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HEAR, HEAR, HERE! & DVD-RW & DVD+RW
by George Margolin, NOCCC - December 23, 2001 at 19:21:39:
First the smallest product I found and now can't live without - the Sybersay Earlite 540 cellular phone earset/headset.A pre-COMDEX press release popped up on my computer telling me that there was going to be a "NEW and BETTER" headset for cell phones demonstrated. "Contact us with the brand and type of cell phone, and we'll have one here for you to try." It said.
Why not! I've bought, tried and discarded, at least a dozen headsets or ear sets, because driving with a cell phone up to your ear is not only dangerous, but makes you look like a dolt. No dolt I. (At least I didn't want to look like one.) So I bought and tried every new headset I could find so that wife Cathy and I could talk and drive safely and not look like we had an obscene 8 ounce growth hanging off our ear. Not to mention avoiding having fellow drivers yell, "Pay attention to your driving, dude!"
But, until now, they all failed the "Can I really live with this" test of usability. No matter which one I tried or how much I paid (up to about $40) they all had the same two faults;
First - the ear piece/speaker was too large to fit into a normal human male ear canal (mine). I am certain that they were designed for elephants or other large eared species, who wouldn't or couldn't use a cell phone, even if you paid them in tons of peanuts. But they but not designed for humans.
Second - the microphone ALWAYS was in the wrong place to pick up my voice. without horrendously amplified traffic noises making what I was saying unintelligible. Not that people haven't, for years, been complaining to me, about this - even when I didn't speak through a tiny, tinny, wrongly placed microphone, making it worse.. And even those head/ear sets with a pick up tube extending nearer my mouth - worked poorly at best. Or beastly at worst.
Comes the dawn of a newer, better, hands off, earpiece set - the Sybersay.
Visited their impossible-to-find their display room - hidden next to the johns/jills/toilets on the second floor of a large lump in the middle of the main convention center. Luckily my bladder's needs helped me find the room almost (well almost, almost) on my way to trying to decipher where it was.
Once there - was impressed by the product, the people and the extensive demonstration of their line of wares. Some of these I'm embargoed from talking about until after they are shown at the CES show in January (about the time you're reading this, but not quite).
We now cut to the chase - what it is and what it does.
The Sybersay Earlite is a very small, very light weight earset. It fits over the ear, either right of left, depending upon your "ear-edness" and plugs into your cellular or cordless phone. This lets you listen and speak without holding the phone to your ear.
Aside from being so light weight I often have to reach over and feel to see if it's still on my ear - IT WORKS!!!
It seem to cancel most of the traffic noises making car conversation MUCH cleared to the person with whom you're speaking. And - the clever little (little, not big and impossible to fit in your ear canal) speaker, practically disappears in the ear AND couples so well with you eardrum - that it is LOUDER by far than any headset I've ever tried.
LOUDER you say? How much LOUDER? Well on my Nokia phone - which required me to crank up its volume to the top - whenever I used one of the 10 headsets I've owned - now runs two notches from the bottom of its volume control. That means it focuses whatever sound its tiny speaker produces MUCH more efficiently than any of the other units I've tried.
BUT WHERE"S THE MIKE? Take a look at the pictures I've taken to illustrate this little report and you see a very small device with sits on the top of your ear - with nary a visible microphone to be seen. But if you look at the close-up picture - you see a very small hole at the front of the earpiece housing. THAT folks - is the entrance to the mini-mike that efficiently captures your voice and sends it CLEARLY to the phone to which it's attached. THAT LITTLE HOLE - WAY BACK THERE, WORKS? Yup! Works very well. And with the noise reducing circuitry - makes for a marvelously convenient and effective ear set. To borrow and revise a phrase, I wouldn't leave home without it.
WHERE YOU CAN GET IT The company that makes it - SyberSay Communications, has a background in the Hearing Aid World - and it shows in the precision and effectiveness and clarity of their products. Their web site is: . And it can be purchased at our local Fry's and CompUSA stores. Their list price on the Earlite 540 model is $39.95 and it is a miniscule price for the effectiveness of this little marvel.
They provide a number of models and connectors for various cell phones. Cathy and I both use Nokia phones of the same general type. So those are the connectors SyberSay provided. But they also have connectors that work with Motorola and Ericson, and Many more companies.
The DVD RECORDERS - are Finally HERE! Hooray!!!!!!
The low cost DVD Burners are just now hitting the market from HP, Ricoh, Pioneer and Panasonic - at about $599! I've been following them and drooling for one of these for about three years. But until very recently, only Pioneer and a few other companies, were selling Professional burners at prices up to $10,000. Very, very far beyond the normal (if there is such a person) computer user.
This year - NOW - there are TWO FLAVORS of burners hitting the market. They are DVD+RW and DVD-RW. Sort of Plus and Minus or Plus and Dash.
These are two camps, one honcho'd by Philips of the Netherlands, and the other by Pioneer and Panasonic in Japan.
In the near future I'll have tested and compared the two systems and will write up my findings for all my readers. But until then I can say that Both systems will be godsends for capturing, storing, playing, backing up, transferring and sending HUGE amounts of digital information - of ALL KINDS, from one end of the earth (for starters) to the other.
Though they will be using different media, their price points for hardware and media are quite close - and the ability to use their output on "normal" DVD and CDR players seems to be assured.
This is very much like the VHS vs Beta battle in the Video Recorder world a decade or so ago. VHS won, even though its quality was somewhat worse than Beta. But market pressures wrote the end of the story for Beta.
In this NEW clash of Titans, we have Philips, Sony, HP, Ricoh, Thompson/RCA, Yamaha, Del and others in the DVD+RW camp.
And in the DVD-RW group, you have Pioneer, Panasonic/Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Daewoo, Fuji, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Kenwood, Kodak Japan, Konica, Sharp, Sanyo, Samsung and more betting on THEIR champion technology.
THIS is shaping up to be a Battle of the GIANTS where we consumers will gain by the bloody competition and at the same time, lose, because it will take a while to know WHICH of these behemoths will become THE DVD Burner STANDARD.
Keep tuned, folks - there's a whole bunch of bridge building and bridge BURNING happening here. But whichever group is finally declared the winner - cheap massive digital/optical storage will be assured. And trust me - this BIG storage is just the beginning of truly HUMONGOUS storage we'll be seeing in the next five or ten years.
May we live in interesting times. And we are!!!
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