Author: Blancer

Like pretty much anything that comes out nowadays with “3-D” in the title, Hasbro’s My3D — which lets you play 3-D games on your iPhone or iPod Touch — isn’t really great yet… but it has potential.

At the moment the device, available exclusively through Target until June, is basically a glorified View-Master. Snap your handheld into the appropriate tray, connect the tray to the viewfinder, close the device, and peer through the goggles to see your phone in three dimensions.

Thumb holes in the bottom of the contraption allow you to select menu options, navigate within games and — depending on what the game demands — shoot stuff.

There are six Hasbro games available for download (all free, for now) in the App Store and one 3-D hub, which lets you watch trailers for movies like Kung-Fu Panda 2 and scroll through 3-D pictures of fish and animals.

For the most part, unfortunately, the games and 3-D offerings are pretty dull. And, while there is some initial excitement at being immersed in your iPhone, it wears off pretty fast.

Sector 17, for example, is a space-based shooter, where you play the role of a gunner and take down approaching enemy space ships. They come at you from all sides — all the game environments are 360 degrees — and you tap a button on the iPhone screen to fire lasers at them.

It’s fun, but a bit repetitive and not very nuanced, though younger kids would likely be entertained by any of the games offered.

All of this could easily be remedied by an SDK. Game developers — any developers, actually — would have a field day coming up with ways to use the 3-D in new ways. As far as that’s concerned, however, Hasbro simply says “stay tuned.”

The company also says it plans to release new 3-D games throughout the year. Hopefully, they’re a bit more developed.

All that considered, the low price point is enough to make it a reasonable impulse buy, especially for people who love 3-D. It’s an easy bet that once the games start getting good, the My3D will be an essential purchase for anyone who loves playing on their phone. If you can get past the occasional bout of motion sickness and looking like a big dork when you use it in public.

WIRED Reasonably priced. Games are good for kids. Watching trailers for 3-D movies in actual 3-D is fun. People with glasses won’t have trouble seeing through the view finder.

TIRED Navigating through the thumb holes is a bit awkward. The games available leave much to be desired for serious gamers or adults. Price points for future apps is still an unknown. No case.

Photos by Jon Snyder/Wired

See Also

• Nintendo 3DS Review: It’s Totally in Your Face
• Why PlayStation Move Could Give ‘3-D Games’ a Whole New Meaning
• Buyer Beware: Rating Nintendo 3DS Launch Games
• Gaming Platforms Take the 3-D Plunge

LaCie’s FastKey is a mutt. It’s not sure whether it wants to be a svelte, mid-capacity SSD or a girthy, high-capacity USB stick.

At least there’s no doubt about the FastKey’s appointments, which are dazzling: blazing USB 3.0 speed, a durable but surprisingly lightweight ruggedized aluminum case, AES 256-bit encryption and up to 120 GB of storage. All squeezed into something that weighs about an ounce and can be clenched in your fist.

Of course, the major gotcha is the heart-palpitating price — $150 for 30 GB, $250 for 60 GB, and $475 for 120 GB.

While it is specifically designed for computers with the newish USB 3.0 standard, it’s also backward-compatible with USB 2.0. To get the best performance, you need to use a computer that has native USB 3.0 on board. For most of us, USB 3.0 is accessible with add-on PCI expansions cards or, for notebooks, ExpressCard adapters. Read and write times with the add-ons are impressive, but still not as fast as native 3.0.

In our unscientific tests, the 60-GB FastKey excelled with a 201 MB per second read time, but averaged just 88 MB per second when writing data. That’s about the same or below many USB 3.0 external hard drives’ writing capabilities. When we tried the FastKey in a USB 2.0 drive, it read at an impressive 35 MBps but wrote data at an unexceptional 28 MBps, the comparable speed of standard external hard drives.

LaCie, a French company, is already a highly regarded manufacturer of USB 3.0 storage devices, like its desktop RAID. It’s also known for making some rugged wrappings. The company almost always bundles software with its storage products, and the FastKey follows suit.

It doesn’t come preformatted. Instead, on first use it starts with a temporary partition with a setup assistant loaded. Here, you chose to format it with either NTFS for Windows or HFS+ for Mac. Pick wisely, because once the quick-partitioning process starts, this temporary partition is eliminated, taking the management software with it.

On Windows XP or later, you get a single 120-GB partition named “La_Public.” Want to also exchange data with a Mac or Linux computer? Then you get two partitions: an 88-GB La_Public partition for Windows only, and a 32-GB partition accessible by Windows, Mac and Linux called “Exchange.” Loaded on the Public section are LaCie utilities, a 256-bit encryption app that can set up yet another password-protected partition, and a Turbo USB app that supposedly lets you read and write data over USB 3.0 more quickly. What is it, some magical Red Bull for your USB port?

And as an extra, LaCie throws in a two-year 4-GB subscription to the online storage service Wuala.

So, you get a lot of SSD capacity and security in a small portable package. Whether it is worth the steep price to you depends primarily on whether you already have USB 3.0, and, to a lesser extent, how much the convenience of the exceedingly small form factor appeals to you.

WIRED Exceptionally fast data throughput when used over native USB 3.0. Only one ounce. Small size belies its capabilities. Flexibile partitioning options. Nice encryption features.

TIRED Its 4-inch length and 1-inch width may prevent it from fitting in some USB slots. Detachable USB cover cap can be easily misplaced or lost.

Photo courtesy of LaCie

For a company that manufactures such boring and pedestrian objects as vacuum cleaners, fans and hand dryers, Dyson sure deserves points for concentrating so heavily on style.

It’s not that it takes an army of brilliant engineers to design a device that pushes air in one direction or another. A well-designed vacuum cleaner needs to be lightweight, display good ergonomics and be easy to control, and still, you know… suck.

All of this designy goodness drives the price up, and Dyson products command a premium. But whether paying that premium make sense this time, for what is essentially an optional cleaning device even for the small apartment dweller, isn’t as clear cut.

The DC35 Digital Slim is Dyson’s high-end entry in the decidedly downscale vacuum stick category, where you can get something that works for less than ten percent of what this model will cost you. Having said that, it’s a faithfully scaled-down version of the bagless design found in their full-sized uprights. There’s the familiar tornado-like chamber, snap off modular parts and all-around attention to detail.

It does what it’s suppose to do at least as well as any other stick I’ve used, and in my household we’ve been through a few in that Quixotic search for the elusive perfect pick. Dyson boasts that the DC35 is the most powerful cordless on the market, and in some random dust busting it performed admirably. This is not a powerhouse machine, of course, but the point of a stick is that it’s easy to grab and, especially for a cordless, always at the ready for jobs that are just too small or inaccessible for an upright or a canister.

In addition to power, it’s the little things that matter in this hard-to-differentiate sector. Like the very Dyson trap door which, when you’re emptying the bin, doesn’t create a new mess from the old one you’ve just cleaned up.

Same goes for how you turn it on. At first I didn’t care for the dead mans’ switch. But after a while I decided that the trade off of having to apply pressure to a trigger was better than having to throw a switch twice.

Also impressively anti-intuitive was the decision to put the weight at the handle, rather than in the mid-section, which is typical on other devices. The center of gravity is such that the wand feels much easier to wield in any position, and possible to deploy where even other cordless sticks are not — outstreched, and even above your head. Weight is weight, however, and some users may find wielding this for very long is a little hard on the wrist, even when only vacuuming the floor.

I didn’t bother to check battery life: You aren’t likely to use this for any length of time between the automatic charges from its wall-mounted holder. For the same reason, don’t bother to ask yourself if you should use the “Max” setting all the time. I’ll repeat the advice given to me by the guy who sold me my first turbocharged car: you always want that on.

So, yes, it’s an awesome vacuum cleaner. The trouble with Dyson’s stuff is that it always comes down to the value proposition. At $300, the Digital Slim is up against a slew of competitors who charge a fraction of that price for vacuums which, when push comes to shove, will do just fine for most people. Sure, at the full-sized vacuum end of the spectrum you will still pay more for a Dyson, but the price disparity isn’t nearly as shocking when alternatives are clustered in the double digits and you are charging hundreds or dollars.

When I reviewed the Dyson Pedestal “air multiplier” fan, I noted its hefty $450 price could be worth it to an owner who might leverage it as an object d’art in an eclectically-decorated modern living room. It’s hard to imagine the DC35 making many public appearances. Is spending $300 for something — instead of maybe $60 — that worth it? I guess if you have to ask…

WIRED By far the coolest way to vanquish dust bunnies. Works on multiple floor surfaces — wood, tile, carpet. Short configuration for close-up jobs. Tell your kid the long wand attachment is a light saber and he’ll keep his room clean.

TIRED The “wow” factor versus cost us wearing thin. Seriously: This couldn’t be priced at less than a 32GB iPhone?

Photos courtesy of Dyson

Photo: Thomas Hannich

Until recently, even the best-sounding speakers resembled R2-D2 hiding in a wastebasket. But a design renaissance has swept audioland, with everyone from Dr. Dre to Bowers & Wilkins pushing the aesthetics of sound components. The most striking example we’ve found: Avantgarde Acoustic’s Trio Classico—a 5-foot-tall assemblage of injection-molded horns and German-engineered audiophile geekery. Each made-to-order unit blends the benefits of old-school horn design—efficiency, range, nuance—with hi-fi opulence like 27-ohm voice coils, 12-pound magnets, and Kevlar midrange cones coated in trillions of microscopic fibers to absorb high-frequency distortion. It’s like a live concert in a Henry Moore sculpture. Of course, people who can afford these can hire their own orchestra.

Photo: Jens Mortensen

There’s no replacement for a good doctor, but these home health monitors can help keep you informed and focused between checkups.

If I told you I test-drove a Lamborghini Aventador, what features would you most want to hear about? The feel of the perforated leather steering wheel? The purr of the 700-horsepower, 6.5-liter V-12 engine? Or would you rather hear a poetic description of the gas in the tank and the highway I raced it on?

Indeed, the HTC ThunderBolt is an excellent piece of hardware. It’s not quite the Lamborghini of the mobile phone world, but it certainly tops every other 4G device currently available from HTC, and it’s the first phone to run on Verizon’s 4G LTE network (That’s the “highway,” and don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a minute).

Unlike HTC’s EVO or Inspire, the ThunderBolt’s 8-megapixel camera sits flush against the back of the device. It’s a perfect gesture of form and function, which vastly improves the feel of the phone, and also prevents the lens from scratching. There’s also a front-facing camera for video chat. The optics are satisfying: The dual-LED flash was surprisingly effective, even in pitch dark. The 720p video quality and color saturation were solid.

The ThunderBolt’s brushed metal kickstand is as well-constructed as it is practical: I used our ThunderBolt like a Chumby — to stream e-mail or RSS while working at a desktop. And the phone’s vivid, oversized 4.3″ WVGA TFT touchscreen was also fantastic for video playback.

Under the hood, too, the ThunderBolt is no slouch. The 1-GHz Snapdragon processor is zippy, to say the least. It comes loaded with Android 2.2 and with version 2.0 of HTC’s own Sense user interface on top.

OK, so what about that highway? The ThunderBolt is the first phone to run on Verizon’s 4G LTE, a network which — up until now — was reserved for laptop data cards or dongles. The short of it: LTE is really, really fast. While web-browsing, I experienced minimal clipping. Pages loaded, at times, in a matter of half-seconds. On average, downloading apps took about 10 seconds, literally.

We ran a few side-by-side speed tests in various locations throughout San Francisco. LTE mightily outperformed the other networks. In one instance, we tethered an iPhone 3GS on AT&T to the ThunderBolt. According to SpeedTest.net’s latest app, the Wi-Fi clocked in at 5.77 Mbps (down) and 3.15 Mbps (up), whereas prior to tethering, the iPhone only logged 0.14 and 0.03 Mbps, respectively. In another instance, we fired up an HTC EVO 4G on Sprint. The absolute best (4.862 down, 1.025 up) was no match for the ThunderBolt (7.529 down; 6.261 up).

Of course, it’s worth wondering whether LTE can continue serving up the same speeds as more users flock to the network. Because, hey, a newly paved backcountry road can’t stay traffic-free and smooth forever, right? But if you’re considering this phone, you should take solace that Verizon is expanding its 4G network to 147 cities this year.

So, what’s not to like about the ThunderBolt? Test-driving the device felt a lot like racing a sports car with a 3-gallon engine. The high speeds are alluring, but really punching it means you won’t get nearly as far.

When tethering the phone and streaming music via Rdio, the 1400-mAh battery served up a measly 2 hours, 45 minutes. That said, dialing the data usage back down to basic web surfing and e-mail, along with reducing the screen brightness, granted us closer to 6 hours. Sure it’s no fun driving a car 35 mph when you know you can get up to 125. Then again, it beats walking.

WIRED An ample 8 GB of on-board memory (woot), plus a whopping 32 GB microSD included (WOOT!). At 0.56 inches, profile is trimmer than a supermodel. Front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera makes you look good when chatting. Standard-sized 3.5-mm headphone jack. 2750-mAh battery upgrade available. Prestocked with apps like Adobe Reader and Kindle.

TIRED Battery tended to heat up faster than a car with a faulty radiator cap. A tad on the heavy side at 6.23 ounces. Loudspeaker is rather tinny — and hidden behind the kickstand. Flash content cannot be viewed while Wi-Fi hotspot is in use. No HDMI port.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com