Category: Tech news

Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories:

Video: AlphaDog Is A Bigger, Faster, Quieter BigDog
Microsoft “Accidentally” Tags Chrome As Malware
Samsung Announces The Dual-Core Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus
Canonical Releases Windows Version of Ubuntu One
Report: HP Still Looking To Offload Palm, Amazon Named As Top Contender

The9, the sizable NASDAQ-listed Chinese game publisher and developer, has made quite a few investments in the U.S. gaming market over the last year. (Reflecting, it seems, a rising Asian interest in U.S. companies, especially gaming.) As part of its international strategy, The9 has been full-steam ahead on creating better ways for international gaming companies and developers to make inroads into the Chinese mobile and social gaming markets, which have been traditionally difficult areas for non-Chinese developers to access effectively (and profitably).

In May, The9 teamed up with Intel and Time Warner to make a $23 million investment in CrowdStar, for example. Earlier this year, it also created a $100 million fund (called Fund9) to focus on investments in Chinese gaming companies, as well as those overseas.

At the same time, The9 also announced a 5-year licensing agreement with Aurora Feint to allow it to use the company’s OpenFeint mobile social gaming network software (which operates on both iOS and Android) in China.

Shortly thereafter, the company began using the $100 million fund, in partnership with OpenFeint, to bring select games from international Android developers into the Chinese market.

Today, The9 is adding the remaining piece, again utilizing its OpenFeint licensing agreement and sizable gaming fund — but this time with iOS. The company today announced that it is releasing the an iOS software development kit (SDK) for its mobile and social gaming platform, called The9 Game Zone ( which is, of course, powered by OpenFeint). This is of interest for the very reason that Game Zone on iOS enables international developers to “implement social features in online and mobile games” that are tailor-made for “China’s 800 million-strong gaming market”, said The9 VP of Mobile Business Chris Shen.

When it comes to entering the mobile gaming market in China, U.S. and international developers are met with a number of obstacles, including localization requirements and fragmentation. Compared to that of the U.S. and the Western World, said Shen, the app market in China is complicated, as there are more than 100 app stores in operation, and each of the big Chinese OEMs along with tons of third parties are trying to enter the market. So there’s the issue of accessing these many app stores to guarantee large-scale distribution, localization of foreign apps for the Chinese market, monetization for that specific market, and so on.

The advantage then, of The9′s platform and SDK is that the company already partners with more than 30 of the largest Chinese app stores (which according to the team make up about 90 percent of the country’s apps), including the app stores launched by the three major Chinese telecom carriers.

So, by using the9 Game Zone on iOS, mobile game developers can revamp their standalone mobile games into interactive, social games optimized for the Chinese market. And soon, developers will also be able to cross-promote their games on those 30 app stores, monetize with virtual goods and currency, take advantage of display advertising, etc.

The9 is really attempting to provide international developers looking to access a Chinese audience with a one-stop solution. Because the majority of China’s app stores have different requirements for game packaging, The9 helps developers to localize and package their games, publishing them to these various channels, giving them access to a much larger section of the market than they’d be able to access otherwise.

The9 has also developed a consulting service for game developers, which is free to use, that will provide them with the various social and interactive integrations, as well as assisting them in translating China’s in-app microtransactional models into their games. Chinese gamers predominantly avoid paying for games, Shen said, which makes it essential for game developers to monetize through in-game ad solutions, virtual currency, etc., which their consulting service will help developers undertake more effectively.

The9 (and the distribution channels, i.e. app stores) then apply a revenue sharing model, taking a cut of the game’s revenues, which will be around 50 percent. Not exactly favorable, but with access to the enormous mobile/social audience in China, likely worth the price of entry.

Thanks to The9′s partnership with OpenFeint, developers using Game Zone on iOS will be able to access the company’s gaming features like leaderboards, achievements, challenges, forums, and chat — and integrate them into their Chinese versions. The9 also allows integration with Chinese social networking sites, like Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter), Tencent, and Renren.

There are currently over 120 game developers and publishers collaborating with The9, publishing more than 500 games in China. Game Zone is available both on iOS and Android, both of which offer features from OpenFeint.

Considering the platform enables developers around the world to cut through the fragmented Chinese mobile gaming market, accessing the second largest app market in the world, and is a one-stop shop for American developers looking to get free packaging and localization services for the Chinese market, this is a pretty sweet solution.

Check out Game Zone and its SDK here, and let us know what you think.

URDB — formerly Universal Records Database  – is announcing a name change and $1 million in Series A funding, from investors Chris Sacca, VantagePoint Capital and 77 Ventures. Initially conceived of at yes, Burning Man, URDB is now RecordSetter and a million dollars more flush.

The premise behind RecordSetter is that “everyone on earth can be the world’s best at something.” The startup wants to to become the preeminent platform for people to both submit their own unique records and compete against other people’s unique records through the uploading of quirky videos like “Most Kisses In 10 Seconds,””Longest ‘Shhhhh’” and “Most Graphic Designers Dancing To ‘Thriller’”. You get the picture.

Says founder Dan Rollman on what sets the company apart from Guinness World Records,

“As long as rules are followed and sufficient evidence is provided, any record is welcome. That includes everything from traditional (Fastest 100-Meter Dash) to outlandish (Most Times Smiling While Listening to “Beat It”.) Creativity is highly encouraged. We’re the Wikipedia to their Encyclopedia Britannica. “

In three years of existence the site has seen over 10,000 submissions from over 50 countries, Rollman tells me, and now hosts the largest collection of world record videos on the Internet. Eventually Rollman hopes that the site will compete with YouTube and Break.com.

Future plans for RecordSetter also include the adding of editorial content (like the addition of tips on how to set records), pursuing media deals and partnerships with brands like Toyota and Livestrong and focusing on its community moderation beta so niche groups like skaters and jugglers can be more involved in the records curating process.

Rollman says that company is also in talks with production companies regarding a TV show based around the niche records found on the RecordSetter platform. Which doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, actually.

Today at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford, Alibaba Groups’s Jack Ma replied to a pointed question about buying Yahoo with, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”

Those “serious buyers” most likely include Alibaba Group investor Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft, Hellman & Friedman and Andreesen Horowitz, who have all reportedly reached out to Yahoo’s board.

Is Ma’s interest enough to spark consumer and shareholder interest in Yahoo? “Any and all interest [is] welcome,” one shareholder told me, “but Ma has real smarts.”

On the surface Ma is certainly the type of CEO that Yahoo needs post-Bartz, diplomatic, cunning, and a man of (relatively) few words. But would the deal make sense financially?

Alibaba Group’s recent funding from Silver Lake valued it at $32 billion, while Yahoo is at a 16 billion market cap. With Yahoo’s 40% stake in Alibaba Group valued at $12.8 billion, it seems like 80% of the company’s value is based on its Asian assets. Ma has apparently made it clear that he would like to buy back Yahoo’s stake in his own company, and now he can for a bargain basement $3 billion premium –with hundreds of millions of US users thrown in for good measure.

Is the rest of Yahoo worth $3 billion? Probably. Plus Ma has an additional incentive to buy Yahoo because getting all those shares back frees him from his largest albatross shareholder. It’s a no brainer for Alibaba.

Would the Yahoo board take an offer from Ma? That remains to be seen, as the relationship between the two companies has been notoriously strained, most recently suffering because of accusations of unfair play on the part of Yahoo when Ma transferred ownership of Alipay to a separate company.

The sentiment among the former Yahoo employees I spoke to seems to be that Yahoo is so dysfunctional that they can’t see anything like this happening. And then there’s stigma; the general idea is to sell to someone you’re proud of like Google and Microsoft, not someone you used to own. The cultural fit between the Chinese and American companies is also quite awkward, as Sarah Lacy has documented comprehensively.

Despite this, many shareholders are just hoping for a decent price to exit their long-held positions, and Ma might be the company’s only hope for survival intact, as he is interested in Yahoo in its entirety. This is surprising: Yahoo is the type of company that Richard Gere in Pretty Woman would buy, and then break up — the individual pieces are more valuable than the sum of the parts.

Related: Looking up that YHOO ticker on Yahoo Finance is just depressing.

Image: Mick Orlosky

Back in March, we heard about a breakthrough from MIT: an “artificial leaf” that produces pure oxygen and hydrogen gas, powered entirely by sunlight. The technology was described in yesterday’s edition of Science, and the team has released a video showing one of the devices in action.

I say device, but it’s really more of a material. There are no moving parts and it has no set shape or size. The leaf is semiconducting silicon, coated on one side with a special cobalt catalyst, discovered by the project’s Daniel Nocera in 2008, and on the other with a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy. Sunlight creates a current within the silicon, and the catalyst causes water molecules to split into gaseous H₂ and O₂, which rise off in bubbles from opposite sides of the leaf.

Take a look at the video. It’s not particular exciting, but it gives you an idea of what kind of conversion rate we’re talking about:

The gases could be isolated and stored in a fuel cell, which could provide power later and produce pure water as its exhaust.

Nocera and several other researchers formed a company, Sun Catalytix, to independently research, apply, and market the artificial leaves, and last year raised $9.5 million from Tata and other investors.

The leaf-like form factor is easy to demonstrate on a human scale, but there’s no reason why the “leaves” couldn’t be microscopic or enormous. The different use cases require much research and testing, however, which is likely what Sun Catalytix is working on at present. That and figuring out to do with the extra protons the process generates. They envision banks of these things powering houses and communities and storing the excess in tanks for sale or emergencies.

There’s more information at MIT’s news page, and, if you’re scientifically minded (and subscribe to the journals), the various papers listed on Sun Catalytix’s tech page.

[image credit: Dominick Reuter]

Looking to fill in the blanks on your family tree? A startup called Mocavo might be just what you’re looking for. The service is setting out to become a search engine that’s highly optimized for ancestry-related purposes — type in the name of a relative, and it’ll do its best to surface content from the web’s troves of genealogy data, some of which has been difficult to search through before now.

The startup, which was part of the TechStars Boulder program this past summer, has just raised a $1 million round from David Cohen (through Bullet Time Ventures), Dave McClure (500 Startups), David Bonderman, Walt Winshall, David Calone, Dave Carlson, Troy Henikoff, and other angels.

Founder Cliff Shaw says that Mocavo is setting out to make genealogy “open, social, and automated”. He explains that while there are existing services that use proprietary data sources,  few take advantage of the abundance of information that’s freely available on the web — information that Google often passes over, because genealogical information is neither fresh nor popular (he says Google only indexes less than 5% of this content).

Mocavo has created a whitelist of these genealogy sites, and it’s constantly scanning them for new data (you can sign up to receive an update for certain names, if you’d like). So far the site has around 5.8 billion names in its index.

The service launched in March, and is currently seeing more than 1 million page views per month, and 100,000 unique visitors. It also has very high engagement stats, with 17 minutes spent on the site, on average. While the site is currently focused exclusively on search, down the line it will integrate social features, like a family tree builder.

Shaw has a long history with ancestry-related companies — he founded his first genealogy site, Genforum, when he was 18. He sold it when he was 19, when it had some 60 million monthly pageviews. His other companies include Pearl Street Software and BackupMyTree, both of which were acquired as well.

Oh, and one caveat: my initial instinct was to try a vanity search on Mocavo, which didn’t have great results. Shaw says that because this is a genealogy search engine, you’ll have much better luck searching for people who are deceased.

Photo: Jens Mortensen

Jetpacks they are not. But when else do you get to wear an engine on your back? And if you’re facing down a big leafy suburban plot, a blower can salvage your weekend.

The Basics

Are they allowed where you live?
Leaf blowers are polarizing. As with pit bulls and Jersey Shore cast members, standing outside with one can run you afoul of both neighbors and the law. Due to concerns about noise and emissions, these machines are banned by hundreds of cities and towns nationwide, along with several neighborhood associations. So check with the relevant authorities before buying.

What about the noise and emissions?
The EPA has been raising standards since 1995, when as much as 25 percent of leaf-blower exhaust was raw, unburned gasoline. Starting with the 2012 model year, new blowers will run 80 percent cleaner than their 1995 counterparts. New designs, better mufflers, and electric options have also squelched some of the neighbor-alienating roar. Still, wait until after 10am. Please.

Why does the engine matter so much?
Gas-powered models come in either two-stroke or four-stroke designs. Two-stroke motors, common in older blowers, use a single crankshaft revolution per piston cycle (one upstroke and one down). This puts intake and exhaust in the same cycle — part of the reason that two-strokes are such polluters. Four-strokes, which have one cycle for intake and one for exhaust, tend to be heavier but also cleaner.

Buying advice

Sure, an ergonomic rake is fine for a single-tree urban plot (try the Flexrake CF224W for $15), but if you’ve got a bunch of children waiting for you to clear a field so they can start soccer practice, you need more horsepower. The easiest way to think about this is to look at the type of lawn mower you own. If you have enough acreage to justify a riding mower, you’ll need a blower with serious airflow, more than 90 mph. If all you need to maintain your suburban oasis is a push mower and a kid with a broom, a less powerful electric model will do, though those generally struggle with wet, heavy debris.

How We Tested

We took these machines to a neighborhood baseball diamond to repeatedly corral and relocate a whole ballpark’s worth of leaves and debris over several days, testing not just for blowing power but also for noise, durability, and comfort.

Photo: Jens Mortensen

Before building prototypes of the Knoll Generation chair, designers spent hundreds of hours watching video of office workers. What they learned: Nobody sits still. Even the most slothful desk jockeys lean, twist, and turn. Where ordinary office chairs have rigid frames that limit movement, the Generation boasts an elastomer backrest that’s more flexible than a sideshow contortionist. Bend, twist, stretch out for a nap — you’ll feel almost weightless. Even better, the slick, nearly tip-proof base could give the clumsiest oaf a Shaolin level of stability, so you can recline without fear of cracking your head open.

WIRED Dense foam cushion is a real tuckus pleaser. Cantilevered arms allow you to sit sidesaddle.

TIRED Expensive. Very tough to disassemble. Limited adjustment range rules it out for people over 6′3″.

Autodesk’s Photofly service stitches together 2-D photos of real-world subjects into digital 3-D models.(Wired Editor In Chief Chris Anderson )

The resulting point clouds can be converted into CAD files, which can then be exported in any number of formats.

Using the 3-D data, models can be extruded, cut, or milled out of almost any material. Hey, it even got the hair right!) Images: Todd Tankersley

3-D modeling used to require lasers and special image-capture studios. But with Autodesk’s free Photofly desktop app, anyone with a camera can turn real-world stuff into 3-D digital images. The resulting files can be output to a 3-D printer to fabricate replicas of existing objects or even busts of you and your friends.

Photogrammetry is a method of 3-D modeling that stitches together 2-D photos to create digital models of almost anything — rooms, toys, even people. It requires some serious processing power, though, and the results have tended to be rough. Photofly shifts the number-crunching burden to the cloud. Even better, it’s quite user friendly. You upload your images, and about 10 minutes later you get a .3dp file preview. The results can be stunning, but you’ve got to work for them.

The detailed tutorial video suggests that you circle your subject, snapping overlapping photos every 5 to 10 degrees. You end up with roughly 40 to 60 photos, which translates into a lot of meticulous shutter time. The experimental software looks for distinctive features — an earring, a button, a light switch — that it can use to align the images and weave them together into a finished model.

Of course, it’s not that simple. The software struggles with shadows, reflections, uneven lighting, and monochromatic surfaces. With the help of a patient assistant, I set about making a model of my own head. But our first few tries looked mostly like the melting-face guys in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Other attempts left huge holes in my face where the software had simply skipped over photos it didn’t like.

Using the .3dp preview as a guide, you can add in new photos where the software left gaps and trim out background scenery, which can trip up the stitching process. It’s tedious but straightforward. Once that’s done, you can export the final file and order a 3-D printed version from a service like Shapeways or churn one out on your own MakerBot.

Photofly is nowhere near precise enough for, say, replacing a discontinued gas cap for your car (I tried), but if you want to swap out the heads on action figures with miniature doppelgè4ngers of yourself and your friends (you know you do), now you’ve got the power.

WIRED Fantastic documentation, including a quickstart guide and video tutorial. Lack of pro features keeps the bar to entry low. It’s free.

TIRED Requires Mendelian patience. Struggles with monochrome, reflective, and translucent objects. While getting started is easy, getting good takes a lot of practice.

The right cocktail app can help you play bartender at the Halloween party, establish a well-stocked liquor cabinet, or figure out what to do with that bottle of aquavit your Swedish friend gave you.

Mixologist

Build a virtual liquor cabinet with up to 1,300 ingredients, browse drinks by category, liquor, or mixer, use GPS to find bars and liquor stores, or learn basics like mixing technique. Arguably the most fully featured app for any libation situation.

Wired: Almost 8,000 recipes, so detailed they include glassware recommendations.

Tired: Virtual cabinet can be overly general; everything from Dr. Pepper to ginger ale is listed as “Soda (Other).” (iOS, Android) $0.99

Rating: 8 out of 10

GetDrunker

This unapologetic app offers a matrix of 39 basic ingredients that produce more than 1,300 drinks, from a margarita to an Absolut chain saw (beer, whiskey, vodka, and Jäger). Select the ingredients you’ve got from a virtual cabinet and it will list drinks you can make. It’s not classy, but it’s effective.

Wired: Simple enough to use even after a few too many.

Tired: Can’t save your ingredient list. Prolonged use can lead to wearing Ed Hardy shirts. (iOS, Android) $0.99

Rating: 4 out of 10

Flip ‘N Drink

Midway between GetDrunker’s dorm room and Mixologist’s crowded bar, Flip ‘N Drink is the friendly local lounge. It has the expected database of recipes, but it also offers suggestions based on drinks you like — sort of a cocktail Pandora. Too bad the database is hidden behind a clunky scrolling interface.

WIRED Detailed photos help with selection and prep.

TIRED Can’t search by style of drink (“hot,” for example). Top-shelf price.

iOS, $4

Rating: 6 out of 10

Photo: Jens Mortensen

Dutch artist Theo Jansen made his name creating intricate and elegantly haunting 30-foot-long plastic creatures that walk on their own, powered by the wind. Now his contraptions are spawning home versions. Working with Gakken — a Japanese publisher with a science bent — Jansen is offering a Mini Strandbeest kit based on one of his full-scale designs.

The 8-inch model is as complex as its forebear, with 120 parts that snap together to form 12 jointed legs, a spinelike crankshaft, and a wind turbine. Ours took about 90 minutes to assemble and walked across most flat surfaces, even packed beach sand and slight inclines. The ingenious movement is hypnotic, but unlike some of the full-size beasts, which use a system of pumps and soda bottles to store energy, the Mini stops when the wind does.

WIRED Given the complexity, the instructions couldn’t be any clearer. One of the most satisfying models you’ll ever build; you kinda feel like you’ve created life. Oddly relaxing to watch.

TIRED Needs a constant breeze. A bit fragile, and there aren’t any replacement parts available; break a piece and you have to glue it or buy a new kit.

Photo: Adrian Gaut

It’s never been easier to be carless in the city. Not because of a boom in public transit, but because of car-sharing services, which make owning a vehicle akin to paying for a nanny instead of hiring the occasional babysitter.

The Basics

Where do the cars live?
Established companies like Zipcar have parking lots sprinkled throughout urban areas, while newer P2P services connect drivers with private owners (a nice way to make extra money, given that the average car sits unused for 22 hours a day). Most systems use smartphones, GPS tracking, social networks, RFID cards, and the real-time web to connect drivers with vehicles, often within minutes.

How does the system work?
Drivers typically sign up online for memberships, often choosing a subscription plan or a monthly minimum payment. Reservations take a few taps on a phone, and unlocking the car can be as easy as touching a smartcard to the windshield. Usually keys and a gas card will be waiting inside the vehicle, though some car-sharing networks, especially P2Ps, require an in-person key exchange.

What about Insurance?
The services in our review all include rental coverage, which varies by company. A 2011 California law called AB 1871 protects car owners in P2P networks by stating that the owner’s insurance is not liable during a rental period as long as the P2P service has coverage and the owner’s rental revenue does not exceed the expense of owning and operating the vehicle. Several other states are considering similar laws.

Buying advice

AAA estimates that the average American who owns a small sedan and drives it 10,000 miles a year spends $5,860 per annum on car ownership. For that, you could log up to 20 hours a week through a car-sharing outfit.

But many providers limit each rental to three or four days and start charging extra fees after 160 miles per day. So for errands and the occasional weekend getaway, a car-sharing setup can save you time and money. For longer commutes or out-of-town trips, you’re better off buying a car or using a traditional rental agency.

How We Tested

We evaluated standard providers Zipcar and City CarShare and P2P services RelayRides and Getaround on midday errands, rush-hour commutes, and evening outings on the streets of San Francisco.

What could be better than a tech company having its own tablet? Having two tablets.

Lenovo, which released its IdeaPad K1 tablet just a month ago, is already back to the table with another one: the oh-so-sexily-named ThinkPad Tablet.

On the surface it makes sense. IdeaPad is a laptop line meant for general consumers, and ThinkPads are built for business. You pay more for ThinkPads, but you get more: Higher-end features, better build quality, and top-shelf performance. Because it’s for business.

And so it is that the ThinkPad Tablet is a bit of a cryptic offering. It’s got the same size screen (10.1 inches at 1280×800 pixels), the same RAM (1GB), and the same CPU (Nvidia Tegra 2 at 1GHz). It, too, runs the latest Android. It costs a bit more — $499 for 16GB versus the 32GB you get on the IdeaPad — but you also get a somewhat unique feature in today’s tablet world. While the tablet works perfectly well with a fingertip, a pressure-sensitive stylus gives you finer control when doodling handwritten notes or, say, creating an illustration masterpiece with Sketchbook Pro. You know, for business.

In all seriousness, I can see how the stylus could be useful in a business setting — picking out just the right cell in your thousand-entry spreadsheet — but so much more about the device makes no sense. It has the same, mass-market-focused skin as the IdeaPad K1, and it’s similarly stuffed to the gills with preinstalled applications. Apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Angry Birds. For business!

OK, even stuffed shirts need to kick back with Keyboard Cat once in awhile, I get that. But do they want to be seen with this garish, two-tone tablet while they do it? Built from two pieces of plastic snapped together, the underside is matte and sleek on the underside but the top bezel surrounding the LCD looks cheap, uber-shiny, and smudgetastic. Looks are one thing, but I also had a much bigger issue with the product: The tablet would frequently drop its Wi-Fi connection, only to find it again several minutes later.

Putting its problems aside, you will find some legitimate business cred in the ThinkPad Tablet, namely in the form of preinstalled apps that the IT crowd will love, including LANDesk, Citrix Receiver, McAfee Mobile Security, and a tablet version Computrace’s theft recovery system. Documents to Go is also preinstalled. And even the unemployed will appreciate the full-sized USB slot the device uses for file transfers. There’s actually a second micro-USB port that also works for file transfers — and can trickle charge the tablet, a rarity in this space.

Still, while I love some of this tablet’s features on their own, as a whole the ThinkPad Tablet feels more like a shopping cart filled with options, some of which work, some of which shouldn’t be here, and some of which are full-on failures. Coupled with the premium pricing, it all adds up to a somewhat questionable experience.

WIRED Top-notch performance in all areas. USB charging. Outstanding battery life (over 9 hours at full tilt). Preinstalled IT apps make sense for enterprise buyers, but they aren’t packaged here very thoughtfully.

TIRED Major problems with wireless networking. Display seems dim if not viewed dead-on. Expensive. Design simply not up to snuff compared to Lenovo’s other products, especially ThinkPad laptops.

Photos by Jon Snyder/Wired

It’s amazing sometimes what one simple design tweak can do for a product. Case in point: Bowers & Wilkins’ elegant new C5 earphones.

As anyone with oddly shaped auditory canals knows, most in-ear monitors rely on a dubious mix of proper tip/sleeve selection and getting the right seal. This can be harder than it seems, especially given that most earphones only come with three or four sleeve options. Even then, many are still prone to shift around or even pop out if you decide to do anything active with them.

The C5s all but eliminate this annoyance with a fancy little thing called…a loop. Yup, that’s it. Just an extra length of padded wire that extends up past the aluminum body and then back into it. And yet this simple solution makes a world of difference.

Here’s how the system works: Each earpiece contains position-preserving memory wire attached to a groove on the side that then forms a customizable loop. This coil is meant to sit against the inner rim of your ear, aka the antihelix. By pulling up or down on the wire, you can adjust it to fit your uniquely-shaped cartilage.

All this engineering translates into some seriously comfy in-ear phones that feel both natural and secure. Were it not for dangling wires coming from each earpiece, you can easily forget you’ve got a tiny pair of speakers jammed in your external acoustic meatus. That loop also means the C5s are staying put, regardless of activity. I used them while running, walking, biking, and even while sleeping on a plane. Never once did they manage to creep out of my finicky ears.

Most importantly though, that reliable fit means uniform sound. Manufacturers don’t tell you this often enough, but getting secure and consistent fit is crucial to both the quality of bass response and really the entire sonic performance of your in-ears. An otherwise great pair of IEMs can sound excessively bright and boomy if jammed too far into the canal. Likewise, they can sound flaccid and bass-less if they’re not pushed in far enough. You, of course, want that elusive Goldilocks solution.

This being B&W, there are other fancy feats of engineering that help you get very close. There’s a tungsten sound tube in each earpiece that’s purposefully weighted towards your inner ear (again, to keep the earphones in place) and also something called a Micro Porous Filter. The latter is made up of hundreds of microscopic steel balls that supposedly act as a kind of sonic diffuser, opening up the sound. Whether it was those tiny balls or something else, the C5s do in fact have a glorious soundstage.

They also come with four different tips. I found the smallest worked best for me, but I experimented with all of them. Despite the incorporation of the loop system, the tips still played a big role, not only with regard to proper positioning but also overall sound signature.

B&W says the goal was to make the C5s as natural-sounding as possible. That’s not a horrible way of describing them, I suppose, as long as you don’t confuse natural with neutral. There’s still a good deal of bass favoring going on, although it’s never overpowering. I found them to be overly bright at times, particularly with classical music (Ravel’s “Boléro”). In general though, the C5s exude a luxuriously warm and surprisingly open sound that will handle almost every genre with aplomb, particularly rock.

Had B&W simply released a mediocre pair of earphones with this “Secure Loop” system, it would’ve been enough to satisfy plenty of people. It just so happens the C5s also sound pretty spectacular for a $180 pair of earphones. Yes, like everything else the company makes, that’s not exactly cheap. But you can easily spend twice as much on a pair of in-ear monitors and get considerably worse performance.

Boiled down to their essence, the C5s are really earphones for people who hate earphones, but love and appreciate music. They not only deliver surprisingly lush and open sound, but they do so with a level of comfort that no other IEMs can match.

WIRED Wonderfully rich and open sound. Includes in-line mic with media controls. Exquisite build-quality. As beautiful to look at as they are to hear. Block out/isolate just enough sound to make them great for the outdoors.

TIRED A perfect fit in your ears and yet a horrible fit in the case — the taco-shaped, chintzy cloth carrier comes with a perplexing (and unnecessary) internal cutout mount. Slightly confusing and unintuitive MFI controls. Hit the center button twice for next song? Careful with the tips! The ones the come already affixed really don’t want to come off (I tore one of them).

Photo courtesy of Bowers & Wilkins

When Microsoft’s latest mobile operating system debuted, it stood apart visually from other mobile OSes. Windows Phone 7 eschewed the desktop-like interfaces seen on iOS and Android. Instead, it went with rectangular “Live Tiles” that host various apps and interactions, organizing them in a constantly cascading home screen. It was just as intuitive and overall, it functioned well. But a year later, it feels stale.

Luckily, Microsoft has rolled out a juicy update to the Windows Phone family: Mango.

The “Metro” UI and general navigation through the platform remain largely unchanged from Windows Phone 7, but Windows Mango (officially, version number 7.5) makes some notable improvements to the way it integrates social networking. The web browser has been upgraded. It also does everything a mobile OS is supposed to do — use hardware sensors, search and app discovery features to help make the most of your handset. Basically, Mango bumps Windows Phone from good to great.

Microsoft loaned me a Samsung Focus handset (for AT&T) loaded with the new release. Mango will be available as an upgrade on any Windows Phone 7 device starting Tuesday.

After a quick boot, the phone’s lockscreen shows you the vitals: time, date, what’s next on your calendar, and message alerts. You swipe upwards to send it on its way and reveal the home screen filled with rectangle-filled Live Tiles. Phone, People, Messaging, Mail — you have full control over what Live Tiles display and what order they’re in.

But that’s all the same as before.

The biggest change to Windows Phone 7 is in the revamped People Hub, where your phone, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn contacts can be stored together in one big, long alphabetical list. As in Windows Phone 7, you have filters: All, What’s New and Recent. All is that big list of all of your contacts; What’s New is a recent social media activity stream, which you can keep lumped together chronologically or organize by platform (just Facebook updates, just tweets); and Recent shows the people you’ve called, messaged or e-mailed most recently.

You can simply search by name to dig up a contact from the All list, but the most effective way to utilize the People Hub is by organizing your contacts into groups. For instance, on my test phone, I created groups for Family, Housemates and Wired. Once your groups are organized, click through to see a grid of their images (pulled from their Facebook or Twitter profiles, or a photo you set yourself), names, or their most recent status updates. Below that, you get the option to send a text or e-mail to everyone in the group. Flick to the right and you get “What’s New”, a collection of their most recent social networking updates. Flick again and you get pictures members of the group have uploaded. As a person who hates the clutter, repetitiveness and general bullshit I have to wade through on Facebook (Really? A newsfeed next to my Newsfeed?), this is a godsend. Now I can just check out the friends and contacts I’m immediately concerned with without slogging through all the narcissistic whining of people I keep forgetting to hide from my Facebook Newsfeed. Depending on my mood, I can check out just the streams from my college friends, my San Francisco friends or my colleagues at work. You can even pin a group (or a single contact) as a live tile to your home screen. Tres bien!

The only downside to this whole scheme is that if you sync your Twitter and Facebook accounts to the phone, all of those contacts get dumped into your contact list. The resulting alphabetical list is completely unmanageable, but again, you can search for a specific name. I found the Recents filter to be the most useful.

In the messaging app, the speech bubbles of you and your contact are now differentiated with a gradient of your chosen color scheme — your sent messages are a few shades darker than your messaging contact’s. Before, both were the same shade, so this is an improvement.

Just like in Windows 7, if you’ve synced your Google account to the phone, the Calendar app only syncs your primary account’s calendar. However, if you’ve synced your Facebook account to the phone, it will also sync Facebook events to your calendar, which is convenient.

UPDATE: In the original post, this review incorrectly stated Mango couldn’t link multiple e-mail accounts and couldn’t properly filter social networking contacts. These oversights have been corrected.