| Barnes and Noble Seeks Government Investigation Of Microsoft Patent Claims Posted: 08 Nov 2011 03:00 PM PST  Over the last year, Microsoft has embarked on a crusade to secure license fees from device makers that use the Android operating system. While Google provides the Android source code for free, Microsoft claims to own patents infringed by Android. most OEMs have capitulated and payed up, but Barnes and Noble, which sells the Nook line of e-readers, has gone to court. Today, the bookseller turned tablet-pusher has asked the feds to get involved. B&N claims that regulators should investigate Microsoft for attempting to drive competition out of business.
Barnes and Noble doesn't pull any punches in calling calling Microsoft's five Android patents "trivial and outmoded." Already Samsung, HTC, and assorted ODMs are paying Microsoft for every Android device sold. Barnes and Noble claims that Redmond is seeking to prevent it from competing with upcoming devices by increasing costs on its low-cost reading devices. Microsoft has asked the International Trade Commission to block imports of Nook devices, but these actions usually fail. The civil case is set to go ahead in February, and neither side seems likely to back down. |
| HP Holding All-Hands Meeting Tonight, Future Of webOS To Be Revealed Posted: 08 Nov 2011 02:43 PM PST  As we told you earlier, HP is rumored to be preparing to sell off the corpse of webOS to the highest bidder. New in the rumor mill is that HP is preparing for a last-minute all-hands meeting tonight after the markets close. This sort of maneuver usually means bad news, and sources are saying that the company will finally detail what's going to happen with webOS.
The meeting will likely go out as a press call as well, so be ready for a flurry of updates this evening. New CEO Meg Whitman will be taking the stage at 4:30PM PT. Past reports have pegged partners like IBM, Oracle, and RIM as potential suitors. Although, there are problems with all those combinations. Whatever happens, this is going to be judgement day for webOS. After the meeting, we will probably have an idea if the OS is being sold for scrap, or actually has some sort of future. What's your prediction? |
| Republic Wireless Offering Unlimited Plans, No-Contract Phone, Just $19 Per-Month Posted: 08 Nov 2011 02:25 PM PST  It seems like some sort of crazy fever-dream. A $199 off-contract Android phone with unlimited calls, text, and data for just $19 per-month. This is what a new cell carrier known as Republic Wireless is offering, and it might just be crazy enough to work. Although, the reason it might work is that there are some caveats.
Republic Wireless will be using a hybrid calling system that defaults over to Wi-Fi for calls when a user is in range of an access point. These VoIP calls will reduce the overall cost to the carrier, and are strongly encouraged. in fact, users that place too many cellular calls, or pull down too much data will be kindly asked to leave. There is also only one phone right now, a version of LG Optimus S. This is a low-end device running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Republic Wireless promises more devices soon. If this service works as advertised, it could be a great option for a lot of users. Republic Wireless uses the Sprint network for its 3G access, which is fairly ubiquitous these days. Do you think this is going to kick off the VoIP future that eventually toppled the traditional carrier model? |
| Belkin N750 DB Review Posted: 08 Nov 2011 01:58 PM PST Belkin's N750 DB offers a better-than-average feature set, but the router's performance is a mixed bag. At most of our test stations, it delivered very good performance from its 5GHz radio but mediocre throughput from its 2.4GHz radio. Belkin arrives at the N750 model number by adding the 300Mb/s theoretical throughput on its 2.4GHz radio to the 450Mb/s theoretical throughput of its 5GHz radio. This is nonsense, of course, because you can't bond the two together to achieve throughput that even approaches 750Mb/s. The features include dual USB 2.0 ports to enable network sharing of both a printer and attached storage (drives can be formatted with either FAT16/32 or NTFS). Belkin provides software that will automatically back up the hard drives on attached clients. The N750 DB supports a guest network, too, which gives you the power to share your broadband connection while barring guests from accessing other computers or storage on your network. The guest network, however, operates on only the 2.4GHz band. 
Prefer to lay your router flat? Too bad! The base on Belkin's N750 DB is permanently attached.
Belkin describes its Video Mover feature as an app that enables you to "play videos from your library on your TV—wirelessly—through devices like… a DLNA-compliant Blu-ray player," but the N750 DB itself is not DLNA certified, and the router is very light in terms of quality-of-service features. There are no provisions for shaping network traffic to assign audio and video streams higher priority than a torrent, for example. And while it does have a UPnP server, none of the server's features are exposed to the end user for tweaking. Belkin ships the N750 DB with channel bonding disabled on its 2.4GHz radio to eliminate the chance it might stomp on your neighbor's wireless network. Since we don't have any neighbors, we turned it on for our tests. Channel bonding is enabled on the 5GHz radio, which operates on a much less crowded frequency (actually, Belkin doesn't give you a choice in the matter). The N750 DB would be a much better value if it delivered faster performance on the 2.4GHz frequency band. As it stands, it's a good choice for inexperienced users with simpler needs, or if you just need a router that can share a printer and network storage. Advanced users will want something that delivers faster throughput and more freedom to tweak. $100 (street), www.belkin.com |
| D-Link DIR-657 Review Posted: 08 Nov 2011 01:57 PM PST D-Link markets this single-band (2.4GHz) router as particularly well suited for gaming and media streaming, and it is endowed with very good quality-of-service features, but QoS can't magically render the 2.4GHz frequency band any less crowded. And given our relatively pristine test environment, the best word to describe the DIR-657's range and TCP throughput is pathetic. And while we realize that our room-within-a-room home theater presents a significant challenge to most 5GHz routers, the 2.4GHz DIR-657 could barely send music streams there wirelessly; streaming video to our TV was a nonstarter. The router couldn't connect to the client located in our second outdoor test location at all—it's been a long time since we experienced that problem with a router operating on the 2.4GHz frequency band. 
D-Link's DIR-657 is pretty enough, but its performance leaves us cold.
D-Link's DIR-657 is certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, too (as is Belkin's N750 DB), so the D-Link (and the Belkin) ships with channel bonding disabled. We turned it on for our tests—and then triple-checked it to make sure it was actually on, because the numbers we got were so low: just 48Mb/s with the client sitting a mere 10 feet from the router. Performance curiously jumped by more than 20Mb/s when we moved the client to the kitchen, doubling the distance and putting a wall in between the router and client, but it went off a cliff—to just 11Mb/s—when we moved the client out to the patio. D-Link deserves credit for going to the trouble and expense of obtaining DLNA certification. This interoperability standard has proliferated throughout the consumer electronics industry during the past couple of years, providing confidence that your computers, TVs, media streamers, and other networked devices will play nice together. The DIR-657 is also outfitted with a USB slot for sharing mass storage devices on your network, and it has an SD Card slot to make it easy to transfer your digital photos, movies, and music to other devices on your network. The aforementioned quality-of-service features come courtesy of Ubicom, which has long delivered the best automatic QoS tools in the industry. If you want to tweak these settings on your own, D-Link provides 10 sets of controls for doing so. Perhaps a firmware update will change our opinion of the DIR-657, but we can't recommend this product in its current state. $100 (street), www.dlink.com |
| Trendnet TEW-692GR Review Posted: 08 Nov 2011 01:56 PM PST Trendnet was first‑to‑market with a dual-band USB adapter capable of supporting three 150Mb/s spatial streams on both the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands, and now it's first‑to‑market with a router that does the same. If you're just looking for a fast wireless router, the TEW-692GR is a good choice and it's priced right, too. But if you want a speedy wireless router that boasts all the latest bells and whistles, keep looking: This one doesn't have a USB port, it provides very little in the way of quality-of-service tweakage, and we don't like the way Trendnet implements guest networks. 
If you're willing to give up a few features, Trendnet's TEW-692GR delivers plenty of speed.
Actually, the missing USB port doesn't bother us all that much. If you want storage attached to your network, a NAS box or a home-brew rig running Windows Home Server are vastly superior alternatives to plugging a USB drive into your router. And if you need to share a printer on your network, networked inkjets are incredibly cheap these days. Some of the other missing features are more serious: The router has the typical UPnP server, for instance, but it doesn't come with the peace of mind that DLNA certification provides. And while you can set up multiple guest networks by establishing up to three additional SSIDs on each band (assigning them separate logins and passwords, or leaving them open, if that's how you swing), but Trendnet doesn't provide any means of restricting guests to Internet access—leaving your network somewhat insecure. Aside from a stunted feature list, it's hard to argue with this router's wireless performance. At the time of our review, the TEW-692GR was street-priced just $5 more than our current favorite, Netgear's WNDR-3700, and it was considerably faster on both frequency bands—at least at close range. Netgear's product boasts many more features, however, and it delivers slightly better range. $135 (street), www.trendnet.com |
| Router Wrangling: 3 Of the Hottest New Devices Reviewed Posted: 08 Nov 2011 01:56 PM PST Different tools for different tasks Looking to replace your aging wireless router? We benchmarked three brand-new models at Maximum PC Lab North, but each one is so different from the others that this shouldn't be considered a three-way comparison. Belkin's N750 DB is a dual-band model promising throughput of 300Mb/s on its 2.4GHz radio and 450Mb/s on its 5GHz radio, while D-Link's DIR-657 is a more conventional single-band (2.4GHz) model claiming throughput of 300Mb/s. And Trendnet's EW-692GR is the first dual-band router to deliver three 150Mb/s spatial streams (450Mb/s in aggregate) on both its 2.4- and 5GHz radios. Belkin N750 DB Belkin's N750 DB offers a better-than-average feature set, but the router's performance is a mixed bag. At most of our test stations, it delivered very good performance from its 5GHz radio but mediocre throughput from its 2.4GHz radio. Belkin arrives at the N750 model number by adding the 300Mb/s theoretical throughput on its 2.4GHz radio to the 450Mb/s theoretical throughput of its 5GHz radio. This is nonsense, of course, because you can't bond the two together to achieve throughput that even approaches 750Mb/s. The features include dual USB 2.0 ports to enable network sharing of both a printer and attached storage (drives can be formatted with either FAT16/32 or NTFS). Belkin provides software that will automatically back up the hard drives on attached clients. The N750 DB supports a guest network, too, which gives you the power to share your broadband connection while barring guests from accessing other computers or storage on your network. The guest network, however, operates on only the 2.4GHz band.
Prefer to lay your router flat? Too bad! The base on Belkin's N750 DB is permanently attached.
Belkin describes its Video Mover feature as an app that enables you to "play videos from your library on your TV—wirelessly—through devices like… a DLNA-compliant Blu-ray player," but the N750 DB itself is not DLNA certified, and the router is very light in terms of quality-of-service features. There are no provisions for shaping network traffic to assign audio and video streams higher priority than a torrent, for example. And while it does have a UPnP server, none of the server's features are exposed to the end user for tweaking. Belkin ships the N750 DB with channel bonding disabled on its 2.4GHz radio to eliminate the chance it might stomp on your neighbor's wireless network. Since we don't have any neighbors, we turned it on for our tests. Channel bonding is enabled on the 5GHz radio, which operates on a much less crowded frequency (actually, Belkin doesn't give you a choice in the matter). The N750 DB would be a much better value if it delivered faster performance on the 2.4GHz frequency band. As it stands, it's a good choice for inexperienced users with simpler needs, or if you just need a router that can share a printer and network storage. Advanced users will want something that delivers faster throughput and more freedom to tweak. Benchmarks: Belkin N750 DB | | 2.4GHz Band | 5GHz Band | | | Belkin N750 DB | Netgear WNDR3700 | Belkin N750 DB | Netgear WNDR3700 | | Bedroom, 10 feet (Mb/s) | 76 | 101* | 135* | 109 | | Kitchen, 20 feet (Mb/s) | 46.3 | 85.8* | 100 | 103* | | Patio, 38 feet (Mb/s) | 61 | 67* | 61.4 | 65.9* | | Home Theater, 35 feet (Mb/s) | 41.2* | 38.2 | 0.6 | 6.4* | | Outdoors, 85 feet (Mb/s) | 7.3* | 4.2 | N/C | 5.3* | Asterisk (*) denotes best score. TCP throughput measure using JPerf.N/C indicates no connection at that location. Additional benchmarking methodology can be found here.
D-Link DIR-657 D-Link markets this single-band (2.4GHz) router as particularly well suited for gaming and media streaming, and it is endowed with very good quality-of-service features, but QoS can't magically render the 2.4GHz frequency band any less crowded. And given our relatively pristine test environment, the best word to describe the DIR-657's range and TCP throughput is pathetic. While we realize that our room-within-a-room home theater presents a significant challenge to most 5GHz routers, the 2.4GHz DIR-657 could barely send music streams there wirelessly; streaming video to our TV was a nonstarter. The router couldn't connect to the client located in our second outdoor test location at all—it's been a long time since we experienced that problem with a router operating on the 2.4GHz frequency band.
D-Link's DIR-657 is pretty enough, but its performance leaves us cold.
D-Link's DIR-657 is certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, too (as is Belkin's N750 DB), so the D-Link (and the Belkin) ships with channel bonding disabled. We turned it on for our tests—and then triple-checked it to make sure it was actually on, because the numbers we got were so low: just 48Mb/s with the client sitting a mere 10 feet from the router. Performance curiously jumped by more than 20Mb/s when we moved the client to the kitchen, doubling the distance and putting a wall in between the router and client, but it went off a cliff—to just 11Mb/s—when we moved the client out to the patio. D-Link deserves credit for going to the trouble and expense of obtaining DLNA certification. This interoperability standard has proliferated throughout the consumer electronics industry during the past couple of years, providing confidence that your computers, TVs, media streamers, and other networked devices will play nice together. The DIR-657 is also outfitted with a USB slot for sharing mass storage devices on your network, and it has an SD Card slot to make it easy to transfer your digital photos, movies, and music to other devices on your network. The aforementioned quality-of-service features come courtesy of Ubicom, which has long delivered the best automatic QoS tools in the industry. If you want to tweak these settings on your own, D-Link provides 10 sets of controls for doing so. Perhaps a firmware update will change our opinion of the DIR-657, but we can't recommend this product in its current state. Benchmarks: D-Link DIR-657 | | 2.4GHz Band | | | D-Link DIR-657 | Netgear WNDR3700 | | Bedroom, 10 feet (Mb/s) | 48 | 101* | | Kitchen, 20 feet (Mb/s) | 69 | 85.8* | | Patio, 38 feet (Mb/s) | 11 | 67* | | Home Theater, 35 feet (Mb/s) | 1.9 | 38.2* | | Outdoors, 85 feet (Mb/s) | 0.1 | 4.2* | Asterisk (*) denotes best score. TCP throughput measure using JPerf.N/C indicates no connection at that location. Additional benchmarking methodology can be found here.
Trendnet TEW-692GR Trendnet was first‑to‑market with a dual-band USB adapter capable of supporting three 150Mb/s spatial streams on both the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands, and now it's first‑to‑market with a router that does the same. If you're just looking for a fast wireless router, the TEW-692GR is a good choice and it's priced right, too. But if you want a speedy wireless router that boasts all the latest bells and whistles, keep looking: This one doesn't have a USB port, it provides very little in the way of quality-of-service tweakage, and we don't like the way Trendnet implements guest networks.
If you're willing to give up a few features, Trendnet's TEW-692GR delivers plenty of speed.
Actually, the missing USB port doesn't bother us all that much. If you want storage attached to your network, a NAS box or a home-brew rig running Windows Home Server are vastly superior alternatives to plugging a USB drive into your router. And if you need to share a printer on your network, networked inkjets are incredibly cheap these days. Some of the other missing features are more serious: The router has the typical UPnP server, for instance, but it doesn't come with the peace of mind that DLNA certification provides. And while you can set up multiple guest networks by establishing up to three additional SSIDs on each band (assigning them separate logins and passwords, or leaving them open, if that's how you swing), but Trendnet doesn't provide any means of restricting guests to Internet access—leaving your network somewhat insecure. Aside from a stunted feature list, it's hard to argue with this router's wireless performance. At the time of our review, the TEW-692GR was street-priced just $5 more than our current favorite, Netgear's WNDR-3700, and it was considerably faster on both frequency bands—at least at close range. Netgear's product boasts many more features, however, and it delivers slightly better range. Benchmarks: Trendnet TEW-692GR | | 2.4GHz Band | 5GHz Band | | | Trendnet TEW-692GR | Netgear WNDR3700 | Trendnet TEW-692GR | Netgear WNDR3700 | | Bedroom, 10 feet (Mb/s) | 121* | 101 | 141* | 109 | | Kitchen, 20 feet (Mb/s) | 99.4* | 85.8 | 103 | 103 | | Patio, 38 feet (Mb/s) | 55.1 | 67* | 53 | 65.9* | | Home Theater, 35 feet (Mb/s) | 31.9 | 38.2* | 4.9 | 6.4* | Asterisk (*) denotes best score. TCP throughput measure using JPerf.N/C indicates no connection at that location. Additional benchmarking methodology can be found here.
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| Soul Electronics SL150 Headphone Review Posted: 08 Nov 2011 01:20 PM PST Hip, but not over the top Celebrity endorsements provide no assurance of product quality; in fact, they too often signal that a product isn't good enough to pass muster on its own merits. So we didn't have the highest of expectations for these headphones endorsed by second-tier rapper Ludacris. After listening to a number of tracks from Accidental Powercut volumes 1 and 2, however, the Soul SL150 mostly won us over. The acoustic tracks on these albums were recorded binaurally live at St. Barnabas Chapel, in the UK. Binaural recordings are typically made using microphones mounted inside a dummy head, and they're produced specifically for headphone listening. The intent is to give the listener the sensation that he or she is in the room with the musicians. These two albums were commissioned by Bowers & Wilkins' Society of Sound subscription music service, and they're available encoded in either FLAC or Apple Lossless with 16-bit resolution at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz (we used the former). Given the Ludacris connection, we assumed the SL150s would beat us about the head with thumping bass response, and if that's what you're looking for in your next set of headphones, steer clear of these. The SL150s instead delivered a respectably balanced performance across the audio spectrum. 
The Soul SL150s look nice right out of the box, but that glossy black plastic is a fingerprint magnet. Then again, not all hip-hop will rattle your fillings. Just take a listen to "Icarus," from rapper Kate Tempest and Sound of Rum (we listened to their live performance on Accidental Powercut 2). Vocals, acoustic guitar, and a spare drum kit define this band's sound on this live album, and the SL150s reproduced it with flair. While listening to "Zambezi," from Zimbabwean recording artist Tenashé (available on Accidental Powercut 3), we appreciated how the SL150s rendered the delicate overtones from the mbira (an African thumb piano). The SL150s sounded just a bit muddy, however, when we tasked them with producing more complex arrangements. On "I Dug Up a Diamond," from the Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris collaboration All the Roadrunning," the three-note bass line that anchors the song's rhythm section lacked so much definition that the notes almost melded into a blur. We had a similarly blah experience with Tower of Power's "Squib Cakes," from their Back to Oakland release. In this case, it was the bari sax that went all flabby. But we have no such complaints with several other tracks we played, including the rockin' "Fulani Choochie Man," from the incredible fusion album The Afrobilly Sessions, by Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara. The SL150s are a circumaural design, although we found their articulated cups too small to fully encircle our mid-sized ears. In spite of the smallish muffs, we found the lightweight headphones comfortable to wear over a several-hour listening session. The headband is wide and thickly padded with a quilted vinyl material inside the top (Soul Electronics prefers to describe this as "high-quality synthetic leather"). The adjustable part of the band is fabricated from sturdy stainless steel, with indexing that ensures even adjustment on both sides. The balance of material is chrome and glossy black plastic that was soon covered with smudgy fingerprints. The SL150 comes with two ribbon cables, one of which has an inline remote control for iOS devices. The SL150s fold in half, and they come with a hard-shell case that's slightly larger than the one Sony provides for their MDR-NC200D noise-cancelling phones; but they're not the most discrete traveling partners—unless you decide to use the included carabiner to clip the case to the outside of your bag. And while we care much more about sound quality than appearances, you'll want to keep a lint-free cloth close at hand, because these headphones looked a bit grody by the end of our evaluation period. $200, www.soulbyludacris.com |
| Tired Of Doing Barrel Rolls? 22 Google Easter Eggs You HAVEN'T Heard About Posted: 08 Nov 2011 12:20 PM PST  "Do a barrel roll!" a virtual dogfighting rabbit screamed into a virtual dogfighting fox's ear in Starfox 64 and BAM! 14 years later, a Google Easter egg was born. Dorky? Sure. Awesome? Yep. And that's not even getting into the ironic fact that Peppy Hare – an old male rabbit with a grown daughter – has somehow changed genders and is now laying Easter eggs of his own. Peppy may be surprised from the sudden turn of events, but we're not: Google has a long, storied history of dropping arcane, geektastic tidbits in the dark corners of its products. And we're here to show them to you!
Ranging from Google search fun to dragon slaying and talking Martians, all of these Easter eggs are still around and fully functional, unlike some other hidden Google gems that have disappeared into the gaping Internet abyss (we're looking at you, Google Maps). Fire up your favorite browser and go check them out for yourself! |
| So, Now HP is Reportedly Shopping Its webOS Business, Any Takers? Posted: 08 Nov 2011 12:13 PM PST  Remember that whole bit about Hewlett-Packard promising to support webOS and continuing to develop software around the platform? HP said it just wasn't interested in the hardware angle, hence the TouchPad's premature retirement from the tablet market, but had no intentions of abandoning the software. Well, about that. It now appears HP wants to wipe its hands of webOS completely if it can find a willing buyer.
Reuters claims to have heard from "four sources close to the matter" that HP is looking to sell its webOS division as a way to gain back some of the money it spent in the Palm deal, which at this point is looking like a bust. A sale isn't likely to net HP the $1.2 billion it originally paid for Palm, but it could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Finding a willing buyer for webOS won't be the difficult part, it's the haggling over price that could prove challenging. A number of tech firms are reportedly interested in webOS, including Amazon, Research In Motion, IBM, Oracle, and Intel, Reuters heard from its sources. Out of all those, Amazon might be the most intriguing as it looks to make a serious run at the tablet market. |
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