Bluetooth Headsets Let You Roam in Stereo

LOOKING FOR a luxurious set of wireless stereo headphones that fit your ears perfectly, provide intuitive controls and astounding audio quality and permit seamless switching between music and calls? Dream on. Our tests of the latest crop of products show that stereo Bluetooth headsets have lots of room for improvement.

Wireless headsets of this kind generally come in two styles: earbud-oriented units, in which a narrow-gauge wire connects the two buds and headphone-style units in which a band or stiffer cord connects the earpieces. All of the units on our chart are worn with the cord or band behind the head.

I integrated each of these stereo headphones into mu daily life, testing each for its audio quality, range performance, comfort and fit, lay-out and button design, and control intuitiveness. Every product excelled in one or two areas, but not in all. For example, the $80 LG Electronics HBS-250 earpads for lt cushy on my ears, but the small controlls were tricky to access.

Color Inkjets Offer Varying Levels of Value

WHEN MONEY IS tight, simplicity and value become higher priorities- and you can find both in a plain, stand-alone inkjet printer. But inkjets are not all created equal: The three new models we reviewed this month may be fairly close in price, but they couldn't be more different in features, performance, and long-term costs.

HP's Photosmart D7560 ranked second, cost just &149 at press time, yet it offers a touchscreen LCD on the control panel, plenty of media slots, and a labeling mechanism for CD's and DVD's. It produced impressive print quality and good speed in our tests, too. Though it's an average priced printer, it gives you a lot for your money especially if you use its high-yield inks.

Like the D7560, the Canon Pixma iP4600 is intended for the home photo-printing market. It debuts in the third spot on this month's chart.

Video Chat Services Let You Converse Face-to-Face

VIDEO CALLS ARE a great way to communicate. You can talk to and see remote colleagues, clients, friends, and relatives. You can trade files, leave messages, and text chat, as well. And with ooVoo or Skype, you can do all of that (and more) for free.

These Voice-over-IP services also let you place calls to landline and cell numbers, a feature you must pay for. (Advanced features, such as multiparty videoconferencing are other paid options. You can't call 911, however.) In my tests, Skype's audio and video quality came out slightly ahead of ooVoo's.

ooVoo 2.0
The free version of ooVoo supports voice and video calls with other ooVoo users, and lets you have two of three people on a call. You can record video messages, set up a video chat room and share files (up to 25MB). too.

The app, decked out in black and silvery-gray hues, makes finding what you need easy. In the default video-call window, the well-designed, angled video screens are the same size and sit side by side.

Video streams were generally smooth with little distortion, though the skin tones seemed bland. Audio quality was mostly sokid: Voices were clear, but I noticed a considerable amount of echo.

Unfortunately, the free version of ooVoo sports garish ads that span the bottom of the videoconferencing window. Ads appeared in the text chat windows, too.

Friends who do not have ooVoo software installed can now call you over the Web. Within ooVoo, you click a button and type your buddy's e-mail address and a message. Your pal can then call you, via their browser. As long as your friend has a Webcam, the same video-call window pops up, and the experience is identical to that of a regular video call.

BETA WATCH

EDWARD N. ALBRO





Jinni: A Field Guide to Video

If you like Pandora's taxonomic method of classifying music. you'll love Jinni. This free video-recommendation service break down movies. TV shows and online shorts into their component parts. The comedy Groundhog Day, for instance is described this way: "Mood: Witty; Plot: Nothing Goes Right Opposites Attract Fall in Love ... Audience: Date Night" If you're a Netflix subscriber and the movie you're reading about is in Netflix's catalog (and really, what title isn't?). You can add it to your rental queue with one click or start watching it if it it's available for instant viewing. Jinni.com

New Chips for Ultrafast Lightweight Computing

HOW MUCH laptop power can fit in a small, lightweight chasis at a bargain price? Recently Intel announced its second-generation Atom processor; Acer unveiled a slew of new netnooks bases on nVidia's Ion platform; and HP began shipping a laptop equipped with AMD's Neo chipset- another first.

As vendors debut tweener laptops whose specs straddle the line between "netbook" and "ultraportable," competition will only heat up. Here is what's in the pipeling.

The new Intel Atom Z550 (one of two Atom processors launched a year after the first-gen Atom hit) is a GHz CPU that incorporates Intel's Hyperthreading technology for improved multitasking and graphics performance. We expect to see Atom Z550 products later this year.

Intel also expects all of its Atom processors to support at least two of the many Microsoft Windows 7 versions.

Acer's just announced AspireRevo mini-desktop is the first product to use the nVidia Ion platfrom. which boasts superior graphics. The AspireRevo pairs a 1.6 GHz Atom N230 CPU with nVidia's Geforce 9400M GPU and CUDA graphics technology to handle high-definition 1080p video and DirectX 10 graphics. Acer hopes to ship the PC by late this summer.

Meanwhile. AMD is positioning its Athlon Neo platform as a step up from first generation Atom chips. The HP Pavilion dv2 ultraportable (with its 1.6GHz Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU) shows the computing potential of this latest AMD platform.

And as if the three way battle shaping up among AMD, Intel, and nVidia weren't enough, Via- which claims a 10 to 15 percent share of the netbook market- is looking for a piece of the ultraportable pie, too. Via's 1.3GHz Nano CPU will provide the power for the soon-to-ship Samsung NC20, which features a 12.1 inc display and weighs just 3.3 pounds.

-Melissa J. Perenson

People Search Engines Tell Your Secrets

People Search Engines Tell Your Secrets

BY JR RAPHAEL

I KNOW THINGS about my lawyer that I wasn't meant to know. He's 55 years old, listens to music of the band Greed, and screams when riding roller coasters. He relaxes with New Age spatreatments and is considering buying an electronic nose hair trimmer. And that's just the start.

I've never spent a moment outside the office with this guy (and I'd rather not be privy to his personal grooming habits). I learned all of these details by tracking his social footprint across the Web-and he probably has no idea that he has left such a vivid trail behind.

These days, we expect some of our thoughts to become public. But as we gradually put more pieces of ourselves online, specialized it easier than ever to pull them together into a highly detailed (and potentially invasive) profile of our virtual lives.

The result isn't always pretty. Even if no rap sheet truns up, do you want the world to know that you look at bad breath cures online or post awful Star Trek fan fiction?

Mini-Notebooks Gain Power

IT DOESN'T MATTER if you have already shed an optical drive from your ultra-portable you still need to lose weight. When you've on the go, you normally perform only a handful of tasks, and you shouldn't have to lug an armful of extra gear.
Cue the mini-notebook. This new breed of pint-size portable continues to gain momentum and acceptance. Superslim, lightweight (2 to 3 pounds), and affordable (starting at under $400), these units go by a few other names: netbooks, mobile Internet devices, and my new favorite "laptots." But their goal, to provide serious mobile computing to the masses, remains the same.
These micro machines aren't designed to compete with more-powerful ultra-portables. Mini-notebooks are good for Web browsing, e-mail, and document creation, but little else (editing a 10GB image file on one will try your patience). Consider a mimi-notebook as a complement to your primary PC and a modest road companion. Asus released its first Eee PC in late 2007; today the choices are numerous, with bigger players, including Acer, Dell, and Lenovo, on the field.