e280 is compatible with Microsoft’s Playforsure that allows music rental. It is also obviously compatible with plain MP3 or WMA files. With 8GB of integrated (flash) memory plus an SD card […]

09/27/2006, We’ve unpacked the Mio H610 on Sept 9th and it is now time to publish our full review. In a nutshell, the Mio H610 is not only an excellent GPS device it is also an object of desire for most people who came in contact with it. Beyond the GPS functionality the H610 is also a 3D gaming-capable Portable Media Player (PMP). Mio is raising the bar: bad news for […]

09/13/2006, I’ve been testing the O ROKR for a couple of months now and it’s time for the review. It’s is a pair of sunglasses with integrated Bluetooth 2.0 (BT) stereo headphones. This fruit of the collaboration between Oakley and Motorola exists in 3 colors: Black, Bronze and White. It receives and plays audio broadcasted by another Bluetooth device such as a phone or an MP3 player. This is the latest […]

09/09/2006, It’s time to unpack the Mio H610: the device itself is uber-looking with its ipod-esque clean look. (Check out the photo gallery). I couldn’t resist turning it on right away and the first impression was “wow, that display is really sharp”. It’s a 2.7”, 320×240 pixels screen – which is fairly common- but the difference is in the software that drives it: all the graphics (including the vector maps) are […]

09/08/2006, We just got back from San Francisco where we attended the official U.S launch of the Mio H610. After a first wave hype in March of this year, customers will finally be able to get their hands on the H610 in October. The product is designed to be totally different from previous Mio units like the C310 (review here) because it turns a commodity like a GPS into a more personal device -designed […]

08/28/2006, As much as we love gadgets, a lot of us don’t know nearly enough about how to dispose of them properly (in an environment-friendly manner). When we heard about Elizabeth Grossman’s “High Tech Trash” book, we did seek a meeting with her in downtown San Francisco to ask her a few questions. Ubergizmo: How bad is the current electronics pollution? Elizabeth Grossman: The amount of discarded electronics is enormous. The […]

08/21/2006, One day, one of my co-workers, Bryan, came up to me and asked me what I think about VoIP. I told him that I had Lingo for about 10 months, from 2004 to 2005, but it didn’t work out for me. We talked about various issues with the VoIP service, dropped calls, choppy sounds, dead air, and so on and so forth. He said that he was considering trying SunRocket […]

07/25/2006, With its design, the Motorla Q has earned it the “BlackBerry Killer” nickname. It has the three “S” of the perfect gadget: Slim, Sexy, and Smart. Text can be entered at full speed, thanks to the QWERTY keyboard, and displayed on a nice QVGA display. The inside is nice too: the phone is a 3G CDMA handset that can connect to Verizon’s high-speed EV-DO network. Internet browsing, email and messaging […]

07/05/2006, Stand alone GPS units are much easier to use than a PDA/GPS combo, that’s a fact. The Mio C310 is a perfect example of a well designed in-car GPS that can also be transported in your (big) pocket or backpack. Even the novice user (my grand mother) will at least be able to use it as a map. Directions are also dead simple to use and the unit got rave […]

06/01/2006, The N70 is one of many phones of the elite Nseries, a line of Nokia phones based on the S60 platform. The Nokia N70 has pretty much anything that a modern phone should possess: very good imaging capabilities (for a phone), 3G connectivity, smart phone features and an elegant design. We used it for months and concluded our test with a trip to Paris, France. So, is the Nokia N70 […]

05/30/2006, Sprint is trying hard to push new services using the third generation (3G) wireless networks like data access, music or video. Many are saying that 2006 will be the year of cellular TV just as 2005 was the year of MP3 phones. Feature-wise, it makes sense but I’m not sure about how the economics will work. The Samsung A920 is a 3G capable phone that’s affordable and once you add the various […]