Otaku Gadgets

There is something special about this time of the year. Everyone’s going/gone back to school, there has been a deluge of laptops and gadget freaks like me are having a field day. However, since this is the end of Q3, the companies have to keep some excitement going as they enter Q4 and the end of the year with it. Hence, we have been seeing a number of new devices and updates of older devices flooding the web sites and setting the Internet all abuzz.

It had been a while since Creative showed up on the latest-tech-radar and hence they have come out with an upgraded Zen X-Fi. Called the Zen X-Fi 2, this new addition to the Creative’s Zen series of PMPs gets an overhaul and loses all the buttons in favor of a nice touch screen. In a slightly quirky move, Creative has done their own unboxing video and has also released a video demo. Watch them both on the other side.

Logitech in the mean time has come out with the SqueezeBox radio and the SqueezeBox touch. Both are dependant on a local wireless network to stream online radio stations and local DRM-free iTunes Plus files. Both have a color screen but only one has a touchscreen. No prizes for guessing which one. Find out more about them plus a video presentation from Logitech on the other side.

Having already talked about the Android-based Archos 5 in the last post, it is quite interesting to be talking about the Creative Zen X-Fi 2. The original Creative Zen X-Fi has been around for over a year now and it has been known for several flaws. The main complaint was about the poor build quality. With a full review still pending on the upgraded Creative Zen X-Fi 2, it is not safe to speculate just yet.

However, there are a few things that we can already see from the specifications and the videos. The touch screen is a TFT LCD screen displaying 262,000 colors. While this was okay about year or two back, having such a low quality screen in the middle of 2009 is totally unacceptable. I for one would not want to watch anything on it, not even the album art. This essentially makes having a nice 3-inch screen almost pointless.

The videos show a noticeable lag in the touchscreen UI, which does not bode well. In addition to this, the touch screen also seems to be quite inaccurate. How many times have people tried to rush into integrating touchscreens with existing products and how many times have they failed? Too many times if you ask me. Companies should really take note of the fact that people expect the accuracies the likes of iPhone, Palm Pre, HTC Touch Pro 2 have set. In the face of that, such obvious problems will not go unnoticed and it will probably hurt sales.

Another problem is that it does not have integrated memory. Now this one’s a bit of a mystery to me. While other cheaper PMPs that cost a fraction of the Creative X-Fi 2 have integrated memories and expansion slots, the X-Fi 2 has only the micro-SD expansion slot. This is not done Creative, not done at all. Learn something from the Sansa Clip Plus will you? (Review coming soon).

The UI on the X-Fi 2 is customizable. It can display RSS content after syncing via a PC. It can also import contacts using Microsoft Outlook. No support for us Mac people though. There is an FM radio with 32 presets. Video can be displayed in PAL or NTSC and output will be stereo. It supports voice recording as well via the built in microphone. Video formats supported are – WMV9, MPEG4-SP, DivX** 4/5 and XviD. Audio formats supported are – MP3, WMA (DRM9), Audible4, AAC and FLAC. One good thing here is the fact that it actually supports FLAC, a lossless format that is also open source. FLAC has been gaining a lot of popularity lately, as it is one of the best lossless formats around and more importantly it does not have any restrictions placed on it by its creators. Audible support is also good thing. There is also support for JPEG and BMP images.

Logitech has brought out what I would call their ‘Squeeze’ series. As scandalous as that sounds, the fact is that these are two harmless and non-squeezable media players that play streaming online radio and any iTunes Plus DRM-free downloaded that you might happen to have lying on the machines that are on the network.

The SqueezeBox Radio not a radio at all. Yes it does look like a digital radio of sorts but it plays free online streaming radio stations. It does this without needing any wiring up or anything. It works via WiFi and will automatically setup base and sniff out a shared Internet connection and will pull the content via that connection. It has a speaker attached to it, so it acts as a self-contained unit. It has a color screen that can display relevant information in color and the album art, of course. It can even act as a completely standalone system, meaning you will not need to plug it into a power source. This can be achieved with the optional battery pack that comes with the system.

However, there are many people who would simply not be satisfied the sound quality of such an integrated system. Besides, most of us already have a nice speaker system all setup to receive the input of our choice. If you don’t have one, set one up now. As long as you have a 3.5mm port waiting receive an input, you are good to go with anything that comes along.

Anyway, Logitech provides (sensible) people like us with the SqueezeBox Touch. This is a touchscreen-enabled device that does exactly what the SqueezeBox Radio does minus the attached speaker. Instead it channels the audio to a speaker system of your choice, like your booming home theatre system or your teeny desktop speakers. It supports sampling rates of up to 96KHz, meaning better quality. There are also apps for integration with Facebook and such. There is a remote as well.

These SqueezeThings may not be PMPs per se but they are pretty darn close. If you have a large house with different systems or keep traveling to places where there is WiFi, carry a SqueezeBox touch around. You get free online radio wherever there is Internet over WiFi.

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