Author: Oli Jones
HEADPHONES WEEK: Jays' V-Jays
On-ear headphones are making a comeback. Okay maybe I just made that up. But the 80s are big again aren’t they? And no one had in-ear headphones in the 80s, they had on-ears, and they were right. On-ears are comfier and safer than in-ears, less obtrusive than cans and they can sound freaking awesome. As proved by Jay’s V-Jays.
The Short Version
Name – V-Jays
Type – On-ear open headphones
How much – £59.99
How much should they cost – £60.00
Should you buy them – If you’re self conscious I’d avoid them, if not, they’re well worth the money.
The Long Version
Sound Quality
On-ear headphones don’t look cool – but isn’t cool all about perceptions – prevailing social norms? Isn’t cool transient? For the sake of these super-wicked headphones I hope so. I’ll admit the first time I stepped out in the V-Jays I felt like a prize numpty. I might as well have had Mr Motivator on my head, that’s how ’93 I looked.
But as soon as I hit play, I forgot about my headgear, so ensconced was I in the precise and amazing sound they yielded: Deep and rangy bass with taut, precise treble and a hefty enough mid to handle anything I through at it.
Never has listening to Godspeed! stomping down Commercial Road felt quite so epic, though they weren’t amazing at drowning out the loftier decibels on the rickety District Line.
Build Quality
The V-Jays are light on design features, which suits me – they look serious, understated and stylish. The square phones are about as flash as it gets. The extendable headband can sometimes be a tad fiddly, adjusting each side to get a vaguely symmetrical shape, but it fits very comfortably.
The cable is about a girthy as you’d expect on a pair of high-end headphones with an interesting 15mm headphone jack-split in the middle, though what purpose it is supposed to serve has, as yet, alluded me.
They feel eminently sturdy, like a Sherpa. You trust them.
The phones fold under the headband to add a modicum of portability but it is one glaring concession of the on-ear genus of headphone: they aren’t easily stuffed in a pocket.
Phones
Swathed in familiar black sponge, it seems things haven’t moved on since about 1979 in-terms of ear-phone casing technology.
But the fact is they were comfy in 1979, and they’re still comfy now, and you get a pair of spares, once the others are too encrusted with your aural discharge for you to hear through.
Packaging
V-Jays come in a rather snazzy box wedged into some good thick foam, but they’re light on accessories. If Jays really wanted to give V-Jays the professional veneer a hard-case might have done the trick.
Conclusion
These headphones are so good I don’t mind looking a bit lame (okay pretty lame) in order to enjoy their full and glorious goodness. The first time I donned the V-Jays, it was 5.45pm, I was on a packed Northern Line train, and a large and unremmitingly odious man behind me was breathing in my ear, I put them on as much as to block his heinous violation of my ear-canal as to listen to some tunes. But hearing them was like a epiphany: “Oh remember this,” I thought, “Music! As it should be. Loud and bassy and ace.”
If you care more about your hair than your music then maybe V-Jays aren’t for you. But they’re certainly for me.
BT throttles users' download speeds under 'Fair Usage' policy
BT, the UK’s biggest ISP has been accused of throttling users download speeds between 5.30 and midnight.
People who sign up for BT’s option one, eight mbps service, may find the speed they actually get is one mbps or under, which might contravene trade descriptions legislation.
A fair usage policy secreted on BT’s website reads: “We do limit the speed of all video streaming to 896Kbps on our Option 1 product, during peak times only.”
ISPs use “traffic shaping” to provide a good overall experience for all of its users. But in practise, this policy just leads to slow and occasionally unusable connections for everyone.
BT said: “Where we manage bandwidth, we do so in order to optimise the experience for all customers, whatever they want to do online.
“We believe there is a real issue that content owners like the BBC need to address and we are currently in discussions with the BBC executive to ensure that our customers get the best possible experience in the future.”
The issue is that BT and other ISPs are refusing to invest in the replacement of antiquated telephone lines while hiding behind their “Fair Usage” policies, which are inherently ridiculous. If you pay for something called, “unlimited broadband”, then having your connection throttled based on some ridiculous and arbitrary ‘fair usage’ terms in simply preposterous.
We pay a premium for our broadband in this country and we get one of the poorest services in the western world, its high time consumer groups put some concerted pressure on our ISPs to invest in some serious physical infrastructure to get us the service we deserve.
Why not test your connection? Tell us your actual speed and bandwith, what speed you were promised, and who your ISP is we’ll tell you who the best and worst are.
Microsoft unveil motion sensing controller – Project Natal
Microsoft has unveiled its much rumoured motion controller at E3 along with 1080p video-streaming, facebook and twitter integration, and Premier League football as part of Microsoft’s deal with Sky.
“Project Natal” is not as many were expecting a hand-held controller but rather a motion sensing camera, like the Eye Toy, but hopefully substantially less crappy.
Steven Spielberg lumbered on stage to demo the new technology, with his avatar moving in real time as he controled the UI. Unlike the Eye Toy which wasn’t really developed with any great vigour, Microsoft seem to have gone to town with Natal and look to have created a very immersive and interactive experience.
Maybe too interactive, because in an Orwellian overstep, Microsoft have included face recognition technology which will allow you to use the meat, sinew and cartilage, on the front of your head to as your password to log in to your Live account.
But Natal isn’t just for gaming: As Microsoft start to push the Xbox 360 as the home entertainment mega-hub, you’ll be able to use Natal to flick through your films and songs and use voice recognition to issue commands.
The demo came complete with a very Wii-esque trailer of a family enjoyed the delights of Natal’s motion capture, although all the voices had been dubbed so grimly that the whole thing takes on this sort of uncanny and unnerving ambiance, like they’re trapped. It’s weird – watch it. It’s a far cry from the light-hearted japes of the Rednapp clan.
Microsoft look to have created an amazing and deeply immersive piece of kit here, but they still can’t make adverts. Not for toffees.
Watch this till the end – it’s a good advert and then in the last 10 seconds the way the light on the Natal unit switches off is so creepy!
Has no one at Microsoft seen Space Odyssey 2001? It couldn’t be more menacingly Hal-esque.
Google and BBC to join forces for international iPlayer
The BBC are in talks with Google to launch an international edition of the BBC iPlayer, supported by Google owned YouTube.
The sticking point seems to be the need to aquire international rights for the content shown on UK iPlayer.
Separate negotiations are also in progress between the BBC’s commerical arm, BBC Worldwide and YouTube with a view to the BBC’s archive content, for which international rights have already been acquired, available on YouTube.
It is currently possible to watch some BBC content on YouTube but only in short format; trailers and clips as opposed to entire shows and episodes.
A BBC spokesperson said: “There are a significant number of obstacles to extending this commercially to other countries, including international rights clearance. These obstacles present significant difficulties and for this reason there are no firm plans for a specific international BBC iPlayer, but audiences can watch BBC content outside the UK through numerous BBC Worldwide content deals with online partners such as iTunes.”
(Via Telegraph)
The Rise of the Smartbook
You’ll be hearing a lot about Smartbooks in the weeks and months to come, they’re basically netbooks but operating on mobile OSs, as opposed to stuffy old computer ones.
Today at a Qualcomm Technologies press conference to announce the release of its new SnapDragon chipset, an Asus Eee PC was spotted running Google’s Android OS.
The shtick with Smarbooks is the idea that, because mobile OSs are designed to run on the teeny weenie processors found in smartphones, putting them on the larger Atom processors found in netbooks will boost their performance at key tasks such as web-browsing, text editing and VoIP.
Granted, mobile OSs aren’t designed for the netbook’s form factor, and concurrently things seem distinctly underwhelming from a UI perspective.
Which leads me to believe that maybe there’s a middle ground between the mobile OS and desktop OS that’s necessary for the Smartbook. A new, ultra-portable, but not over-simplified OS, that hits web browsing, email, media and text editing and not much else.
Xmas list 2010
1) Smartbook
Mark my words.
(Via TweakTown)
Zune HD to be released on 5th September?
The Zune HD will be launched in the US on 5th September according to Microsoft guru Paul Thurott.
But as the American launch edges palpably closer a UK launch is beginning to seem more like an impossibility than a improbability.
The Zune’s HD radio wouldn’t work in the UK where we use DAB and the ZunePass music subscription service used in the US is none-existent in Europe.
Pipe smoking, tech high-brow, Jack Schofield writes on Guardian.co.uk, “Sony is already offering much better sound quality than Apple, OLED screens, built in FM radio and better file support at reasonable prices. Admittedly it still has to re-educate a market that still thinks Sony supports ATRAC and requires horrible SonicStage software, but that’s probably an easier job than establishing the Zune brand from scratch.”
Which he’s right about. Well, the Zune thing, not the iPod thing: The sound quality on Sony Mp3 players is simply not any better than the iPod’s. That’s just not true. The thing that has made the iPod successful is how seamless it is. From it’s beautiful design, across every device and generation, to its amazingly simple and balanced UIs and a sound quality that’s as good as any personal media player out there.
That’s what has made the iPod ubiquitous, it’s simplicity. And that simplicity isn’t something Microsoft has ever been good at (ie… Vista). That being said, I’d be sad not to see the Zune HD launched here in some form, purely because it looks like a good product. I’m sick of these US only products. What have they done to deserve them? I want the Kindle and Zune HD on these shores by the end of the year – got it.
(Via SlashGear)
Orange launch cheapest £5-a-month contract
Orange has today launched a £5-a-month pay-monthly contract.
The whopping 36 month deal gives you 50 texts and 50 minutes a month and comes with a free Nokia 2630, which has WAP – remember WAP?
Aimed at those people who rarely use their phones and find topping up either annoying or difficult, (so your gran then) the £5 contract is part of a groups of tariffs launched today, ranging from £5 to £15.
Also launched today are a series of SIM only contracts, the cheapest of which is an 18 month deal that gives you 500 texts and 100 minutes for £10 a month.
(Via What Mobile)
SHINY PREVIEW VIDEO: LG Viewty GC900
The camera phone spelled the end for the digital camera. That’s what they told us. But no, it wasn’t true, because the cameras in camera phones have generally always been pretty useless regardless of how many megapixels they had wodged into them. But is that all about to change with the new LG Viewty Smart, a handset that’s as much a camera as it is a phone.
The eight megapixel snapper/phone comes wielding auto focus, smile and face detection, geo-tagging, and in-phone editing.
LG’s impressive S-Class UI make a welcome reappearance on the Viewty along with a veritable smorgasbord of connectivity options, minus 3G, which might make viewing web-pages a ball-ache, especially if you can’t get an EDGE signal either. Quaintly it also has FM radio, which I actually really like, a lot, because radio is still ace.
Available soon, on Orange initially, and then across the networks thereafter.
The PSP Go! is real. Officially real. But not officially launched
A video has been “mistakenly” posted on Sony’s official website of their Qore TV show which had a feature on the 3.8 inch screened, 43% lighter-than-the-original, PSP Go! If that was a mistake then I’m a cake. The video was “hurriedly” pulled once the Tech-media had been given sufficient time to lap it up and post copies on YouTube, which are systematically being pulled at a leisurely rate.
Bing goes Live, not Live Search
Microsoft’s first serious attempt at a Google-beater went live on Friday for US users and is now available in beta form for UK searchers.
The big friendly search page is very “Web 2.0”, its all big simple fonts and whitewash villas, no actually, there’s a picture of whitewashed villas, which will make you want to search for whitewashed villas, but don’t get distracted, you’ve got searching to do.
Bing is a new-breed of search engine, it want to give you answers, all by itself. The UK version is, as yet, without the much hyped “Local” search option, which Microsoft have been hyping in the run-up to the launch. A team of 60 web-bods are working full-time to bring Bing’s Local option to UK users as soon as possible.
The search results look dismally like Live Search’s but, unlike Live Search the side bar with related searches works smoothly and offers an array of pertinent links to potentially related subjects, which is nice.
So say you search; Nikon D300, you get; Nikon D300 review, Nikon D300 sales, Nikon D300 to buy, in your related searches, all of which is very helpful.
The image search is better than Google’s, it offers filters which allow you to hone your search precisely.
The video and shopping searches also equally hold their own. But in terms of Search, because after all Bing is primarily a search engine, Bing still falls short of Google’s unerring and uncanny knack of finding just what you’re looking for.
But beating Google is maybe setting Microsoft’s sites a bit high. Live Search had about 8.5% of the global search market, behind Yahoo on 18% and Google on 69%. So leapfrogging Yahoo might be the first step for Microsoft, but right now, will I be deserting Google for Bing? No.
