Archive for September, 2008

Sports Deluxe Game Player Review

Friday, September 19th, 2008

There’s many reasons not to choose the Sports Deluxe Game Console over the Nintedo Wii, which it is similar to and there’s one main reason to choose it in ADDITION to the Wii. It makes a good traveling companion that you can trash or lose without worrying about having to replace the expensive gaming console that you leave at home.

Let’s face it. The Sports Deluxe is a Wii Knock-off. There’s no denying it. But that’s not a bad thing. The SDGC has a wireless interface and, similar to Wii Sports, you play such games as baseball, boxing, bowling, golf, and even tennis on it. And you can work up quite a sweat while doing it. And the specific sports aren’t half bad, with the exception of baseball which is fairly limited to pitch and hit. I found the most fun was had bowling and playing tennis. Boxing is boxing and some just aren’t thrilled with that. Although it does let users employ the “katana” extra that plugs in via USB to record the activity or your other hand. The best sport, though, hands down is tennis, followed by Golf. But the funny thing about the Golf game is that there’s a lot of spelling errors in the notes that the game sends you. For instance, you end up hitting the ball in the water, you’re hitting a water haZRad. Pretty funny.

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AudioVox Home Base – Good idea that’s isn’t the sum of its parts

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Home Base

When we broke the news at Coolest Gadgets of the AudioVox Homebase at CES last year, I thought this was perhaps the coolest home kitchen idea to make family life easier. The idea was simple. A digital frame wrapped around an acrylic base which also serves as a whiteboard for notes and digital recorder for voice messages. The LCD screen looked to show pictures from SD cards and promised slide shows and other options that would make looking at digital stills quite enjoyable.

Then I got the real McCoy to test last week. By the end of the afternoon, I was ready to pack it up and send it back. Not because it’s easy to use, which it is, or that it’s design is a lost cause – which it isn’t. But because the parts AudioVox used in building the Home Base are just plain disappointing. The LCD screen resolution is around 1st generation digital frame quality and the microphone which is used to record the digital memos makes playback sound like the drive-through at Jack in the Box. And on top of that, AudioVox seems to think that using sponge tape to affix a three or four pound electronic device to an refrigerator door that opens and closes is going to be a secure system for protecting it from falling and breaking into thousands of pieces. Well sorry, but that’s a recipe for disaster. These kind of shortcomings only prove the old adage that designers don’t work on their own cars.

But in this case, designers don’t use the stuff they design. And they should, if they plan on charging $200 for them. If AudioVox is willing to put a little more into this design to make it both safe and high quality, even if it costs $10 –20 more, I’m sure people would pay the difference to get what Audiovox first promised. And therein lies the hope, because it’s just a great idea for digitizing people’s busy life.

Hello world!

Friday, September 12th, 2008

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