[Source: Wired News]

Gadget Blessings: Shinto Priest Protects Electronics From Bad Mojo

Boom!... Boom!... My chest reverberates with the thumping of a huge wooden drum as two robed holy men shuffle across tatami mats. They kneel in a vermilion-colored alcove, and a young assistant announces that the ceremony has commenced. The priests begin bowing and chanting rhythmically. I've been given a white "robe of cleansing" to wear. Actually, it's more like a smock. I'm not sure what I should be doing. I bow a couple of times.

I've come to the 1,270-year-old Kanda Shrine in Tokyo to purify and bless something very near and dear to me: my cell phone. I've had hellish luck with mobiles over the past year. I left one on a ride at Universal Studios Japan. Its successor suddenly—and mysteriously—died. The next one accompanied my pants into the washing machine, and its replacement went AWOL in less than a week. Divine intervention was needed, and pronto.

Japan's Shinto religion holds that nearly every object in the world, animate or inanimate, has a spiritual essence. Therefore, anything can be blessed, from a newborn child to an automobile. Priests at the Kanda Shrine, which overlooks Akihabara—Tokyo's mecca for consumer electronics—offer prayers for the well-being of gadgets.

Kanda found its calling in metaphysical IT work seven years ago, when Microsoft XP went on sale in Japan. The shrine created talismans to prevent system crashes, and they were snapped up by the throngs of nerds who prowl Akihabara for the latest gizmos and porn comics. Soon, requests were pouring in for priests to perform purification rites on laptops, cell phones, even Web portals. Today Kanda offers microchip-shaped good-luck charms for ¥800 (about $8) and private ceremonies for ¥5,000.

Back in the great hall, an older priest waves a giant wand—essentially a mop of white parchment streamers—over his counterpart. Thus cleansed, the younger priest rises and carries my phone on a lacquer tray to the main altar. He begins a low-pitched chant, invoking the shrine's deities to "watch over and protect Brian Ashcraft's cellular phone."

As the sound of plucked koto strings echoes through the hall, the assistant jingles gold bells over my head. I'm told to approach the altar and am given a tree branch, an offering to the shrine's deities. A priest painstakingly instructs me to turn the branch 180 degrees—no, no, clockwise—and place it on the altar. Then bow deeply twice—that's good—and clap twice.

Most Japanese people would probably stumble through this intricate ceremony as clumsily as I do, but the tenets of Shinto are deeply ingrained in their consciousness. It occurs to me that this must affect how they view their little electronic helpmates. Perhaps gadgets really do have souls. Maybe my problem isn't bad luck—maybe I simply haven't been giving my phones the respect they deserve. I bow again, and the ceremony concludes.

Near the great hall's exit, I am presented with a wooden plaque certifying that my cell has been purified. Over a cup of sake, senior priest Katsuji Takahashi chuckles as he tells me, "I've lost my phone twice, but both times it turned up."

Seven months later, my blessed phone is still with me.

My cell phone sits in a lacquer tray waiting to be blessed by a Shinto priest. Late last year, I visited the ancient Kanda shrine, located in the heart of Tokyo's consumer electronics district. The shrine does boffo business offering charms and ceremonial purifications that protect cell phones and laptops and even blogs and ISP service from bad mojo. You can read about it here and see more images of the temple and its priests by clicking on the thumbnails above.

A geek nirvana has grown up around the 1,200-year-old Shinto shrine. Tokyo's Akihabara district is the place to go if you're looking for gizmos, manga, videogames, anime, or figurines. On the right is the otaku hypermart AsoBitCity, and on the left is a doujin (fanzine) bookstore packed with images of doe-eyed schoolgirl characters.

Up a narrow side street and under a red and green gate, a wide stone path leads up to the Kanda shrine. It's morning, and a salaryman on his way to work stands tossing change into the wooden offering box and clasps his hands in prayer. Just over the top of the green roof tiles, modern buildings dot the skyline. The view is discombobulating at first, the modern and ritzy clashing with the traditional and sacred, yet that image sums up Japan.

Near the shrine's entryway is what looks like an old-school arcade attraction. Inside is a shishigashira, or lion head puppet. Drop some yen in this coin-op device to see the mechanical lion do its festive Shinto dance that wards off evil. When the shimmying is over, an omikuji, or fortune, drops down the chute. The fortune, printed on a rolled-up piece of paper, could just as easily be terrible as great. I'm afraid to use the thing — one more bit of bad luck and my cell phone might spontaneously combust in my pocket.

I enter the shrine with my cell and don a white robe for the purification ceremony. I've been called before the altar. I'm feeling nervous and awkward. Why wouldn't I be? I don't know precisely what it is that I'm supposed to be doing. Clap two times...? Alrighty, here goes.

Whoosh! Parchment rustles noisily, and gusts of cleansed air hit me in the face. The priest is holding a haraigushi, a prayer stick covered with folded bits of paper. Waving the haraigushi over my phone is part of the blessing ceremony. After this is over, I'm called upon to offer a tree branch to the deities of the shrine.

These paper charms are made to look like microchips. Each has the words "IT Info Safety Blessing" and the shrine's name inscribed on it. The backing is a sticker with peel-off paper — perfect for slapping it onto your laptop. Take that, computer viruses!

All done! I'm given a piece of wood to commemorate the ritual. My name is handwritten on it, along with the words "Cell Phone Safety Blessing." It's been eight months since this ceremony, and my phone is still safe and sound. Maybe the ritual itself worked…or maybe the ritual forced me to look at my phone with a little more reverence and respect.

[Source: Wired News]

Performing Thinkpad, Fine Kettle, Solid Slider :

The T400s has performance that is simply outstanding: While graphics are a tad weak due to the lack of a video card, the high-end CPU (the newest Core 2 Duo SP9600, running at 2.53 GHz), 2 GB of RAM and 128-GB solid-state drive give the T400s plenty of juice to power through general apps, running rings around nearly all other notebooks we've benchmarked this year. The screen, now backlit by LEDs, is also dazzlingly bright — one of the brightest on the market, especially in this size class. Netbook and MacBook Air users, take a back seat: There's also a DVD burner.

ThinkPad geeks will most enjoy the little tweaks that Lenovo has given the T400s: The Esc and Delete keys are now double-sized for easier access, and though the speakers still suck, at least the unit features better volume controls, including a dedicated microphone On/Off button. A 2-megapixel webcam with dual microphones rests atop the LCD, and then there's the textured, multitouch touchpad — now flush with the palm rest — that is possibly the most comfortable touchpad we've ever used.

WIRED Unparalleled performance from a 14-inch laptop. Nearly as thin as a MacBook Air — including an optical drive. Killer touchpad (plus TrackPoint for old-schoolers). Plus: Caps Lock LED!

TIRED Only three USB ports. Fn key where the Ctrl key goes. Unbelievably tinny, distant audio. So-so battery life (2 hours, 11 minutes). No ExpressCard slot.

$2,000, lenovo.com

Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad T400s review.

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The act of boiling water hasn't changed much since your cave-dwelling ancestor Og heated fetid H2O in a mammoth skull.

That's why the Chef's Choice SmartKettle is an enormous evolutionary leap forward for teakettles — and for tea nerds. The device adds a geeky element to the mundane task of stoking liquids by letting you punch in the exact temperature you want.

Operation is dead simple: Just enter a temperature on the unit's recessed front panel. We set ours to 185 degrees Fahrenheit for green tea, filled it to its max capacity of 1.5 quarts, and in five minutes the solid stainless steel kettle produced agua caliente at exactly the desired temp. (We checked.)

WIRED First electric kettle to quickly heat water to the exact temperature you specify. Handsome and sturdy stainless steel pitcher. Alarm sounds just like a teakettle's whistle.

TIRED Safety/power-saving features over-complicate the act of boiling water.

$100, edgecraft.com

Read our full Chef's Choice SmartKettle Model 688 review.

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The awkwardly-named w995a is a solid-feeling slider. At 4 ounces it sits comfortably in the hand, and the mechanism for sliding up the screen and exposing the keypad felt solid even after repeated use. Since Sony conceived of the w995 as a media player, its button layout is relatively stripped down and geared towards multimedia playback. In addition to the typical "call" and "end" buttons, the face of the handset sports four somewhat flimsy multi-purpose softkeys and a decent four-directional D-pad.

It's clear that Sony wanted to craft a fun, functional phone, and they've largely succeeded in that endeavor. We can think of a few other devices that do a better job of nailing specific features. But Sony at least is on the right path when it comes to producing a very capable, versatile phone.

WIRED Standard headphone jack FTW. Slick animated menus and overall presentation. Sports a mini-kickstand for propping the phone up to watch video. Brilliant and colorful 2.6-inch 320x240 display. Decent audio clarity when using headphones. Decent data speeds with both 3G and Wifi connections. Supports MPEG4, WMV, RealVideo, 3GPP, and H.264 video playback.

TIRED Low volume for music and calls. Music or voice, it doesn't matter — the speakerphone just sucks. E-mail client is both chintzy, web-based. Mediocre call quality. Buttons so recessed they need a government bailout.

$600, sonystyle.com

Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.

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The iPhone 3GS combines two sets of advances. The first group is available only to purchasers of the new hardware. The rest of the features are part of Apple's iPhone 3.0 software upgrade, which is offered free to those with earlier iPhones. (iPod Touch users can get the new software for $10.)

I'll talk about the hardware-based features first. As promised, Apple has indeed ramped up the speed with which the new phone performs tasks like launching apps, loading web pages, and displaying graphics. Apple claims speed boosts of up to two times of what the 3G delivers, and in some benchmarks cites even better performance. I haven't done scientific measurements, but you don't need a stopwatch to notice the new phone is zippier than its predecessor. I appreciated getting box scores faster and videos playing sooner in the MLB.com At Bat application, and it was clear that web pages loaded faster. In the case of a game like Tiger Woods Golf, the boost is significant enough to make me more likely to play when I don't have much time.

Photos were a weak spot in previous iPhones — they weighed in at a measly 2 megapixels — but the iPhone 3GS has a 3-megapixel, autofocusing camera that's more sensitive and allows you to choose an object to focus on by tapping on it. (No zoom, though. Bummer.) Better yet, the camera also records quite creditable video. After you shoot your clip, there's a dead-simple function for instant editing, after which you can send your masterpiece to YouTube or Mobile Me with a single tap.

WIRED Faster. More storage. Better camera, with video recording capability. Search encompasses more data, not just one app at a time. Voice navigation. Feature-rich iPhone 3.0 software is free to current iPhone users.

TIRED Multitasking still limited. No tethering or MMS support yet for AT&T users. Recent iPhone 3G customers must pay a fortune to upgrade.

$300 (32-GB version, with 2-year contract), apple.com

Read our full iPhone 3GS review.

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TomTom's Go Live 740 is a new breed of web-ready GPS in which web access seems like a well-integrated enhancement, not a useless afterthought.

At almost half a pound it sits comfortably in hand, and its colorful 4.3-inch 320 × 240 touch screen is both bright and responsive to repeated pokes. And with its 2GB of memory, microSD port, and integrated Bluetooth we were able to smoothly navigate between a number of tasks, such as listening to music and using the integrated speaker for hands-free calls while paired with a cell phone.

WIRED Svelte, smooth-to-touch design and construction. Decent signal acquisition times (average of four minutes on a cold start). Sports both Bluetooth audio and file exchange capabilities. Intuitive, touch-based interface and menu tree. Allows instant messaging with other TomTom users. Comes with car charger, dash mount, USB cradle charger. It feels ... sexy.

TIRED Navigational interface displays waaay too much information at one time (speed, distance, current time, arrival time, current street, next turn, distance to turn, etc.). Sketchy voice recognition doesn't cut it. Web-enabled services are only free for the first 90 days ($10/mo. afterwards). Speaker would occasionally sound garbled, mispronounce common street names.

$370, TomTom.com

Read our full TomTom Go Live 740 review

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The coolest trick the Alias 2 can pull off is changing from a number pad to a text keyboard as you flip it open. It's a cool trick and makes the Alias 2 somewhat like the Optimus Maximus of phones. This keyboard beats a touchscreen any day of the week; the little mounds offer tactile feedback not found in any iDevice.

In stark contrast to the phone's E Ink deftness other parts of the Alias 2 are decidedly girlish and silly. An included theme for the phone evokes a she-teen boudoir that counts colorful Trapper-Keepers, potted plants and a rainbow peeking in the window among its touches. Access the menu, and the room comes alive, with menu items as knick-knacks, recent calls as a dorm message board and utilities in a toolbox on the floor. Fortunately, you can change this, if you dig around in settings long enough. The preinstalled ringtones are laughable, ranging from cheesy period pieces, to earsplitting high-range electronica, to faux hip-hop distilled somewhere in Seoul's equivalent of 8 Mile. Anyone with a shred of self-respect would be wise to immediately hop on the internet and download a decent Black Sabbath riff for a ringtone.

WIRED E Ink keyboard morphs button layouts when switching from phone to messaging device. Voice quality is high. Battery life is nearly six hours. Reasonably priced.

TIRED The Dear Diary feel of the interface is at odds with anyone over 13. My Room Menu theme is embarrassing. Lack of dedicated buttons leave you hunting and pecking for even the most common tasks.

$130 (with a two year contract), samsung.com

Read our full Samsung Alias 2 review.

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Size seems to matter to the folks at Amazon. While the Kindle 2 has a 6-inch (measured diagonally) e-ink screen — roughly the area of a mass-market paperback book — the DX's 9.7-inch screen resembles a page from a typical hardback. Put another way, the DX flaunts 2.5 times more display space. More text on a page means more lines and, if you prefer, a bigger font, without having to turn the page as often. What does that mean for you? It's easier to read using the DX.

By elegantly super-sizing the Kindle — and ramping up its ability to read files — Amazon has improved the best all-around e-reader available. But the hefty price tag doesn't fit Jeff Bezo's stated philosophy of getting the best value for his customers.

WIRED Big-screen device that's even more readable than the original Kindle. PDF support is a welcome addition.

TIRED High cost of admission. Pivot mode has hair trigger. Southpaws will find the reader cumbersome.

$490, amazon.com

Read our full Amazon.com Kindle DX review.

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Shaped like a small bar of shower soap, the dense, ebony Pre matches many (if not all) of the features of its chief competitor, the iPhone. But in one key aspect, the Pre does the iPhone one better. While a lot of the Pre's features — a bright 3.1-inch touchscreen manipulated by taps, swipes and pinches; apps sold by third parties in an open online bazaar; integration of e-mail, contacts and calendar — are now standard in 3G smartphones, Palm also lets users keep multiple applications running simultaneously.

Its long-term prospects, though, hinge on whether or not all those third-party apps will show up, whether Sprint can satisfy users, and whether Apple has something up its sleeve that counters the Palm's gambits. Also, of course, the Pre has to prove stable and reliable. (Our test unit occasionally suffered opening-day jitters, including a crash that was fixed only by taking out the removable battery.)

WIRED Great look and superb feel. Well-conceived OS with multitasking and instant notification. Physical keyboard. Utilizes iTunes to load and refresh content.

TIRED Multitasking puts a big suck on the battery. Sprint exclusivity will be annoying to Palm-philes on a contract with AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. Keyboard is puny. If Apple blocks the handset's access to iTunes, Pre users are hosed.

$200 (with two year contract), palm.com

Read our full Palm Pre review.

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Demonstrating that it's serious about making a run at the top-end offerings from Canon and Nikon, the K-7 bows with a spankin' new 14.6 megapixel, 28.1mm (diagonal) CMOS image sensor and an updated Prime II processor. This enables HD-video capture, built-in high dynamic range shooting, a 77-segment metering system, pre- and post-production filtering and distortion correction, all in a form factor more than 10 percent smaller (and actually easier to handle) than its predecessor, the K20D.

By and large, it's a super quick focusing compact image-maker — once you learn how the menu system works. But it's just a step or two behind Nikon and Canon in ease of use. In spite of that, Pentax has nearly hit a home run with the K-7. It's svelte, sturdy, fairly easy to operate, has a great range of available lenses and a feature set that's unmatched at this price. Think of it as a solid double off the wall, with an RBI.

WIRED Speedy 5.2 frames per second. Super-sturdy construction. Lots of pro features at a prosumer price. Improved battery life and 100 percent field-of-view viewfinder. Faster, more robust processor. Live View with contrast focus and face detection. Shoots 5.2 frames-per-second with shutter speed up to 1/8000. The 77-segment metering system and 11-point AF system are quick and spot on. Internal mechanical shake reduction.

TIRED User interface needs to be simpler and more unified.

$1,300 (body only), pentax.com

Read our full Pentax K-7 DSLR review.

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The A600's 21.5-inch screen (1920 x 1080 pixels) is big and dazzlingly bright — so much so that Lenovo includes an automatic screen-dimming system designed to prevent eyestrain. Inside its bowels, this 25-pounder offers substantial specs: 2.13-GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and a terabyte hard drive. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics card may be getting a little long in the tooth, but it's powerful enough to make the A600 more than acceptable to play all but the very latest gaming titles.

That's a lot of stuff for the price — $1,150 — and stripped-down versions of the IdeaCentre run considerably less. If you don't need the power but dig the design and screen size, the budget rendition might be an even better bet.

WIRED Very small footprint. Single-cable design is a blessing for technophobes. Swivel base makes adjustments to viewing angle easy. Six USB ports and 802.11n Wi-Fi, plus FireWire, SD and coaxial connectors.

TIRED Keyboard and mouse frequently fall asleep; difficult to awaken. Remote control overly complex and rather homely. Included games feel like an engineer on Quaaludes designed them.

$1,150 (as tested), lenovo.com

Read our full Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 review.

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Its glossy black finish and polished Darth Vader design makes Samsung's newest Blu-ray box, the BD-P4600, stand out from every other player on the market. Well, it actually doesn't stand anywhere at all -- it comes with the metal brackets to mount it on a wall or plant it on a desktop pedestal. And like Lord Vader, this model packs some serious force with its built-in streaming for Pandora music and Netflix.

For $100 less, you could pick up Samsung's BD-P3600 a player that has all the same features as this model but comes in a non-wall-mountable chassis. But really, would you want to watch The Empire Strikes Back on a Blu-ray player that didn't look like it was made in a dark corner of Coruscant?

WIRED High-end, spacey designed Blu-ray player is loaded with features include ability to wall mount, loads Blu-ray discs exceptional fast and offers exceptional playback.

TIRED Complicated initial setup for its feature set. Cramped underside port-connection compartment. Competitively over priced for what it delivers.

$500, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung BD-P4600 review.

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Let's cut to the chase and hit you with the sell: The MSI X340 is a MacBook Air at half the price. Interested? Read on.

For starters, the X340 (aka the X Slim) is considerably better muscled than your typical netbook, featuring a glossy 13.4-inch (1366 x 768 pixels) screen, 320-GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM. Like Apple's ultralight, it's incredibly thin — about 0.8 inches at its thickest — and it actually weighs slightly less than the Air, just 2.9 pounds.

Before you start salivating over the prospects of a half-price Air, note that Apple's laptop does trump the X340 in a few significant ways. The Air includes Nvidia graphics, while the X340 is stuck with Intel's integrated chipset.

The screens are night and day: The Air is renowned for having one of the brightest LCDs available, while the X340 is merely average in this department.

WIRED Gorgeous design; slap an Apple sticker over the MSI logo and no one will ever know. Performance bests most netbooks, though it's hardly top-notch. Surprisingly good graphics and responsiveness. Includes the usual goodies: 1.3-MP webcam, Bluetooth, 802.11n.

TIRED Flaky touchpad. Disappointing battery life.

$900 (as tested), us.msi.com

Read our full MSI X340 review.

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The first day we took the car for a spin we kept the front-mounted 5.9-liter 470 BHP vehicle on a strict diet of city driving: no freeways, no tightly coiled back roads. Trudging through heavy traffic almost felt sadistic — kind of like taking a thoroughbred racehorse and giving it polio. But after exiting the city limits and tearing down a stretch of asphalt connecting San Francisco with Napa Valley, the DB9 snapped up, greedily devouring 90-degree curves with just a hint of oversteer.

WIRED Fast like a sports car, more refined than a quart of 40-weight. Gorgeous; induces whiplash in head-turning bystanders. Zippy acceleration for a GT — you can't front on a 4.6-second zero-to-60 time ... unless you're armed with a Ferrari or a Bentley.

TIRED Hood-release switch located in impossibly hard to find/reach nook (as if an Aston owner would ever do that). iPod access tres difficult to set up. Chugs gas like an ASU freshman rips beer-bong hits. Back seat harder to get into than MIT.

$209,000 as tested, astonmartin.com

Read our full Aston Martin DB9 review.

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If you don't mind looking like an extra in a 1-800-Dentist commercial and have no reservations about looking like a crazy person yammering to yourself, the Plantronics Voyager Pro may be the perfect Bluetooth headset for you.

This headset is big, bulky and (surprise, surprise) silly looking. The 3-inch boom extending out toward your mouth is the main culprit of these crimes against style. But despite being tacky, the Voyager Pro delivers strong performance. It's easy to use, withstands drops, bumps and haphazardly tossed laptops, has decent battery life and pairs effortlessly with a range of smartphones, including the iPhone.

WIRED Easy to use. Super sound quality. Stays attached to your ear. You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.

TIRED You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.

$100, plantronics.com

Read our full Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset review.

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After a few grim years ceded to the iMac, PC-based all-in-one desktops are making an LL Cool J-esque comeback. Their next move: Make the switch from semi-luxe gear designed for highly aesthetic environments to the megacheap world that the netbook has built.

Specs look exceedingly promising at first: 250 GB of hard drive space, 2 GB of RAM, integrated Wi-Fi, DVD burner, an SD card slot and a very bright 19-inch touchscreen display. If nothing else, it's one of the best-looking touchscreens (non-capacitive; a stylus works better than your finger) we've seen at this screen size.

But the Achilles' heel of the Wind Top is its baffling choice of an Atom 330 processor to power these guts. Although the dual-core 330 is known as the "fast" version of the Atom (it draws 8 watts instead of the 2.5 watts used by the netbook standard Atom N270 and has double the L2 cache), it's still woefully inadequate for a computer this ambitious.

WIRED Amazingly affordable and loaded to the gills. Touchscreen makes this a perfect kiddie computer. Slim profile lets it fit just about anywhere. Cuter than a box of puppies.

TIRED Performance problems dog the user at every turn. Flashing blue hard-drive activity light is front and center, terribly distracting and impossible to cover up. Bundled keyboard and mouse are beyond cheap. Webcam aim can't be adjusted.

$590 (as tested), us.msi.com

Read our full MSI Wind Top AE1900 review.

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The new Chrome Soyuz is an ambitious (if slightly crazed) reimagining of the urban commuter backpack. It's a weird hybrid of a river-rafting drybag and laptop case, all contained within a stylish wedge of black and red nylon.

It sits comfortably behind your back, letting you weave through traffic on your fixie without fear of snagging on the projecting mirrors of double-parked delivery trucks. It can ride between your knees on a crowded train. And it tucks neatly below an airplane seat, leaving just enough space on either side to squeeze in your feet so you can stretch your legs.

WIRED Wedge design keeps load balanced, trim and compact. Expandable waterproof compartment shrinks down to nothing when empty. Heavy-duty 1,000-denier cordura nylon withstands abuse. Main compartments are completely waterproof. Heavy-duty metal strap locks make adjustment easy. Glorious enameled metal "Chrome" logo.

TIRED Narrow openings + deep compartments = where the hell did my keys go? Not quite big enough to contain a six-pack (unless you put the bottles in one by one). Padding traps heat, steaming your back on long rides. No hip belt. Pricier than a metric ton of pig iron.

$180, chromebags.com

Read our full Chrome Soyuz Backpack review.

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The pristine fidelity these headphones deliver is the result of a dual-armature layout, which bathes your tympanic membranes in accurate audio reproduction. The earpiece's dual drivers have the added benefit of propping up the typically flaccid base that seems to plague many other in-ear monitors.

The only major downside is that great sound comes at a considerable price — $230 to be precise. For most people, that's likely to be as much (or more) than you spent on your MP3 player. But as my neglected Audio Technicas can attest, in this case, you undoubtedly get what you pay for.

WIRED Exquisite sound reproduction in an insanely small package. Handy in-flight attenuator saves you from Captain Blowhard's eardrum-exploding announcements. Fuller, richer base and wider frequency response than previous UEs.

TIRED Spendiferous. Cable noise will distract joggers or anyone planning to use the headphones while exercising. Despite its redesign, the pocket case is still too small to fit all the accouterments.

$230, ultimateears.com

Read our full Ultimate Ears 700 Noise-Isolating Earphones review.

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Digeo's Moxi HD DVR sports a slick, Emmy-winning (seriously) user interface and all the commercial-skipping accouterments of competitors like TiVo. It even ditches a monthly bill in favor of flat pricing and grants access to online video and music.

The Moxi's stunning high-def UI is full of slick transitions and responsive performance. Unfortunately, sleek visuals don't conquer all. Basics like surfing through the program guide (or accessing a previously recorded show) took a lot of hunting and pecking through a menu tree. Finding pre-recorded shows and getting them to play took searching, highlighting, selecting Play, confirming that you selected Play, and then finally watching.

WIRED No monthly bills. Sleek high-def interface has nifty animations and transitions. Hard drive expandable to 1 TB for power recorders. Dual tuners let you watch one show while recording another. Offers a whopping 1.5-hour buffer time per HD channel.

TIRED Hefty entry fee. Online video chops not quite up to snuff. No dedicated Guide button on the remote?! Unnecessarily complicated menus. Programming schedules are displayed in cramped vertical list instead of friendly grid.

$800, moxi.com

Read our full Digeo Moxi HD DVR review.

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We're a little dismayed by the E71x. The device is almost identical to the E71: same 3.2-megapixel camera, same .04-inch profile, same vibrant 320 x 240 QVGA display, same business apps and multimedia functionality. The operating system is slightly tweaked so there are some differences in transmissions and page loading. But as a whole, the phone is relatively unchanged.

These are the key differences: a new $100 price tag (good), a black paint job (badass) and the omission of our favorite feature from the original E71 (ugly). We're talking about the two separate, customizable home screens, something we absolutely loved about the O.G. E71. One screen was designed for business, the other for personal use. It was a great function: You could literally edit spreadsheets from 9 to 5 on one screen, then toggle over to the other and watch a couple of episodes of 30 Rock on the media player.

WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.

TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.

$100 with 2-year contract, att.com

Read our full Nokia E71x Smartphone review.

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The Replica comes with bare-bones software and strikes a good balance between peace of mind and individual-user control.

After the hard drive is plugged in, the Replica starts mirroring your computer's content. The startup process is short, taking only a couple of minutes, though the actual backup is a time-gobbling endeavor. (It took us about four hours to transfer 130 GB of data). A blue light on the top of the Replica's case blinks continuously while data is being transferred. It's also stealthy for a hard drive, emitting only a quiet whir when working at full speed.

WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.

TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.

$200, seagate.com

Read our full Seagate Replica 500GB review.

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Panasonic's new HDC-TM300 shoots in "Full HD," marketing speak for 1080p — aka 1080 x 1920 resolution with progressive-scan video. Translation? Stunning Blu-ray-level video that should more than lives up to the most critical expectations of prosumers and video enthusiasts.

The highlight of this shooter is the high-def footage. Not only does the phenomenal zoom reel in distant objects, but thanks to the triple sensors and quality lens, it nails far-off details perfectly. The architectural features of distant buildings we shot in downtown San Francisco showed up like we were standing on the window ledge -- not in a park three blocks away.

WIREDReproduces colors like a Crayola factory. Closeups pop with sharp, clear details. Nice performance in low light. Einstein-smart automatic shooting features are like having your own DP built into the camera. 32-GB onboard memory is expandable via SDHC slot. Great zoom tackles action better than Jason Statham.

TIRED Fast pans in bright daylight turns up more artifacts than a Mayan ruin. May require second mortgage.

$1,300, Panasonic.com

Read our full Panasonic HDC-TM300 HD Camcorder review.

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In the aftermath (heh heh) of the bass-heavy Beats by Dre Studio headphones, Monster decided to pack the Doctor's finicky sound quality specs into two tiny earbuds. Naturally, audiophiles (including myself) were skeptical. Sure the Beats suffered from shoddy construction and fell apart after a few months of ownership, but they also provided some of the best bass we've ever heard in a set of cans.

Sure enough, the bass response from these things is rich and full. The lowest frequencies rumble with a force akin to the thud of a decent subwoofer. Keep in mind these are not miniaturized 12-inch Kickers designed to blow your eardrums out. But for a device that is essentially a tiny speaker with no auxiliary power, they're superb — especially when compared to the white earcruds doled out by Apple with every iDevice.

WIRED Excellent all-around frequency definition and particularly impressive bass response. Monster’s durable, ingenious anti-tangle cable means jumbled cords are a distant unpleasant memory.

TIRED The bright red cable is slightly ostentatious. Peak bass only hits at earwax shattering volumes.

$150, beatsbydre.com

Read our full Monster Beats By Dre Tour High-Resolution In-Ear Headphones review.

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The UE-11 Pros are packed with four, count 'em, four drivers: There's a double dose of bass, one for the midrange and one chiming the highs. If you're looking for the most precise, separated sound possible, then this is the earphone for you. Throughout the play list I heard clarity and detail in the music I'd never heard before. This rang especially true with classical tunes — it literally feels like sitting in a symphony hall and having every instrument speak directly to you. To get that kind of superior fidelity you'll certainly have to pay the piper. But you'll really love the music while Rome — or your bank account — burns.

WIRED Most clear, separated and detailed sound.

TIRED Try convincing your spouse you need a $1,150 set of headphones.

$1,150, ultimateears.com

Read our full UE-11 Pro review.

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The slate-gray, high-impact polymer body houses three LEDs capable of blasting out a peak 270 lumens for 15 minutes, or a more useful and long-lasting 90 lumens for 60 minutes. Both settings have an emergency low-power 25-lumen mode (equivalent in brightness to most common household D-cell flashlights) for an additional 60 minutes.

WIRED High-power pro flashlight pumps out awesome illumination and recharges ridiculously fast. Flashlight will outlive you. Seriously brilliant, blinding — a boon for flashlight junkies.

TIRED Pricy front-end investment. Comes with a 12-volt car charger.

$170, 511tactical.com

Read our full 5.11 Tactical Light review.

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In our tests, we threw all things digital at this 68-pound slab. And while it does not perform as superbly as its higher-price brethren from Sony, Samsung and Sharp, it still shows off a completely acceptable high-def image and above-average sound.

So where has Westinghouse cut corners? Oh, let's see. How about the borderline embarrassing 1000:1 contrast ratio? In a well-lit room, the screen looks more washed out than a warehouse full of Maytags. And even though the set offers the 120-Hz spec, fast motion still looks a bit blurred.

WIRED High resolution and decent sound at incredible rock-bottom price. Convenience features integrated into menu. Quality remote not found in higher-priced TVs.

TIRED Displays some pixelated speckled noise in darker and mid-hue images. Analog-station reproduction is downright blurry. No worries though — analog TV has flatlined.

$700, Westinghouse.com

Read our full Westinghouse TX-42F450S review.

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It's not quite a netbook, not quite an ultralight PC. Whatever it is, Samsung's NC20 is a dazzling feat of engineering: an extremely usable 12-inch laptop with epic battery life, impressive specs and a downright mystifyingly affordable price tag.

But the NC20 doesn't make depressing tradeoffs to achieve those scores. Battery life is three hours, 40 minutes (22 percent longer than the S10) and weight is just 3.3 pounds, comparable to the Asus Eee PC 1000H. All that and you get a 12.1-inch LCD, too, instead of the usual 10.2-inch netbook display.

WIRED Everything a netbook should be: Offers the best performance available from a computer this portable and inexpensive. Very usable keyboard. Good quality audio. Includes three USB ports, 1.3-megapixel webcam, and SD card slot.

TIRED LCD could be a touch brighter and quality sharper. Chassis design is a bit boring.

$550, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung NC 20 review.

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Pure Digital's Flip has proven that it's possible to build a super-small flash memory camcorder and offer it up for fewer than two hundred bucks. But there are tradeoffs with going small and cheap, like optics and battery life. Canon takes a completely different tack with its newest solid-state cam, the Vixia HF S10, which delivers some fantastically brilliant moving pictures, but at a stiff cost.

Out in the field, auto focus and auto exposure were both very impressive in a wide range of situations, from the intense brightness of the beach to shady and contrasty venues. Every camera suffers indoors, thanks to low light, and everyone complains about it, but the S10 did a credible job with low-light shots and it's clearly better than previous cams of this ilk.

WIRED Improved audio quality. Big, bright lens. Speedy processor. Lots of creative control options. More intuitive menus than previous generation Canon camcorders.

TIRED Loose lens cover noisier than cutlery caught in a garbage disposal. Still images come off looking a bit overexposed.

$1,300, canon.com

Read our full Canon Vixia HF S10 review.

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Dry your eyes, plasma junkies. The untimely demise of Pioneer's Kuro line doesn't mean you'll have to forgo those deliciously deep blacks and theater-perfect colors for long. In fact, even as the last of the Pioneer Kuro Elites make its way into a few lucky U.S. homes, a new lineup of HDTV sets are already poised to seize the plasma king's vacant throne.

Key to this plasma's visual appeal is its integrated THX mode. In addition to blessing various audio components, the home-theater ninjas at THX began bestowing plasma and LCD certification a few years back. Each set is subjected to approximately 400 individual tests, ranging from evaluations in signal processing to luminosity. Basically, the idea behind G10's THX mode is to recreate the precise color gamut filmmakers use during the in-studio post-production process.

WIRED Mind-boggling blacks with tons of detail. THX mode is a godsend for movie buffs. Integrated SD card slots transform your plasma into a giant digital photo frame. Amazing color saturation.

TIRED THX mode is bit dim for brightly lit rooms. Ethernet connectivity is nice for VieraCast, but Wi-Fi would've been better. Three HDMI ports (two in the back, one on the side) don't cut it. More power-hungry than LCD TVs. Where's the PiP?

$1,300, panasonic.com

Read our full Panasonic TC-P42G10 Viera G10 Series Plasma review.

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The PogoPlug is a device, which looks like a supersized AC adapter, plugs into almost any external hard drive (even a USB stick) and then pumps that content onto the web, giving you access anywhere in the world you can get an internet signal — including your iPhone.

But the PogoPlug isn't without the occasional snafu and annoyances. Only image files are available for preview. PDF, Word documents or even HTML files have to be downloaded before viewing. Worse yet, when we unhooked the device, it caused our PC to crash twice in a row. We're still not entirely sure if this was due to a glitch in the PogoPlug or in Windows.

WIRED Easy to use. Simple setup. Great utility: I must be able to access my collection of LOLcat photos from anywhere. The iPhone app is solid software.

TIRED No wireless mode ... yet. Poor security — it's a wise idea to keep those tax returns or bank documents off the PogoPlug. Computer crashes are deeply flummoxing. The iPhone is currently the only mobile device that supports remote access.

$100, pogoplug.com

Read our full Cloud Engines PogoPlug review.

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NatureMill's Pro edition is an indoor composter we can pretty much dig. Using minimal electricity, a small motor turns a heavy-duty mixing bar, heats the mixing chamber (no sunlight needed) and powers an air pump that works with a carbon air filter to help reduce smell (each filter lasts four to five years).

Just add starter dirt, drop in some sawdust pellets to combat odors and dump your food scraps in. NatureMill recommends that you cut organic material into 4-inch bits before plopping it in. We didn't, but aside from the motor making some gnarly noises, it didn't seem to affect compost production. NatureMill's Pro version also features some automatic activation. We were able to leave ours sitting for weeks without pushing the button even once; it mixed and heated itself just fine.

WIRED Stainless steel mixing bar made short work of uncut banana peels. Relatively small and exceptionally lightweight = easy to stash and transport. Foot pedal eliminates lid touching. Mighty Morphin' Power Saver: only draws 5 kwh a month (roughly 50 cents on an average electric bill). Not as much of an eyesore as it could be and it's available in a range of colors (including, you guess it, green).

TIRED Little to no stench — until top opens (that's hard to remedy, and burger/fish/salad remnants smell worse than a dead wildebeest doused in Eau D'Bile). Polypropylene housing is light, but may not last forever. Disposable carbon filters reduce smell, but also cut down on the green factor. Regular maintenance (scraping the mix chamber walls) isn't fun.

$400, naturemill.com

Read our full Nature Mill Indoor Composter — Pro Edition review.

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You can get away with a lot if you're beautiful. Such is the case with the new Porsche Design P'9522 phone. In some ways, it's a wonderful and capable cellphone, but in most others, it's dumber than the gorgeous block of aluminum it was machined from.

Someone forgot to include e-mail — an absence that had us trying to mar the Porsche phone's scratchproof screen with claws of rage. Unfortunately, that screen is tough, so the P'9522 will be lauded and drooled over — despite our many gripes with it.

WIRED Gorgeous. Touchscreen interface is easy to understand, if limited and frustrating. Preloaded ringtones include the roaring engines of the 911 GT3 and Turbo. Its 5-megapixel camera has autofocus and captures clean, vivid images. LED flash doubles as a flashlight. Unlocking the phone with its fingerprint scanner is very MI5.

TIRED Fingerprint scanner is also very POS: Who thought it would be a good idea to use fingerprints to access a device you're likely holding in one hand while juggling multiple other tasks? Preloaded ringtones include bad German techno. Touchscreen is deeply frustrating. Seriously — no e-mail?

$800, porschedesign.com

Read our full Porsche Design P'9522 Phone review.

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Weighing just 140 grams, the handset offers some of the best optics we've ever found crammed into a cell phone: sharp, noiseless pics (3,264 × 2,448 pixels) and decent image stabilizer punctuate video capture that puts full-figured handicams from 2008 to shame. You can even shoot VGA at 30 fps or QVGA at a whopping 120 fps (yes, 120!), including slow motion footage in 1/4 and 1/8 speeds.

Amazing, sure, but not a picture perfect phone. The i8510 functions almost exactly like a standard point-and-shoot, except for the zoom button, which is placed inexplicably, and awkwardly at the bottom of the device.

WIRED Beaucoup codecs, including — wait for it — DivX! 2.8-inch screen excellent for playback. Intuitive photo/video editing suite. Equally intuitive navigation. Automatic lens cover. MicroSD slot good for 16 GB (enough for aspiring Scorseses to go epic). All the usual smartphone suspects: 3G, Wi-Fi, USB, Bluetooth, accelerometer, GPS. Decent earbuds with ample cord. 3.5mm audio jack. Most excellent: TV-out capability.

TIRED Side-mounted headphone jack makes phone harder to pocket. Optical control pad is a tad sensitive (between us and you — we don't want to hurt its feelings). Most bogus: Metal shell retains enough scratches to fill a DJ Shadow album. A little on the clunky side. Most bogus: Flash needs to be brighter.

$500, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung i8510 INNOV8 review.

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As the successor to Logitech's G11 and G15, this huge hunk of plastic comes with gaming hardwired in its DNA. Like its relatives, it has a blocky aesthetic that harkens to the days of the Model M. There are, however, a handful of very modern flourishes that make this latest G-board a distinctly modern marvel.

In the end, the G19's main drawback is the same one that has plagued fancy keyboards since the days of yore: It's freaking huge. That swiveling LCD? It actually requires a tiny onboard Linux computer to run, which in turn requires its own power source. Should you choose to make use of the two self-powered USB ports, you'll potentially have more wires shooting out of this thing than your computer.

WIRED More customizable than a box of Legos. Two self-powered USB ports. Dedicated D-pad and menu keys let you control LCD directly from the keyboard. Convenient cable management lanes carved into bottom of unit lessens clutter … slightly. Choose-your-own-color adventure with adjustable backlighting. Keys are pleasantly clicky and responsive.

TIRED Limited desktop space? This is not your keyboard. Price tag to match gargantuan footprint. Requires power brick to run. After its novelty wears off, built-in LCD becomes more of a distraction than a useful tool.

$200, Logitech.com

Read our full Logitech G19 Keyboard review.

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Want to catch the last episode of Battlestar Galactica while hanging out in the local java joint? Going to download a season of The Simpsons for viewing on the plane? Giving an impromptu screening of your vacation photos at a friend's house? The Mini 10 is your machine.

But there are infuriating shortcomings to the Mini 10. The trackpad is one of the worst we've seen. Dell's decision to integrate the buttons underneath the pad itself makes using it both unpredictable and challenging. When you click on a button, the cursor may hit the target, wiggle off a centimeter or two, or teleport off into a remote corner of your screen. While it got easier to use after a week of practice, our advice is to invest in a cheap travel mouse.

WIRED Bright, responsive screen. Integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam. Not gunked up with crapware. HDMI-out port shows charming, if unwarranted, optimism about the netbook's video capabilities. Light weight: Just 2.6 pounds.

TIRED Infuriating trackpad with integrated buttons hidden underneath. Excessively glossy screen produces distracting glare. Windows XP is starting to look pretty tired. What, no solid-state option? Despite the HDMI port, the netbook can't deliver HD video without fits and starts.

$470 (as tested), dell.com

Read our full Dell Mini 10 Netbook review.

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The new 370Z upgrades come in the form of a sexy body with a hood, hatch and doors of lightweight aluminum and a chassis significantly stiffer to reduce performance-robbing flex. To make up for the beefier chassis, Nissan's engineers pared more than 225 pounds from the rest of the car — even the audio system lost 3.5 pounds — and the result is a car that weighs 88 pounds less than the previous 350Z.

Every model gets the same 332-horsepower V6, an engine that makes this Z the quickest yet with a zero-to-60 time of 4.6 seconds. That kind of performance, however, is contingent on your skills as a driver. If you don't posses Lewis Hamilton levels of talent don't fret. The Z's abundant power and excellent handling will let you think you do.

WIRED Insanely easy to drive, insanely quickly. You'll run out of nerve before you run out of grip. Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a gramophone.

TIRED Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a vinyl record. Tympani-like tire roar, piccolo-like exhaust note. Hummer-sized blind spots make lane changes a gun-it-and-go-for-it leap of faith. Fake brushed-aluminum interior bits don't fool anyone.

$33,970 (as tested), nissanusa.com

Read our full Nissan 2009 370Z review.

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Using the BookReader is simple: Just plunk a novel on the platen, punch a button and you're relaxing to the dulcet sounds of Jill, a computerized voice with a voracious appetite for literature. All the menus read themselves off when you mouse over them, and they have keyboard shortcuts, which is useful if you have reduced vision. Jill is pretty good at recognizing words. We tried out several books, including one heavy with medical jargon, and she held her own with just a few exceptions.

Useful as it is, we could not help noticing that the BookReader seems to be slightly undercooked. A few of the buttons don't really do anything, and you can't customize the dictionary to alter Jill's interpretation of commonly used, but horribly flubbed words, acronyms or numbers. The unit seems to be terribly overpriced as well. Plustek wants $600 for the BookReader, despite the fact that the OpticBook only costs $250 — and has its own text-to-speech function.

WIRED Reads books to you at the push of a button. Platen glass goes right to the edge to accommodate books without strain. Turns text into MP3s for portability. Includes several accessibility features to help the visually impaired.

TIRED The included software lacks polish and seems rushed. Squat, ugly looks make it seem at home in a cubicle farm. The reader voice may not screw up often, but when it does, it's a doozy. High price nears gouging territory.

$600, plustek.com

Read our full Plustek BookReader V100 review.

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: Photo: Dylan Tweeny/Wired.com

Apple's newest Shuffle (almost 50 percent smaller than previous Shuffles) could easily be mistaken for a stick of Trident, features no buttons, and pimps voice-identification technology. But even given its apparent readily consumable stature, there are a few features on the Shuffle that are a bit tough to swallow.

The biggest gripe on the 4-GB Shuffle we tested is definitely the control set. First off, it's completely counterintuitive; Apple says you can easily use it without looking. We still don't have the hang of it after a few days of testing. What's worse, if you have a decent set of earbuds (say, a pair of Shures or Ultimate Ears) you're totally hosed — you'll have to endure the 'buds that come with the Shuffle or pick up specially made third-party headphones. Our recommendation? Pick up a new Shuffle only if you're prepared to deal with proprietary headphones and ambiguous controls.

WIRED Thumb-drive size. Can double as a tie clip. Battery life lasts for 12 freaking hours. Short USB sync cord is sexy. Yes, we'll admit, it's another beautifully designed piece of hardware from Apple. Battery bonked out after 11 constant hours of blasting Thunderstruck on loop.

TIRED Proprietary headphones required. Control set awkward to use, hard to get used to. So small, it nearly gets lost in the packaging it comes in.

$80, apple.com

Read our full Apple iPod Shuffle 3rd Gen review.

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Rather than foam, gel or compressed-air cushioning, the soles on Newtons have a series of "actuator lugs" just below the ball of the foot. The lugs are designed to help encourage you to land on your forefoot, to protect that part of the foot, and (best yet) to propel you forward. When you land, the lugs push into hollow chambers in the midsole. This cushions your landing, and helps make it comfy to land midsole or forefoot rather than on the heel as you might be accustomed. As your foot moves forward, these lugs then essentially lever out, and as you lift your foot, they return the energy by pushing up and out in the same direction as your stride. Newton claims this makes them more efficient than traditional foam or gel soles that simply absorb energy but don't return it.

WIRED So cozy they're like a Snuggie for your feet. Actuator lugs get you off your heels better than a La-Z-Boy. Lightweight at 10.2 ounces. Designed for all stride types. Stomps cold weather like global warming, and keeps out the drizzle for shizzle.

TIRED Not waterproof. Worse on single-track trails than a skateboard. $175??? OMG, for that much money I could just pay somebody to run for me.

$175, newtonrunning.com

Read our full Newton All Weather Trainer review.

< [Source: Wired News]

Playlist: Spherical Ice, Day-Glo Brothers, Maru the Cat, and More :

The carefully hand-carved orb of ice used to chill our last Yamazaki single malt in Tokyo wasn't just for show. As master bartenders there know, a 2-inch diameter ball of cold has a lower surface-area-to-volume ratio than a typical cube. That means it melts more slowly, preventing vintage hooch from warming up and getting watered down. Japan's mixologists hire apprentices to chisel perfect frozen spheres, but if you aren't so flush, pick up DIY molds (two trays for $16) from the MoMA store.

Photo: Tom Schierlitz

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Not all summer anthems require booty-shaking beats. On its vibrant second album, this Los Angeles-based quartet leaves behind its old melancholy new wave synths for upbeat slide guitar, lively hand claps, and wall-of-sound horns and strings. Somewhere between "Vacationing People" and "See Us Home," we started to long for a little offline, sun-kissed R&R.

Photo: Emily Ulmer

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The NYPD once had a word for walking along this elevated railway line on the West Side: trespassing. But the abandoned tracks, perched 30 feet above Gotham's streets and sidewalks, are being reborn as a surreal 1.5-mile-long public park designed by the landscape architects at Field Operations. Strolling among the trees and meadows atop the hulking steel structure feels like something out of a dream. Or a game of Halo.

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You may not know their names, but you're familiar with their work. In 1938, Bob and Joe Switzer invented fluorescent paint—without which we might not have highlighters, traffic cones, or the cover of this magazine. Their enlightening story, as told by children's author Chris Barton (with illustrator Tony Persiani), shows how basement tinkering can lead to scientific discovery.

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Ever lost baggage while flying to or from Heathrow? There's a tiny chance that Luna Laboo has it. Over the past eight months, the art director has bought $227 worth of unclaimed luggage at airport auctions and photographed it. Her goals: 1) Capture what's inside and 2) harness the power of the Web to return all 11 bags to their rightful owners. Recognize anything?

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Is it OK to eat Independence Day hot dogs on July 9? Just how dangerous is sun-drenched coleslaw? Ask Stilltasty.com. The site tells you when leftovers are safe—and when it's time to toss 'em. It also offers tidbits on whether condiments should be refrigerated (yes) and if that pizza from yesterday's meeting is, well, still tasty (no). Those five-day-old wieners? They're done.

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Inspiration struck artist Erika Iris Simmons when she spotted a bunch of cassettes sitting atop a blank canvas. Now, under the name iRI5, the Atlanta- based Simmons unspools the tapes for her Ghost in the Machine series and uses their entrails to create stunningly accurate portraits of musicians like Tom Waits, Jimi Hendrix, and Robert Smith. (That's Ian Brown of the Stone Roses above.) See and purchase Simmons' work at iRi5.com.

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Barbecuing doesn't have to be a heated challenge, especially if you arm yourself with the right utensils. This seven-in-one multitool packs everything you'll need to make your grilling seem more like chilling: a spatula, two-pronged fork, bottle opener/corkscrew, tongs, serrated cutter, and even built-in holder for a cigarette lighter. The only task it can't handle? Telling you when to flip those Kobe burgers.

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Yes, we know that YouTube is full of cat videos. But this is a Japanese cat video. Starring an acrobatic tabby leaping in and out of a cardboard box. (He even has his own blog.) We laughed so hard we wept. Thanks, Interwebs.:

Two decades after This Is Spinal Tap skewered the music biz, the band has reunited—again—to record a follow-up album. Real rockers Steve Vai and Keith Emerson join parodists Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer on Back From the Dead. The disc includes classic tunes, plus new ones that capture the clumsy mixed metaphors and misogyny intrinsic to Tap's comic genius. First line of the title track: "Give me reincarnation, or give me death!"

Photo: Art Streiber

[Source: Wired News]

The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics

On June 6, 2008, Veronica Noone attached a small sensor to her running shoes and headed out the door. She pressed start on her iPod and began keeping track of every step she took. It wasn't a long run—just 1.67 miles in 18 minutes and 36 seconds, but it was the start of something very big for her.

Since that day, she's run 95 more times, logging 283.8 miles in about 48 hours on the road. She's burned 28,672 calories. And her weight, which topped 225 pounds when she was pregnant, has settled in at about 145.

Noone knows all of that thanks to the sensor system, called Nike+. After each run, she can sync her iPod to the Nike+ Web site and get a visual representation of the workout—a single green line. Its length shows how far she's gone, and the peaks and valleys reflect her speed.

For a self-described "stat whore," there's something powerfully motivating about all the data that Nike+ collects. "It just made running so much more entertaining for me," says Noone, who blogs at ronisweigh.com. "There's something about seeing what you've done, how your pace changes as you go up and down hills, that made me more motivated."

Noone is now running four times a week and just did her first 10-mile race. She's training for a half marathon and hoping to do a full marathon by the end of the year. And she attributes much of her newfound fitness to the power of data. "I can log in to Nike+ and see what I've done over the past year," she says. "That's really powerful for me. When I started, I was running shorter and slower. But I can see that progression. I don't have to question what I've done. The data is right there in white and green."

Noone has joined the legion of people, from Olympic-level athletes to ordinary folks just hoping to lower their blood pressure, who are plugging into a data-driven revolution. And it goes way beyond Nike+. Using a flood of new tools and technologies, each of us now has the ability to easily collect granular information about our lives—what we eat, how much we sleep, when our mood changes.

And not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it as well, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance.

Few things illustrate the power and promise of Living by Numbers quite as clearly as the Nike+ system. By combining a dead-simple way to amass data with tools to use and share it, Nike has attracted the largest community of runners ever assembled—more than 1.2 million runners who have collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories.

With such a huge group, Nike is learning things we've never known before. In the winter, people in the US run more often than those in Europe and Africa, but for shorter distances. The average duration of a run worldwide is 35 minutes, and the most popular Nike+ Powersong, which runners can set to give them extra motivation, is "Pump It" by the Black Eyed Peas.

The company couldn't have gathered all that information, and gained all those insights, if it hadn't reconfigured how runners approach their sport. Nike has done more than create a successful product; it has fundamentally changed the way more than a million people think about exercise.

A brown plastic box, emblazoned with Nike's iconic Swoosh logo, sits on the conference room table at the company's headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. It's a clunky thing, the size of a thick paperback book, with a waist strap and two ports on the front that look like miniature speakers, lending it the air of a shrunken mid-'80s boom box.

It was called the Nike Monitor, and it was the company's first attempt to sell runners a product that would tell them how far and fast they had run. The ports on the front weren't speakers—they were sonar detectors that would calculate a runner's speed, which would then be announced over a pair of headphones. The Monitor had to be strapped to the runner's waist facing forward. It may have been a good idea, but it was utterly impractical. Less than two years after its 1987 launch, the Monitor was dropped from Nike's product lineup.

Michael Tchao, head of Nike's Techlab, laughs. "You can imagine that this device, a little big, maybe not the most fashionable, wasn't the huge runaway success we had hoped. But even 20 years ago, we were experimenting in this space."

Despite Nike's shoe-centric business, its experiments in electronics continued. It launched a line of sports watches, made heart rate monitors, and even entered into an agreement with Philips to market an MP3 player. And Nike engineers constantly tinkered with what they referred to as a "smart shoe," a sneaker with built-in sensors that would automatically record the length and speed of your runs.

But a smart shoe, they realized, wasn't enough—you needed a device to save the data. By late 2004 the engineers started to notice that most of the runners they saw on Nike's campus were sporting white earbuds. The Apple iPod, which debuted in 2001, had mushroomed in popularity, with sales doubling every quarter. "Most runners were running with music already," says Nike president and CEO Mark Parker. "We thought the real opportunity would come if we could combine music and data."

Nike engineers started to brainstorm. They cooked up various demos, even sketching a shoe with an embedded iPod. Finally, Parker picked up the phone and called a friend who worked at Apple—CEO Steve Jobs. After that call, teams from both companies got together at Nike headquarters. "We talked about the idea of Nike+ and actually had a little storyboard that showed it," says Tchao, who worked at Apple for 10 years before joining Nike. "Steve called it 'the speedometer for sports,' and we thought that was an interesting way to describe it. People drove around in cars before speedometers, and today you can't imagine driving without one."

Both companies saw profit potential if they could develop the system together, so the Nike and Apple teams each took on different parts of the project. Apple refined the sensor that Nike had prototyped, making it smaller and more durable. Nike focused on the shoes and the interface for the Web and the iPod. It created a simple system based around the idea of setting goals.

If a runner wants to run 5 miles, they enter that distance and press start. During the run, voice prompts let the runner know how fast they're moving, how far they've gone, and how much farther they need to go. At the end of the run, the user presses stop and the data is saved on the iPod. The next time they sync their iPod, the workout data is automatically uploaded to NikePlus.com, which adds the current information to the history of all their runs.

The basic science that allowed Nike and Apple to capture this information is low tech, introduced in a 40-year-old study published by biomechanical researcher Richard Nelson at Penn State. Nelson filmed a mix of 16 freshman and varsity athletes at the university running at various speeds, on smooth and sloped surfaces. What he found was both simple and powerful—the amount of time a runner's foot is in contact with the ground is inversely proportional to how fast he's running and unaffected by slope or stride length. That means if you know how long that contact lasts, you can make a pretty good guess as to how fast the runner is going.

"People in biomechanics knew about this, but they felt it wasn't good enough for the lab, because it's accurate to plus or minus 5 percent," says Mario Lafortune, director of Nike's Sport Research Lab. "But for an application like Nike+ it's tremendously accurate."

The Nike+ sensor consists of just three parts. There's an accelerometer that detects when your foot hits and leaves the ground, calculating that all-important contact time. There's a transmitter that sends the information to a receiver, one that's either clipped onto an iPod nano or built into the second-generation iPod touch. And there's the battery. That's what Nike+ is.

What's more interesting is what Nike+ isn't. There's no GPS that automatically tracks your routes—if you want to map your run, you have to do it manually on the Nike site. There's no heart rate monitor, so even though you know how far and how fast you've traveled, you don't know what level of cardiovascular exertion it required. "We really wanted to separate ourselves from that sort of very technical, geeky side of things," Tchao says. "Everyone understands speed and distance."

In other words, Nike+ isn't a perfect tool; it wasn't designed to be. But it's good enough, and more crucially, it's simple. Nike learned a huge lesson from Apple: The iPod wasn't a massive hit because it was the most powerful music player on the market but because it offered the easiest, most streamlined user experience.

But that simple, dual-variable tracking can lead to novel insights, especially once you have so many people feeding in data: The most popular day for running is Sunday, and most Nike+ users tend to work out in the evening. After the holidays, there's a huge increase in the number of goals that runners set; this past January, they set 312 percent more goals than the month before.

There's something even deeper. Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.

In the mid-1920s at Western Electric's manufacturing plant in Cicero, Illinois, the management began an experiment. The lighting in an area occupied by one set of workers was increased so there was better illumination to help them see the telephone relays they were building. Perhaps not surprisingly, workers who had more light were able to assemble relays faster.

Other changes were then made: Employees were given rest breaks. Their productivity increased. They were allowed to work shorter hours. Again, they were more efficient during those hours.

But then something weird happened. The lighting was cut back to normal ... and productivity still went up. In fact, just about every change the company made had only one effect: increased worker productivity. After months of tinkering, the work conditions were returned to the original state, and workers built more relays than they did in the exact same circumstances at the start of the experiment.

What was happening? Why was it that no matter what the Hawthorne plant managers did, the workers just performed better? Researchers puzzled over the results, and some still doubt the details of the experiment's protocols. But the study gave rise to what's known in sociology as the Hawthorne effect.

The gist of the idea is that people change their behavior—often for the better—when they are being observed (which is why it's sometimes called the observer effect). Those workers at Western Electric didn't build more relays because there was more or less light or because they had more or fewer breaks. The Hawthorne effect posits that they built more relays simply because they knew someone was keeping track of how many relays they built.

When you lace up your running shoes outfitted with the Nike+ sensor and fire up your iPod, you're both the researcher and the subject—a self-contained experimental system. And what you're likely to find is that the Hawthorne effect kicks in. You're actively observing yourself, and just that fact not only provides information you can act on but also may modify your behavior. That's the power of Living by Numbers.

Keeping track of our lives is nothing new. Athletes have kept training logs to quantify and analyze their workouts. Counting calories has long been a popular and effective way to lose weight.

In the past, that required two steps. First, there was the recording of the information, then the actual effort to modify behavior. In study after study, this extra work turned out to be a huge burden. Compliance fell, and the outcome suffered: People would stop monitoring their caloric intake, fail to change it, and fail to lose weight. Make the data-gathering easy and you remove one of the barriers to meaningful improvement in our lives.

With Nike+ and other tools, that first step has become almost effortless. Dieters don't have to calculate the caloric content of meals manually; they can just log in to FitDay to enter the information in an online food diary. Keeping a training log doesn't mean busting out a pen and paper at the end of a run. It's as simple as listening to music on an iPod while exercising.

But the power of self-tracking is even more profound. It's not just that collecting this data can help us change our behavior all on its own. Using the immensely powerful tools now becoming available, we can set up positive feedback loops: We keep track of something, see how the data matches up with what we'd like to have happen, and then use that knowledge to modify our actions.

The effect of feedback on attempts to change behavior is well established. A 2001 study in the American Journal of Health Behavior showed that personalized feedback increased the effectiveness of everything from smoking-cessation programs to interventions for problem drinkers to exercise programs. Feedback is important and powerful; it works.

That feedback can be internal, too, because when we start to do things to make ourselves more healthy, our bodies react. When obese people lose as little as 7 percent of their body weight, the levels of adiponectin in their blood goes up—reducing their risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Or consider the five-run threshold that Nike has seen in the data. It might be that runners not only like the information they get; they might be getting positive feedback from their body after five runs as well.

Think of it this way: It used to be that to lose weight, you'd keep a diary of everything you ate. Stepping on a scale is easy enough and gives one data point—about the system's output, not its inputs. But develop a system that allows you to track not only your weight but also what you eat, how you exercise, even how you're feeling, and suddenly you can start to pull things together. You can see how all those variables interact and then put that information to use.

We tend to think of our physical selves as a system that's simply too complex to comprehend. But what we've learned from companies like Google is that if you can collect enough data, there's no need for a grand theory to explain a phenomenon. You can observe it all through the numbers. Everything is data. You are your data, and once you understand that data, you can act on it.

On August 31, 2008, thousands of runners lined up for a 10K race in Taipei. And in Melbourne, Australia. In Istanbul and Munich, in Paris and New York, in Austin and at Nike headquarters. In 25 cities, Nike organized what it dubbed the Human Race. But if you weren't in one of these locations, you could still participate—by running 10 kilometers on your own and uploading the data to Nike+. That day, 779,275 people participated both at the race sites and virtually, together running more than 4 million miles.

Gathering and connecting such a large community unlocks another powerful effect of Living by Numbers—the feedback loop that comes not from you but from the world around you. Simply put, other people can tell you to go out and run.

It's one thing if some company tells me that I'm slacking off, like when Nike+ sends an email reminding me to get out and exercise. It's a whole different thing if people whose opinion I care about get on my case. Nike+ lets a user create a goal—one that other people can see. Let's say I pledge to run 100 miles this month. I can then enter the email addresses of people I'd like to cheer me on—my wife, my mother, my boss. As I sync up after each run, the data is uploaded to the site, and my support group is updated on my progress. The hope is that they'll use whatever techniques they can to try to motivate me. (One imagines praise, guilt, and threats, in that order.)

Again, Nike is tapping into well-known science here—the power of communities. Nicholas Christakis, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, has been examining how social networks influence our behavior. For instance, in a network of more than 12,000 people in Framingham, Massachusetts, he found that smoking behavior tends to cluster: People quit smoking in groups, as part of a team effort; as more of them stop, the remaining smokers find themselves moving to the margins of the social network. Those community ties have direct effects on people's behavior.

Competition can be another great motivator. Nike+ has a feature that sets up challenges for a group of runners, from just two friends to the entire massive community. Software developer and Nike+ runner Cabel Sasser compares the system to a videogame. "Like any good online game, you can challenge your friends," wrote Sasser on his blog. "First to 100 miles? Fastest 5-mile time? Your call. These challenges wind up being incredibly inspiring ... Logging in after a long run, uploading your data, and seeing where you are in the standings is a pretty awesome way to wrap up your exercise. And more important, sitting around the house, wondering what to do, thinking about jogging, and then realizing that if you don't go jogging tonight you're going to lose points and slip in the standings—now that's true videogame motivation."

As Nike has slowly added features to Nike+, a small group of outside software makers have raced forward, showing how the system might grow and morph over time. Open source projects like Neki++ and Running Tracker give you control over your data, allowing you to download and analyze it directly, without going through Nike's site. Since the data is exported from the iPod in a standardized format, it's relatively easy for other services to manipulate. Users have hooked Nike+ into other social networks—Twiike automatically posts your run data to Twitter whenever you sync it.

In a stance that's uncommon for a company that has historically relied on patented technology like its Air cushioning system, Nike seems to be genuinely excited to see these tools sprout up. After all, the more apps out there, the more Nike+ gear the company can sell. "The more we can open up Nike+, the better," says Stefan Olander, who oversees digital content for the Nike+ site. "The only reason to close it out is because you actually don't believe that you have a strong enough product for others to want to take it and do good things with it." So far, Nike hasn't officially released a software kit to allow developers to hook directly into Nike+, but that's likely to come.

"The open sourcing piece hasn't been developed yet," says Nike CEO Parker, "but that's part of our plan moving forward. The technology here is still in its infancy."

The challenge Nike faces is that it's a hardware company, one that owes its success to deep understanding of cushioning foam and biomechanics. The genius of Nike+ isn't the hardware, no matter how clever and easy to use it might be. The genius is the software—the deeper insight it allows and the connections with others it helps make.

So while some athletes would like to see more features, like heart rate monitoring (the company says that it is looking into it for a next-generation product), that's almost beside the point. If Nike wants to make Nike+ into the universal platform where athletes track their workout data, it has to find new, unexpected ways to collect and share it effortlessly.

Nike has always tried to meet the physical needs of athletes with shoes and equipment, but Nike+ does something very different. Nike+ is about creating, and then meeting, a psychological need. "What Nike+ taught us about was context," says Trevor Edwards, Nike vice president of global brand management. "It lets the product live beyond its physical use."

There's a purity about running. All you need are a set of legs and lungs and the effort required to move forward, faster. For most runners, it's an intensely individual experience—you and the road or trail. The world shrinks, and you focus on yourself in isolation.

Of course, another word for isolation is boredom. For a lot of people, there's something excruciating about exercise—it's right up there with balancing your checkbook, visiting your in-laws, and flossing your teeth. That was the case with Rick Law. "I used to complain about how inactive I was and wish there was an interesting way to become more physically active," says Law, who works as a technology manager at Thomson Reuters in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2007, Law's wife gave him a Nike+ system for Christmas, hoping it would motivate him.

It did. The first run Law did was just over 10 minutes long, not even a mile. But day after day, he'd head out in the morning before going to the office, putting in the work to get stronger and faster. Soon he was up to 3 miles, then 8, then 10.

By tracking his effort—enhancing an analog experience with digital technology—Law found that running could be as interesting as his work. When you're Living by Numbers, what happens after the run becomes as important as the run itself. Law got feedback as he ran and enjoyed the sense of accomplishment that came from charting his progress as he got more and more fit.

For many Nike+ users, doing their exercise becomes inextricable from measuring it. Again and again, they tell you that without their unit, running is mundane, like listening to a symphony through laptop speakers "Forgetting my Nike+ sensor, or my iPod battery being dead, just takes the life out of my run," Law says.

A couple of weeks before Christmas 2008, Law ran the Dallas White Rock Half Marathon. "It was an endurance struggle for me," Law says. "But in a year, I went from the couch to a half marathon." He finished the 13.1 miles in two hours, 26 minutes, 28 seconds. Now, Law is training for the Chicago Marathon in October, tracking a new goal. All told, he's spent 75 hours and 27 minutes on the road, and he's put in 428.8 miles. And counting.

Senior editor Mark McClusky (mark_mcclusky@wired.com) wrote about performance-enhancing drugs in issue 15.01.

[Source: Wired News]

Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365

I got up at 6:20 this morning, after going to bed at 12:40 am. I woke up twice during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute, and my blood pressure, averaged over three measurements, was 127/ 74. My mood was a 4 on a scale of 5. My exercise time in the last 24 hours was 0 minutes, and my maximum heart rate during exercise was not calculated. I consumed 400 milligrams of caffeine and 0 ounces of alcohol. And in case you were wondering, my narcissism score is 0.31 (more on that in a moment).

Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. We have pedometers in the soles of our shoes and phones that can post our location as we move around town. We can tweet what we eat into a database and subscribe to Web services that track our finances. There are sites and programs for monitoring mood, pain, blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, cognitive alacrity, menstruation, and prayers. Even sleep—a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you're unconscious—is yielding to the skill of the widget maker. With an accelerometer and some decent algorithms, you will soon be able to record your sleep patterns with technology that costs less than $100.

All this might once have seemed like a nightmare, the kind of thing that would be proposed by Thomas Gradgrind, the schoolmaster in Charles Dickens' Hard Times, who barks at his students by number—"Girl number twenty!"—and blasts every person he meets with unsolicited facts and statistics. Quantitative analysis by its very nature seems remorseless and inhuman. Numbers may be useful for epidemiologists and insurance companies, school systems, the military, and sociology professors, but what have they to do with the fabric of our personal lives? To be turned from warm flesh into cold arithmetic—what a terrible thing. As the hero of the cult TV series The Prisoner cried, "I am not a number! I am a free man!"

But two years ago, my fellow Wired writer Kevin Kelly and I noticed that many of our acquaintances were beginning to do this terrible thing to themselves, finding clever ways to extract streams of numbers from ordinary human activities. A new culture of personal data was taking shape. The immediate cause of this trend was obvious: New tools had made self-tracking easier. In the past, the methods of quantitative assessment were laborious and arcane. You had to take measurements manually and record them in a log; you had to enter data into spreadsheets and perform operations using unfriendly software; you had to build graphs to tease understanding out of the numbers. Now much of the data-gathering can be automated, and the record-keeping and analysis can be delegated to a host of simple Web apps. With new tracking systems popping up almost daily, we decided to create a Web site to track them. We called our project the Quantified Self. We don't have a slogan, but if we did it would probably be "Self-knowledge through numbers."

We're aware of how absurd this sounds. Self-knowledge through numbers. What could that possibly mean? Of course you can learn things about yourself through numbers—weight is probably the most common personal metric—but self-knowledge has connotations that go beyond quotidian facts. "Know Thyself" was inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, held up as an ideal in Latin and Christian philosophy, and recycled by generations of advice mongers. Self-knowledge was obtained through introspection and reflection; that is, through words.

But there has long been a parallel method of understanding ourselves. Athletes are among the pioneers: With their increasingly precise and scientific training regimens, serious competitors now commonly load databases not only with their practice results but also with stats on the biological precursors of optimum performance: heart rate, diet, metabolism, and dozens of other factors. Anywhere the goal is explicit—run faster, weigh less—the ability to plot progress is too powerful to ignore.

But the newest tools open possibilities for personal tracking in areas of life that had always seemed inaccessible to quantitative methods. Diarists often chronicle their moods, creating a paper trail that provides a sense of mastery over fleeting emotions. There is a problem, however, with this sort of old-fashioned journal-keeping: You record your mood only when you're in the mood to do so, which introduces a bias. If you impose a regular schedule, noting your feelings at the same time every day, you face the issue that mood varies predictably with time of day and regular cycles of activity. It might seem that we're simply incapable of reliably tracking our own subjective states, but social scientists solved this problem years ago: Just randomize the time of inquiry. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson reported early results using such methods back in 1983, launching a productive line of research in psychology. At the time, of course, this was work for professionals with programmed watches. It wasn't clear how you would direct a random inquiry to yourself.

With today's technology, such things are now trivial. There is open source software for random experience sampling. This feature is already embedded in tools like Happy Factor, a Facebook app that randomly pings you with a text message, to which you respond with a number indicating your happiness level. There are protocols for measuring mental fitness that take less than five minutes to complete and provide a baseline for experiments on your brain's agility. The Web site CureTogether lets users log an enormous range of conditions, symptoms, and feelings. Modern self-tracking systems can measure our bodies, our minds, and our movements.

But can they measure our narcissism? The question comes up often enough to require an answer. My original impulse, after I'd heard it three or four times, was to investigate it in the spirit of the self-tracking movement—that is, with a number. There is a well-validated psychological test for measuring narcissism that takes only a few minutes to fill out. I administered it to three dozen self-trackers, and the mean score was 0.38, which is within the normal range. But of course, that's not a real answer, because when people ask whether self-tracking is narcissistic, they're not wondering about clinical narcissism. They're wondering about selfishness, narrowness, a retreat from social engagement and social generosity into an egotistical world of self.

Oddly, though, self-tracking culture is not particularly individualistic. In fact, there is a strong tendency among self-trackers to share data and collaborate on new ways of using it. People monitoring their diet using Tweet What You Eat! can take advantage of crowdsourced calorie counters; people following their baby's sleep pattern with Trixie Tracker can graph it against those of other children; women watching their menstrual cycle at MyMonthlyCycles can use online tools to match their chart with others'. The most ambitious sites are aggregating personal data for patient-driven drug trials and medical research.

Self-trackers seem eager to contribute to our knowledge about human life. The world is full of potential experiments: people experiencing some change in their lives, going on or off a diet, kicking an old habit, making a vow or a promise, going on vacation, switching from incandescent to fluorescent lighting, getting into a fight. These are potential experiments, not real experiments, because typically no data is collected and no hypotheses are formed. But with the abundance of self-tracking tools now on offer, everyday changes can become the material of careful study.

When magnifying lenses were invented, they were aimed at the cosmos. But almost immediately we turned them around and aimed them at ourselves. The telescope became a microscope. We discovered blood cells. We discovered spermatozoa. We discovered the universe of microorganisms inside ourselves. The accessible tools of self-tracking and numerical analysis offer a new kind of microscope with which to find patterns in the smallest unit of sociological analysis, the individual human. But the notion of a personal microscope isn't quite right, because insight will come not just from our own numbers but from combining them with the findings of others. Really, what we're building is what climate scientist Jesse Ausubel calls a macroscope.

The basic idea of a macroscope is to link myriad bits of natural data into a larger, readable pattern. This means computers on one side and distributed data-gathering on the other. If you want to see the climate, you gather your data with hyperlocal weather stations maintained by amateurs. If you want to see traffic, you collect info from automatic sensors placed on roadways and cars. If you want new insights into yourself, you harness the power of countless observations of small incidents of change—incidents that used to vanish without a trace. And if you want to test an idea about human nature in general, you aggregate those sets of individual observations into a population study.

The macroscope will be to our era of science what the telescope and the microscope were to earlier ones. Its power will be felt even more from the new questions it provokes than from the answers it delivers. The excitement in the self-tracking movement right now comes not just from the lure of learning things from one's own numbers but also from the promise of contributing to a new type of knowledge, using this tool we all build.

Contributing editor Gary Wolf (gary@aether.com)blogs about self-tracking at quantifiedself.com. He wrote about the barcode of life in issue 16.10.

[Source: Wired News]

Scrappy Post-Apollo Lunar Science Sets Stage for New Missions A new mission to the moon is both the culmination of the shoestring post-Apollo lunar science program and the beginning of NASA's planned manned return to the satellite.

[Source: Wired News]

Gear gallery: The iPhone 3GS, GPS Grandmaster and Split Personality Samsung Phone :

The iPhone 3GS combines two sets of advances. The first group is available only to purchasers of the new hardware. The rest of the features are part of Apple's iPhone 3.0 software upgrade, which is offered free to those with earlier iPhones. (iPod Touch users can get the new software for $10.)

I'll talk about the hardware-based features first. As promised, Apple has indeed ramped up the speed with which the new phone performs tasks like launching apps, loading web pages, and displaying graphics. Apple claims speed boosts of up to two times of what the 3G delivers, and in some benchmarks cites even better performance. I haven't done scientific measurements, but you don't need a stopwatch to notice the new phone is zippier than its predecessor. I appreciated getting box scores faster and videos playing sooner in the MLB.com At Bat application, and it was clear that web pages loaded faster. In the case of a game like Tiger Woods Golf, the boost is significant enough to make me more likely to play when I don't have much time.

Photos were a weak spot in previous iPhones — they weighed in at a measly 2 megapixels — but the iPhone 3GS has a 3-megapixel, autofocusing camera that's more sensitive and allows you to choose an object to focus on by tapping on it. (No zoom, though. Bummer.) Better yet, the camera also records quite creditable video. After you shoot your clip, there's a dead-simple function for instant editing, after which you can send your masterpiece to YouTube or Mobile Me with a single tap.

WIRED Faster. More storage. Better camera, with video recording capability. Search encompasses more data, not just one app at a time. Voice navigation. Feature-rich iPhone 3.0 software is free to current iPhone users.

TIRED Multitasking still limited. No tethering or MMS support yet for AT&T users. Recent iPhone 3G customers must pay a fortune to upgrade.

$300 (32-GB version, with 2-year contract), apple.com

Read our full iPhone 3GS review.

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TomTom's Go Live 740 is a new breed of web-ready GPS in which web access seems like a well-integrated enhancement, not a useless afterthought.

At almost half a pound it sits comfortably in hand, and its colorful 4.3-inch 320 × 240 touch screen is both bright and responsive to repeated pokes. And with its 2GB of memory, microSD port, and integrated Bluetooth we were able to smoothly navigate between a number of tasks, such as listening to music and using the integrated speaker for hands-free calls while paired with a cell phone.

WIRED Svelte, smooth-to-touch design and construction. Decent signal acquisition times (average of four minutes on a cold start). Sports both Bluetooth audio and file exchange capabilities. Intuitive, touch-based interface and menu tree. Allows instant messaging with other TomTom users. Comes with car charger, dash mount, USB cradle charger. It feels ... sexy.

TIRED Navigational interface displays waaay too much information at one time (speed, distance, current time, arrival time, current street, next turn, distance to turn, etc.). Sketchy voice recognition doesn't cut it. Web-enabled services are only free for the first 90 days ($10/mo. afterwards). Speaker would occasionally sound garbled, mispronounce common street names.

$370, TomTom.com

Read our full TomTom Go Live 740 review

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The coolest trick the Alias 2 can pull off is changing from a number pad to a text keyboard as you flip it open. It's a cool trick and makes the Alias 2 somewhat like the Optimus Maximus of phones. This keyboard beats a touchscreen any day of the week; the little mounds offer tactile feedback not found in any iDevice.

In stark contrast to the phone's E Ink deftness other parts of the Alias 2 are decidedly girlish and silly. An included theme for the phone evokes a she-teen boudoir that counts colorful Trapper-Keepers, potted plants and a rainbow peeking in the window among its touches. Access the menu, and the room comes alive, with menu items as knick-knacks, recent calls as a dorm message board and utilities in a toolbox on the floor. Fortunately, you can change this, if you dig around in settings long enough. The preinstalled ringtones are laughable, ranging from cheesy period pieces, to earsplitting high-range electronica, to faux hip-hop distilled somewhere in Seoul's equivalent of 8 Mile. Anyone with a shred of self-respect would be wise to immediately hop on the internet and download a decent Black Sabbath riff for a ringtone.

WIRED E Ink keyboard morphs button layouts when switching from phone to messaging device. Voice quality is high. Battery life is nearly six hours. Reasonably priced.

TIRED The Dear Diary feel of the interface is at odds with anyone over 13. My Room Menu theme is embarrassing. Lack of dedicated buttons leave you hunting and pecking for even the most common tasks.

$130 (with a two year contract), samsung.com

Read our full Samsung Alias 2 review.

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Size seems to matter to the folks at Amazon. While the Kindle 2 has a 6-inch (measured diagonally) e-ink screen — roughly the area of a mass-market paperback book — the DX's 9.7-inch screen resembles a page from a typical hardback. Put another way, the DX flaunts 2.5 times more display space. More text on a page means more lines and, if you prefer, a bigger font, without having to turn the page as often. What does that mean for you? It's easier to read using the DX.

By elegantly super-sizing the Kindle — and ramping up its ability to read files — Amazon has improved the best all-around e-reader available. But the hefty price tag doesn't fit Jeff Bezo's stated philosophy of getting the best value for his customers.

WIRED Big-screen device that's even more readable than the original Kindle. PDF support is a welcome addition.

TIRED High cost of admission. Pivot mode has hair trigger. Southpaws will find the reader cumbersome.

$490, amazon.com

Read our full Amazon.com Kindle DX review.

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Shaped like a small bar of shower soap, the dense, ebony Pre matches many (if not all) of the features of its chief competitor, the iPhone. But in one key aspect, the Pre does the iPhone one better. While a lot of the Pre's features — a bright 3.1-inch touchscreen manipulated by taps, swipes and pinches; apps sold by third parties in an open online bazaar; integration of e-mail, contacts and calendar — are now standard in 3G smartphones, Palm also lets users keep multiple applications running simultaneously.

Its long-term prospects, though, hinge on whether or not all those third-party apps will show up, whether Sprint can satisfy users, and whether Apple has something up its sleeve that counters the Palm's gambits. Also, of course, the Pre has to prove stable and reliable. (Our test unit occasionally suffered opening-day jitters, including a crash that was fixed only by taking out the removable battery.)

WIRED Great look and superb feel. Well-conceived OS with multitasking and instant notification. Physical keyboard. Utilizes iTunes to load and refresh content.

TIRED Multitasking puts a big suck on the battery. Sprint exclusivity will be annoying to Palm-philes on a contract with AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. Keyboard is puny. If Apple blocks the handset's access to iTunes, Pre users are hosed.

$200 (with two year contract), palm.com

Read our full Palm Pre review.

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Demonstrating that it's serious about making a run at the top-end offerings from Canon and Nikon, the K-7 bows with a spankin' new 14.6 megapixel, 28.1mm (diagonal) CMOS image sensor and an updated Prime II processor. This enables HD-video capture, built-in high dynamic range shooting, a 77-segment metering system, pre- and post-production filtering and distortion correction, all in a form factor more than 10 percent smaller (and actually easier to handle) than its predecessor, the K20D.

By and large, it's a super quick focusing compact image-maker — once you learn how the menu system works. But it's just a step or two behind Nikon and Canon in ease of use. In spite of that, Pentax has nearly hit a home run with the K-7. It's svelte, sturdy, fairly easy to operate, has a great range of available lenses and a feature set that's unmatched at this price. Think of it as a solid double off the wall, with an RBI.

WIRED Speedy 5.2 frames per second. Super-sturdy construction. Lots of pro features at a prosumer price. Improved battery life and 100 percent field-of-view viewfinder. Faster, more robust processor. Live View with contrast focus and face detection. Shoots 5.2 frames-per-second with shutter speed up to 1/8000. The 77-segment metering system and 11-point AF system are quick and spot on. Internal mechanical shake reduction.

TIRED User interface needs to be simpler and more unified.

$1,300 (body only), pentax.com

Read our full Pentax K-7 DSLR review.

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The A600's 21.5-inch screen (1920 x 1080 pixels) is big and dazzlingly bright — so much so that Lenovo includes an automatic screen-dimming system designed to prevent eyestrain. Inside its bowels, this 25-pounder offers substantial specs: 2.13-GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and a terabyte hard drive. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics card may be getting a little long in the tooth, but it's powerful enough to make the A600 more than acceptable to play all but the very latest gaming titles.

That's a lot of stuff for the price — $1,150 — and stripped-down versions of the IdeaCentre run considerably less. If you don't need the power but dig the design and screen size, the budget rendition might be an even better bet.

WIRED Very small footprint. Single-cable design is a blessing for technophobes. Swivel base makes adjustments to viewing angle easy. Six USB ports and 802.11n Wi-Fi, plus FireWire, SD and coaxial connectors.

TIRED Keyboard and mouse frequently fall asleep; difficult to awaken. Remote control overly complex and rather homely. Included games feel like an engineer on Quaaludes designed them.

$1,150 (as tested), lenovo.com

Read our full Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 review.

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Its glossy black finish and polished Darth Vader design makes Samsung's newest Blu-ray box, the BD-P4600, stand out from every other player on the market. Well, it actually doesn't stand anywhere at all -- it comes with the metal brackets to mount it on a wall or plant it on a desktop pedestal. And like Lord Vader, this model packs some serious force with its built-in streaming for Pandora music and Netflix.

For $100 less, you could pick up Samsung's BD-P3600 a player that has all the same features as this model but comes in a non-wall-mountable chassis. But really, would you want to watch The Empire Strikes Back on a Blu-ray player that didn't look like it was made in a dark corner of Coruscant?

WIRED High-end, spacey designed Blu-ray player is loaded with features include ability to wall mount, loads Blu-ray discs exceptional fast and offers exceptional playback.

TIRED Complicated initial setup for its feature set. Cramped underside port-connection compartment. Competitively over priced for what it delivers.

$500, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung BD-P4600 review.

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Let's cut to the chase and hit you with the sell: The MSI X340 is a MacBook Air at half the price. Interested? Read on.

For starters, the X340 (aka the X Slim) is considerably better muscled than your typical netbook, featuring a glossy 13.4-inch (1366 x 768 pixels) screen, 320-GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM. Like Apple's ultralight, it's incredibly thin — about 0.8 inches at its thickest — and it actually weighs slightly less than the Air, just 2.9 pounds.

Before you start salivating over the prospects of a half-price Air, note that Apple's laptop does trump the X340 in a few significant ways. The Air includes Nvidia graphics, while the X340 is stuck with Intel's integrated chipset.

The screens are night and day: The Air is renowned for having one of the brightest LCDs available, while the X340 is merely average in this department.

WIRED Gorgeous design; slap an Apple sticker over the MSI logo and no one will ever know. Performance bests most netbooks, though it's hardly top-notch. Surprisingly good graphics and responsiveness. Includes the usual goodies: 1.3-MP webcam, Bluetooth, 802.11n.

TIRED Flaky touchpad. Disappointing battery life.

$900 (as tested), us.msi.com

Read our full MSI X340 review.

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The first day we took the car for a spin we kept the front-mounted 5.9-liter 470 BHP vehicle on a strict diet of city driving: no freeways, no tightly coiled back roads. Trudging through heavy traffic almost felt sadistic — kind of like taking a thoroughbred racehorse and giving it polio. But after exiting the city limits and tearing down a stretch of asphalt connecting San Francisco with Napa Valley, the DB9 snapped up, greedily devouring 90-degree curves with just a hint of oversteer.

WIRED Fast like a sports car, more refined than a quart of 40-weight. Gorgeous; induces whiplash in head-turning bystanders. Zippy acceleration for a GT — you can't front on a 4.6-second zero-to-60 time ... unless you're armed with a Ferrari or a Bentley.

TIRED Hood-release switch located in impossibly hard to find/reach nook (as if an Aston owner would ever do that). iPod access tres difficult to set up. Chugs gas like an ASU freshman rips beer-bong hits. Back seat harder to get into than MIT.

$209,000 as tested, astonmartin.com

Read our full Aston Martin DB9 review.

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If you don't mind looking like an extra in a 1-800-Dentist commercial and have no reservations about looking like a crazy person yammering to yourself, the Plantronics Voyager Pro may be the perfect Bluetooth headset for you.

This headset is big, bulky and (surprise, surprise) silly looking. The 3-inch boom extending out toward your mouth is the main culprit of these crimes against style. But despite being tacky, the Voyager Pro delivers strong performance. It's easy to use, withstands drops, bumps and haphazardly tossed laptops, has decent battery life and pairs effortlessly with a range of smartphones, including the iPhone.

WIRED Easy to use. Super sound quality. Stays attached to your ear. You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.

TIRED You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.

$100, plantronics.com

Read our full Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset review.

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After a few grim years ceded to the iMac, PC-based all-in-one desktops are making an LL Cool J-esque comeback. Their next move: Make the switch from semi-luxe gear designed for highly aesthetic environments to the megacheap world that the netbook has built.

Specs look exceedingly promising at first: 250 GB of hard drive space, 2 GB of RAM, integrated Wi-Fi, DVD burner, an SD card slot and a very bright 19-inch touchscreen display. If nothing else, it's one of the best-looking touchscreens (non-capacitive; a stylus works better than your finger) we've seen at this screen size.

But the Achilles' heel of the Wind Top is its baffling choice of an Atom 330 processor to power these guts. Although the dual-core 330 is known as the "fast" version of the Atom (it draws 8 watts instead of the 2.5 watts used by the netbook standard Atom N270 and has double the L2 cache), it's still woefully inadequate for a computer this ambitious.

WIRED Amazingly affordable and loaded to the gills. Touchscreen makes this a perfect kiddie computer. Slim profile lets it fit just about anywhere. Cuter than a box of puppies.

TIRED Performance problems dog the user at every turn. Flashing blue hard-drive activity light is front and center, terribly distracting and impossible to cover up. Bundled keyboard and mouse are beyond cheap. Webcam aim can't be adjusted.

$590 (as tested), us.msi.com

Read our full MSI Wind Top AE1900 review.

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The new Chrome Soyuz is an ambitious (if slightly crazed) reimagining of the urban commuter backpack. It's a weird hybrid of a river-rafting drybag and laptop case, all contained within a stylish wedge of black and red nylon.

It sits comfortably behind your back, letting you weave through traffic on your fixie without fear of snagging on the projecting mirrors of double-parked delivery trucks. It can ride between your knees on a crowded train. And it tucks neatly below an airplane seat, leaving just enough space on either side to squeeze in your feet so you can stretch your legs.

WIRED Wedge design keeps load balanced, trim and compact. Expandable waterproof compartment shrinks down to nothing when empty. Heavy-duty 1,000-denier cordura nylon withstands abuse. Main compartments are completely waterproof. Heavy-duty metal strap locks make adjustment easy. Glorious enameled metal "Chrome" logo.

TIRED Narrow openings + deep compartments = where the hell did my keys go? Not quite big enough to contain a six-pack (unless you put the bottles in one by one). Padding traps heat, steaming your back on long rides. No hip belt. Pricier than a metric ton of pig iron.

$180, chromebags.com

Read our full Chrome Soyuz Backpack review.

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The pristine fidelity these headphones deliver is the result of a dual-armature layout, which bathes your tympanic membranes in accurate audio reproduction. The earpiece's dual drivers have the added benefit of propping up the typically flaccid base that seems to plague many other in-ear monitors.

The only major downside is that great sound comes at a considerable price — $230 to be precise. For most people, that's likely to be as much (or more) than you spent on your MP3 player. But as my neglected Audio Technicas can attest, in this case, you undoubtedly get what you pay for.

WIRED Exquisite sound reproduction in an insanely small package. Handy in-flight attenuator saves you from Captain Blowhard's eardrum-exploding announcements. Fuller, richer base and wider frequency response than previous UEs.

TIRED Spendiferous. Cable noise will distract joggers or anyone planning to use the headphones while exercising. Despite its redesign, the pocket case is still too small to fit all the accouterments.

$230, ultimateears.com

Read our full Ultimate Ears 700 Noise-Isolating Earphones review.

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Digeo's Moxi HD DVR sports a slick, Emmy-winning (seriously) user interface and all the commercial-skipping accouterments of competitors like TiVo. It even ditches a monthly bill in favor of flat pricing and grants access to online video and music.

The Moxi's stunning high-def UI is full of slick transitions and responsive performance. Unfortunately, sleek visuals don't conquer all. Basics like surfing through the program guide (or accessing a previously recorded show) took a lot of hunting and pecking through a menu tree. Finding pre-recorded shows and getting them to play took searching, highlighting, selecting Play, confirming that you selected Play, and then finally watching.

WIRED No monthly bills. Sleek high-def interface has nifty animations and transitions. Hard drive expandable to 1 TB for power recorders. Dual tuners let you watch one show while recording another. Offers a whopping 1.5-hour buffer time per HD channel.

TIRED Hefty entry fee. Online video chops not quite up to snuff. No dedicated Guide button on the remote?! Unnecessarily complicated menus. Programming schedules are displayed in cramped vertical list instead of friendly grid.

$800, moxi.com

Read our full Digeo Moxi HD DVR review.

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We're a little dismayed by the E71x. The device is almost identical to the E71: same 3.2-megapixel camera, same .04-inch profile, same vibrant 320 x 240 QVGA display, same business apps and multimedia functionality. The operating system is slightly tweaked so there are some differences in transmissions and page loading. But as a whole, the phone is relatively unchanged.

These are the key differences: a new $100 price tag (good), a black paint job (badass) and the omission of our favorite feature from the original E71 (ugly). We're talking about the two separate, customizable home screens, something we absolutely loved about the O.G. E71. One screen was designed for business, the other for personal use. It was a great function: You could literally edit spreadsheets from 9 to 5 on one screen, then toggle over to the other and watch a couple of episodes of 30 Rock on the media player.

WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.

TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.

$100 with 2-year contract, att.com

Read our full Nokia E71x Smartphone review.

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The Replica comes with bare-bones software and strikes a good balance between peace of mind and individual-user control.

After the hard drive is plugged in, the Replica starts mirroring your computer's content. The startup process is short, taking only a couple of minutes, though the actual backup is a time-gobbling endeavor. (It took us about four hours to transfer 130 GB of data). A blue light on the top of the Replica's case blinks continuously while data is being transferred. It's also stealthy for a hard drive, emitting only a quiet whir when working at full speed.

WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.

TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.

$200, seagate.com

Read our full Seagate Replica 500GB review.

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Panasonic's new HDC-TM300 shoots in "Full HD," marketing speak for 1080p — aka 1080 x 1920 resolution with progressive-scan video. Translation? Stunning Blu-ray-level video that should more than lives up to the most critical expectations of prosumers and video enthusiasts.

The highlight of this shooter is the high-def footage. Not only does the phenomenal zoom reel in distant objects, but thanks to the triple sensors and quality lens, it nails far-off details perfectly. The architectural features of distant buildings we shot in downtown San Francisco showed up like we were standing on the window ledge -- not in a park three blocks away.

WIREDReproduces colors like a Crayola factory. Closeups pop with sharp, clear details. Nice performance in low light. Einstein-smart automatic shooting features are like having your own DP built into the camera. 32-GB onboard memory is expandable via SDHC slot. Great zoom tackles action better than Jason Statham.

TIRED Fast pans in bright daylight turns up more artifacts than a Mayan ruin. May require second mortgage.

$1,300, Panasonic.com

Read our full Panasonic HDC-TM300 HD Camcorder review.

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In the aftermath (heh heh) of the bass-heavy Beats by Dre Studio headphones, Monster decided to pack the Doctor's finicky sound quality specs into two tiny earbuds. Naturally, audiophiles (including myself) were skeptical. Sure the Beats suffered from shoddy construction and fell apart after a few months of ownership, but they also provided some of the best bass we've ever heard in a set of cans.

Sure enough, the bass response from these things is rich and full. The lowest frequencies rumble with a force akin to the thud of a decent subwoofer. Keep in mind these are not miniaturized 12-inch Kickers designed to blow your eardrums out. But for a device that is essentially a tiny speaker with no auxiliary power, they're superb — especially when compared to the white earcruds doled out by Apple with every iDevice.

WIRED Excellent all-around frequency definition and particularly impressive bass response. Monster’s durable, ingenious anti-tangle cable means jumbled cords are a distant unpleasant memory.

TIRED The bright red cable is slightly ostentatious. Peak bass only hits at earwax shattering volumes.

$150, beatsbydre.com

Read our full Monster Beats By Dre Tour High-Resolution In-Ear Headphones review.

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The UE-11 Pros are packed with four, count 'em, four drivers: There's a double dose of bass, one for the midrange and one chiming the highs. If you're looking for the most precise, separated sound possible, then this is the earphone for you. Throughout the play list I heard clarity and detail in the music I'd never heard before. This rang especially true with classical tunes — it literally feels like sitting in a symphony hall and having every instrument speak directly to you. To get that kind of superior fidelity you'll certainly have to pay the piper. But you'll really love the music while Rome — or your bank account — burns.

WIRED Most clear, separated and detailed sound.

TIRED Try convincing your spouse you need a $1,150 set of headphones.

$1,150, ultimateears.com

Read our full UE-11 Pro review.

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The slate-gray, high-impact polymer body houses three LEDs capable of blasting out a peak 270 lumens for 15 minutes, or a more useful and long-lasting 90 lumens for 60 minutes. Both settings have an emergency low-power 25-lumen mode (equivalent in brightness to most common household D-cell flashlights) for an additional 60 minutes.

WIRED High-power pro flashlight pumps out awesome illumination and recharges ridiculously fast. Flashlight will outlive you. Seriously brilliant, blinding — a boon for flashlight junkies.

TIRED Pricy front-end investment. Comes with a 12-volt car charger.

$170, 511tactical.com

Read our full 5.11 Tactical Light review.

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In our tests, we threw all things digital at this 68-pound slab. And while it does not perform as superbly as its higher-price brethren from Sony, Samsung and Sharp, it still shows off a completely acceptable high-def image and above-average sound.

So where has Westinghouse cut corners? Oh, let's see. How about the borderline embarrassing 1000:1 contrast ratio? In a well-lit room, the screen looks more washed out than a warehouse full of Maytags. And even though the set offers the 120-Hz spec, fast motion still looks a bit blurred.

WIRED High resolution and decent sound at incredible rock-bottom price. Convenience features integrated into menu. Quality remote not found in higher-priced TVs.

TIRED Displays some pixelated speckled noise in darker and mid-hue images. Analog-station reproduction is downright blurry. No worries though — analog TV has flatlined.

$700, Westinghouse.com

Read our full Westinghouse TX-42F450S review.

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It's not quite a netbook, not quite an ultralight PC. Whatever it is, Samsung's NC20 is a dazzling feat of engineering: an extremely usable 12-inch laptop with epic battery life, impressive specs and a downright mystifyingly affordable price tag.

But the NC20 doesn't make depressing tradeoffs to achieve those scores. Battery life is three hours, 40 minutes (22 percent longer than the S10) and weight is just 3.3 pounds, comparable to the Asus Eee PC 1000H. All that and you get a 12.1-inch LCD, too, instead of the usual 10.2-inch netbook display.

WIRED Everything a netbook should be: Offers the best performance available from a computer this portable and inexpensive. Very usable keyboard. Good quality audio. Includes three USB ports, 1.3-megapixel webcam, and SD card slot.

TIRED LCD could be a touch brighter and quality sharper. Chassis design is a bit boring.

$550, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung NC 20 review.

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Pure Digital's Flip has proven that it's possible to build a super-small flash memory camcorder and offer it up for fewer than two hundred bucks. But there are tradeoffs with going small and cheap, like optics and battery life. Canon takes a completely different tack with its newest solid-state cam, the Vixia HF S10, which delivers some fantastically brilliant moving pictures, but at a stiff cost.

Out in the field, auto focus and auto exposure were both very impressive in a wide range of situations, from the intense brightness of the beach to shady and contrasty venues. Every camera suffers indoors, thanks to low light, and everyone complains about it, but the S10 did a credible job with low-light shots and it's clearly better than previous cams of this ilk.

WIRED Improved audio quality. Big, bright lens. Speedy processor. Lots of creative control options. More intuitive menus than previous generation Canon camcorders.

TIRED Loose lens cover noisier than cutlery caught in a garbage disposal. Still images come off looking a bit overexposed.

$1,300, canon.com

Read our full Canon Vixia HF S10 review.

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Dry your eyes, plasma junkies. The untimely demise of Pioneer's Kuro line doesn't mean you'll have to forgo those deliciously deep blacks and theater-perfect colors for long. In fact, even as the last of the Pioneer Kuro Elites make its way into a few lucky U.S. homes, a new lineup of HDTV sets are already poised to seize the plasma king's vacant throne.

Key to this plasma's visual appeal is its integrated THX mode. In addition to blessing various audio components, the home-theater ninjas at THX began bestowing plasma and LCD certification a few years back. Each set is subjected to approximately 400 individual tests, ranging from evaluations in signal processing to luminosity. Basically, the idea behind G10's THX mode is to recreate the precise color gamut filmmakers use during the in-studio post-production process.

WIRED Mind-boggling blacks with tons of detail. THX mode is a godsend for movie buffs. Integrated SD card slots transform your plasma into a giant digital photo frame. Amazing color saturation.

TIRED THX mode is bit dim for brightly lit rooms. Ethernet connectivity is nice for VieraCast, but Wi-Fi would've been better. Three HDMI ports (two in the back, one on the side) don't cut it. More power-hungry than LCD TVs. Where's the PiP?

$1,300, panasonic.com

Read our full Panasonic TC-P42G10 Viera G10 Series Plasma review.

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The PogoPlug is a device, which looks like a supersized AC adapter, plugs into almost any external hard drive (even a USB stick) and then pumps that content onto the web, giving you access anywhere in the world you can get an internet signal — including your iPhone.

But the PogoPlug isn't without the occasional snafu and annoyances. Only image files are available for preview. PDF, Word documents or even HTML files have to be downloaded before viewing. Worse yet, when we unhooked the device, it caused our PC to crash twice in a row. We're still not entirely sure if this was due to a glitch in the PogoPlug or in Windows.

WIRED Easy to use. Simple setup. Great utility: I must be able to access my collection of LOLcat photos from anywhere. The iPhone app is solid software.

TIRED No wireless mode ... yet. Poor security — it's a wise idea to keep those tax returns or bank documents off the PogoPlug. Computer crashes are deeply flummoxing. The iPhone is currently the only mobile device that supports remote access.

$100, pogoplug.com

Read our full Cloud Engines PogoPlug review.

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NatureMill's Pro edition is an indoor composter we can pretty much dig. Using minimal electricity, a small motor turns a heavy-duty mixing bar, heats the mixing chamber (no sunlight needed) and powers an air pump that works with a carbon air filter to help reduce smell (each filter lasts four to five years).

Just add starter dirt, drop in some sawdust pellets to combat odors and dump your food scraps in. NatureMill recommends that you cut organic material into 4-inch bits before plopping it in. We didn't, but aside from the motor making some gnarly noises, it didn't seem to affect compost production. NatureMill's Pro version also features some automatic activation. We were able to leave ours sitting for weeks without pushing the button even once; it mixed and heated itself just fine.

WIRED Stainless steel mixing bar made short work of uncut banana peels. Relatively small and exceptionally lightweight = easy to stash and transport. Foot pedal eliminates lid touching. Mighty Morphin' Power Saver: only draws 5 kwh a month (roughly 50 cents on an average electric bill). Not as much of an eyesore as it could be and it's available in a range of colors (including, you guess it, green).

TIRED Little to no stench — until top opens (that's hard to remedy, and burger/fish/salad remnants smell worse than a dead wildebeest doused in Eau D'Bile). Polypropylene housing is light, but may not last forever. Disposable carbon filters reduce smell, but also cut down on the green factor. Regular maintenance (scraping the mix chamber walls) isn't fun.

$400, naturemill.com

Read our full Nature Mill Indoor Composter — Pro Edition review.

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You can get away with a lot if you're beautiful. Such is the case with the new Porsche Design P'9522 phone. In some ways, it's a wonderful and capable cellphone, but in most others, it's dumber than the gorgeous block of aluminum it was machined from.

Someone forgot to include e-mail — an absence that had us trying to mar the Porsche phone's scratchproof screen with claws of rage. Unfortunately, that screen is tough, so the P'9522 will be lauded and drooled over — despite our many gripes with it.

WIRED Gorgeous. Touchscreen interface is easy to understand, if limited and frustrating. Preloaded ringtones include the roaring engines of the 911 GT3 and Turbo. Its 5-megapixel camera has autofocus and captures clean, vivid images. LED flash doubles as a flashlight. Unlocking the phone with its fingerprint scanner is very MI5.

TIRED Fingerprint scanner is also very POS: Who thought it would be a good idea to use fingerprints to access a device you're likely holding in one hand while juggling multiple other tasks? Preloaded ringtones include bad German techno. Touchscreen is deeply frustrating. Seriously — no e-mail?

$800, porschedesign.com

Read our full Porsche Design P'9522 Phone review.

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Weighing just 140 grams, the handset offers some of the best optics we've ever found crammed into a cell phone: sharp, noiseless pics (3,264 × 2,448 pixels) and decent image stabilizer punctuate video capture that puts full-figured handicams from 2008 to shame. You can even shoot VGA at 30 fps or QVGA at a whopping 120 fps (yes, 120!), including slow motion footage in 1/4 and 1/8 speeds.

Amazing, sure, but not a picture perfect phone. The i8510 functions almost exactly like a standard point-and-shoot, except for the zoom button, which is placed inexplicably, and awkwardly at the bottom of the device.

WIRED Beaucoup codecs, including — wait for it — DivX! 2.8-inch screen excellent for playback. Intuitive photo/video editing suite. Equally intuitive navigation. Automatic lens cover. MicroSD slot good for 16 GB (enough for aspiring Scorseses to go epic). All the usual smartphone suspects: 3G, Wi-Fi, USB, Bluetooth, accelerometer, GPS. Decent earbuds with ample cord. 3.5mm audio jack. Most excellent: TV-out capability.

TIRED Side-mounted headphone jack makes phone harder to pocket. Optical control pad is a tad sensitive (between us and you — we don't want to hurt its feelings). Most bogus: Metal shell retains enough scratches to fill a DJ Shadow album. A little on the clunky side. Most bogus: Flash needs to be brighter.

$500, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung i8510 INNOV8 review.

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As the successor to Logitech's G11 and G15, this huge hunk of plastic comes with gaming hardwired in its DNA. Like its relatives, it has a blocky aesthetic that harkens to the days of the Model M. There are, however, a handful of very modern flourishes that make this latest G-board a distinctly modern marvel.

In the end, the G19's main drawback is the same one that has plagued fancy keyboards since the days of yore: It's freaking huge. That swiveling LCD? It actually requires a tiny onboard Linux computer to run, which in turn requires its own power source. Should you choose to make use of the two self-powered USB ports, you'll potentially have more wires shooting out of this thing than your computer.

WIRED More customizable than a box of Legos. Two self-powered USB ports. Dedicated D-pad and menu keys let you control LCD directly from the keyboard. Convenient cable management lanes carved into bottom of unit lessens clutter … slightly. Choose-your-own-color adventure with adjustable backlighting. Keys are pleasantly clicky and responsive.

TIRED Limited desktop space? This is not your keyboard. Price tag to match gargantuan footprint. Requires power brick to run. After its novelty wears off, built-in LCD becomes more of a distraction than a useful tool.

$200, Logitech.com

Read our full Logitech G19 Keyboard review.

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Want to catch the last episode of Battlestar Galactica while hanging out in the local java joint? Going to download a season of The Simpsons for viewing on the plane? Giving an impromptu screening of your vacation photos at a friend's house? The Mini 10 is your machine.

But there are infuriating shortcomings to the Mini 10. The trackpad is one of the worst we've seen. Dell's decision to integrate the buttons underneath the pad itself makes using it both unpredictable and challenging. When you click on a button, the cursor may hit the target, wiggle off a centimeter or two, or teleport off into a remote corner of your screen. While it got easier to use after a week of practice, our advice is to invest in a cheap travel mouse.

WIRED Bright, responsive screen. Integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam. Not gunked up with crapware. HDMI-out port shows charming, if unwarranted, optimism about the netbook's video capabilities. Light weight: Just 2.6 pounds.

TIRED Infuriating trackpad with integrated buttons hidden underneath. Excessively glossy screen produces distracting glare. Windows XP is starting to look pretty tired. What, no solid-state option? Despite the HDMI port, the netbook can't deliver HD video without fits and starts.

$470 (as tested), dell.com

Read our full Dell Mini 10 Netbook review.

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The new 370Z upgrades come in the form of a sexy body with a hood, hatch and doors of lightweight aluminum and a chassis significantly stiffer to reduce performance-robbing flex. To make up for the beefier chassis, Nissan's engineers pared more than 225 pounds from the rest of the car — even the audio system lost 3.5 pounds — and the result is a car that weighs 88 pounds less than the previous 350Z.

Every model gets the same 332-horsepower V6, an engine that makes this Z the quickest yet with a zero-to-60 time of 4.6 seconds. That kind of performance, however, is contingent on your skills as a driver. If you don't posses Lewis Hamilton levels of talent don't fret. The Z's abundant power and excellent handling will let you think you do.

WIRED Insanely easy to drive, insanely quickly. You'll run out of nerve before you run out of grip. Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a gramophone.

TIRED Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a vinyl record. Tympani-like tire roar, piccolo-like exhaust note. Hummer-sized blind spots make lane changes a gun-it-and-go-for-it leap of faith. Fake brushed-aluminum interior bits don't fool anyone.

$33,970 (as tested), nissanusa.com

Read our full Nissan 2009 370Z review.

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Using the BookReader is simple: Just plunk a novel on the platen, punch a button and you're relaxing to the dulcet sounds of Jill, a computerized voice with a voracious appetite for literature. All the menus read themselves off when you mouse over them, and they have keyboard shortcuts, which is useful if you have reduced vision. Jill is pretty good at recognizing words. We tried out several books, including one heavy with medical jargon, and she held her own with just a few exceptions.

Useful as it is, we could not help noticing that the BookReader seems to be slightly undercooked. A few of the buttons don't really do anything, and you can't customize the dictionary to alter Jill's interpretation of commonly used, but horribly flubbed words, acronyms or numbers. The unit seems to be terribly overpriced as well. Plustek wants $600 for the BookReader, despite the fact that the OpticBook only costs $250 — and has its own text-to-speech function.

WIRED Reads books to you at the push of a button. Platen glass goes right to the edge to accommodate books without strain. Turns text into MP3s for portability. Includes several accessibility features to help the visually impaired.

TIRED The included software lacks polish and seems rushed. Squat, ugly looks make it seem at home in a cubicle farm. The reader voice may not screw up often, but when it does, it's a doozy. High price nears gouging territory.

$600, plustek.com

Read our full Plustek BookReader V100 review.

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: Photo: Dylan Tweeny/Wired.com

Apple's newest Shuffle (almost 50 percent smaller than previous Shuffles) could easily be mistaken for a stick of Trident, features no buttons, and pimps voice-identification technology. But even given its apparent readily consumable stature, there are a few features on the Shuffle that are a bit tough to swallow.

The biggest gripe on the 4-GB Shuffle we tested is definitely the control set. First off, it's completely counterintuitive; Apple says you can easily use it without looking. We still don't have the hang of it after a few days of testing. What's worse, if you have a decent set of earbuds (say, a pair of Shures or Ultimate Ears) you're totally hosed — you'll have to endure the 'buds that come with the Shuffle or pick up specially made third-party headphones. Our recommendation? Pick up a new Shuffle only if you're prepared to deal with proprietary headphones and ambiguous controls.

WIRED Thumb-drive size. Can double as a tie clip. Battery life lasts for 12 freaking hours. Short USB sync cord is sexy. Yes, we'll admit, it's another beautifully designed piece of hardware from Apple. Battery bonked out after 11 constant hours of blasting Thunderstruck on loop.

TIRED Proprietary headphones required. Control set awkward to use, hard to get used to. So small, it nearly gets lost in the packaging it comes in.

$80, apple.com

Read our full Apple iPod Shuffle 3rd Gen review.

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Rather than foam, gel or compressed-air cushioning, the soles on Newtons have a series of "actuator lugs" just below the ball of the foot. The lugs are designed to help encourage you to land on your forefoot, to protect that part of the foot, and (best yet) to propel you forward. When you land, the lugs push into hollow chambers in the midsole. This cushions your landing, and helps make it comfy to land midsole or forefoot rather than on the heel as you might be accustomed. As your foot moves forward, these lugs then essentially lever out, and as you lift your foot, they return the energy by pushing up and out in the same direction as your stride. Newton claims this makes them more efficient than traditional foam or gel soles that simply absorb energy but don't return it.

WIRED So cozy they're like a Snuggie for your feet. Actuator lugs get you off your heels better than a La-Z-Boy. Lightweight at 10.2 ounces. Designed for all stride types. Stomps cold weather like global warming, and keeps out the drizzle for shizzle.

TIRED Not waterproof. Worse on single-track trails than a skateboard. $175??? OMG, for that much money I could just pay somebody to run for me.

$175, newtonrunning.com

Read our full Newton All Weather Trainer review.

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The Firebird features a hybrid design — using 2.5-inch hard drives (two 320-GB models) and dual graphics cards originally designed for laptops — but powers it all with a desktop CPU and desktop-sized DIMMs. As with a laptop, wireless is built in, but the power supply is not: To save on wattage, HP breaks out the (enormous) power adapter instead of integrating it into the box.

As cool as the Firebird is on the whole, it isn't without some foibles. The inclusion of an ExpressCard slot is on the baffling-to-useless side, and the external power supply (it's huge) is more annoying to deal with than it sounds. But our biggest gripe is that the Firebird's streamlined shell means it includes no front-mounted ports at all, not even a single USB slot for your thumb drive. Seriously HP, even the Mac Pro finds room for that.

WIRED Amazingly quiet and conscientious in its power consumption. Outstanding design; belongs on top of the desk, not beneath it. Solid all-around performance at a fair price.

TIRED No front USB port. Curvy design means you can't put anything on top of the case. Functionally locked down, with no real upgrade path.

$2,100 (as tested), hp.com

Read our full HP Firebird 803 review.

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I shouldn't love this truck. I should hate it. I purposely do not own a car, and this all-black behemoth represents everything I hate about SUV culture: conspicuous consumption, insensitivity to our rapidly shrinking world and crowded cities, middle finger raised at global warming.

You could slap a cold fusion generator under Big Poppa Cadillac's hood and the first two issues would still apply, but I was kind of wrong about that last one. Have you ever seen Godzilla vs. Megalon? Where Godzilla fights on behalf of the people of Japan against a giant rhinoceros/cockroach? Sure, Tokyo's favorite monster still smashes a bunch of buildings and steps on some people, but he's trying to be good. Same goes for this Hybrid Chromedaddy.

WIRED Decent pickup for a motorized bomb shelter. Combined ABS and regenerative braking system do a terrific job of hauling the beast down from speed. Trick motorized step makes it easy for shorties to climb into your rolling condo.

TIRED Thing has a car phone. No, not Bluetooth, but an actual phone built into infotainment system. (It's actually just Onstar, but there was no other option for hands-free calling.) What is this, 1989? Cadillac — God love 'em — uses the fact that this is a hybrid as an excuse to bling up the truck even more: Hybrid badges are plastered on every hard surface, on the sides of the door, even the windshield. —Joe Brown

$74,085 (as tested), Cadillac.com

Read our full Cadillac Escalade Hybrid review.

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The Kindle 2 is zippier, with pages turning 20 percent faster (yes, you can tell the difference). It has more memory (2 gigabytes, enough for storing more than 1,500 books onboard). And it flaunts a more powerful built-in battery: Amazon claims that the Kindle lasts four to five days with the wireless on (we got 4.5 days in our first test) and up to two weeks with it off. After a week of limited wireless, my meter is around 50 percent. Amazon also says that after 500 charges, it will hold 80 percent of its original juice. That means that most users won't have to replace the battery (a $60 procedure) for about a decade or so.

Looking over the horizon, it's clear that Amazon's biggest competitor in selling digital books will be Google, whose recent agreement with publishers and authors will make it the virtually exclusive seller for millions of books in copyright but not in print. But right now at least, the Google and Amazon formats aren't compatible: I was unsuccessful in getting a PDF of a public-domain book downloaded from Google to appear in readable form on my Kindle.

WIRED The best e-reading system on the market. Welcome improvements to aesthetics, more functional industrial design, better graphics and longer battery life. Sleeker than the original: One-third of an inch thick and 10 ounces.

TIRED Quit [Source: Wired News]

Olympus Camera Packs SLR Aspirations in Compact Body Combine the large sensor and interchangeable lenses of a digital SLR with the compact portability of a point-and-shoot, and you get something that looks a lot like the Olympus E-P1.

[Source: Wired News]

Gear gallery: King Size Kindle Skinny Shooters and The Palm Pre :

Size seems to matter to the folks at Amazon. While the Kindle 2 has a 6-inch (measured diagonally) e-ink screen — roughly the area of a mass-market paperback book — the DX's 9.7-inch screen resembles a page from a typical hardback. Put another way, the DX flaunts 2.5 times more display space. More text on a page means more lines and, if you prefer, a bigger font, without having to turn the page as often. What does that mean for you? It's easier to read using the DX.

By elegantly super-sizing the Kindle — and ramping up its ability to read files — Amazon has improved the best all-around e-reader available. But the hefty price tag doesn't fit Jeff Bezo's stated philosophy of getting the best value for his customers.

WIRED Big-screen device that's even more readable than the original Kindle. PDF support is a welcome addition.

TIRED High cost of admission. Pivot mode has hair trigger. Southpaws will find the reader cumbersome.

$490, amazon.com

Read our full Amazon.com Kindle DX review.

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Shaped like a small bar of shower soap, the dense, ebony Pre matches many (if not all) of the features of its chief competitor, the iPhone. But in one key aspect, the Pre does the iPhone one better. While a lot of the Pre's features — a bright 3.1-inch touchscreen manipulated by taps, swipes and pinches; apps sold by third parties in an open online bazaar; integration of e-mail, contacts and calendar — are now standard in 3G smartphones, Palm also lets users keep multiple applications running simultaneously.

Its long-term prospects, though, hinge on whether or not all those third-party apps will show up, whether Sprint can satisfy users, and whether Apple has something up its sleeve that counters the Palm's gambits. Also, of course, the Pre has to prove stable and reliable. (Our test unit occasionally suffered opening-day jitters, including a crash that was fixed only by taking out the removable battery.)

WIRED Great look and superb feel. Well-conceived OS with multitasking and instant notification. Physical keyboard. Utilizes iTunes to load and refresh content.

TIRED Multitasking puts a big suck on the battery. Sprint exclusivity will be annoying to Palm-philes on a contract with AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. Keyboard is puny. If Apple blocks the handset's access to iTunes, Pre users are hosed.

$200 (with two year contract), palm.com

Read our full Palm Pre review.

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Demonstrating that it's serious about making a run at the top-end offerings from Canon and Nikon, the K-7 bows with a spankin' new 14.6 megapixel, 28.1mm (diagonal) CMOS image sensor and an updated Prime II processor. This enables HD-video capture, built-in high dynamic range shooting, a 77-segment metering system, pre- and post-production filtering and distortion correction, all in a form factor more than 10 percent smaller (and actually easier to handle) than its predecessor, the K20D.

By and large, it's a super quick focusing compact image-maker — once you learn how the menu system works. But it's just a step or two behind Nikon and Canon in ease of use. In spite of that, Pentax has nearly hit a home run with the K-7. It's svelte, sturdy, fairly easy to operate, has a great range of available lenses and a feature set that's unmatched at this price. Think of it as a solid double off the wall, with an RBI.

WIRED Speedy 5.2 frames per second. Super-sturdy construction. Lots of pro features at a prosumer price. Improved battery life and 100 percent field-of-view viewfinder. Faster, more robust processor. Live View with contrast focus and face detection. Shoots 5.2 frames-per-second with shutter speed up to 1/8000. The 77-segment metering system and 11-point AF system are quick and spot on. Internal mechanical shake reduction.

TIRED User interface needs to be simpler and more unified.

$1,300 (body only), pentax.com

Read our full Pentax K-7 DSLR review.

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The A600's 21.5-inch screen (1920 x 1080 pixels) is big and dazzlingly bright — so much so that Lenovo includes an automatic screen-dimming system designed to prevent eyestrain. Inside its bowels, this 25-pounder offers substantial specs: 2.13-GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and a terabyte hard drive. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics card may be getting a little long in the tooth, but it's powerful enough to make the A600 more than acceptable to play all but the very latest gaming titles.

That's a lot of stuff for the price — $1,150 — and stripped-down versions of the IdeaCentre run considerably less. If you don't need the power but dig the design and screen size, the budget rendition might be an even better bet.

WIRED Very small footprint. Single-cable design is a blessing for technophobes. Swivel base makes adjustments to viewing angle easy. Six USB ports and 802.11n Wi-Fi, plus FireWire, SD and coaxial connectors.

TIRED Keyboard and mouse frequently fall asleep; difficult to awaken. Remote control overly complex and rather homely. Included games feel like an engineer on Quaaludes designed them.

$1,150 (as tested), lenovo.com

Read our full Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 review.

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Its glossy black finish and polished Darth Vader design makes Samsung's newest Blu-ray box, the BD-P4600, stand out from every other player on the market. Well, it actually doesn't stand anywhere at all -- it comes with the metal brackets to mount it on a wall or plant it on a desktop pedestal. And like Lord Vader, this model packs some serious force with its built-in streaming for Pandora music and Netflix.

For $100 less, you could pick up Samsung's BD-P3600 a player that has all the same features as this model but comes in a non-wall-mountable chassis. But really, would you want to watch The Empire Strikes Back on a Blu-ray player that didn't look like it was made in a dark corner of Coruscant?

WIRED High-end, spacey designed Blu-ray player is loaded with features include ability to wall mount, loads Blu-ray discs exceptional fast and offers exceptional playback.

TIRED Complicated initial setup for its feature set. Cramped underside port-connection compartment. Competitively over priced for what it delivers.

$500, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung BD-P4600 review.

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Let's cut to the chase and hit you with the sell: The MSI X340 is a MacBook Air at half the price. Interested? Read on.

For starters, the X340 (aka the X Slim) is considerably better muscled than your typical netbook, featuring a glossy 13.4-inch (1366 x 768 pixels) screen, 320-GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM. Like Apple's ultralight, it's incredibly thin — about 0.8 inches at its thickest — and it actually weighs slightly less than the Air, just 2.9 pounds.

Before you start salivating over the prospects of a half-price Air, note that Apple's laptop does trump the X340 in a few significant ways. The Air includes Nvidia graphics, while the X340 is stuck with Intel's integrated chipset.

The screens are night and day: The Air is renowned for having one of the brightest LCDs available, while the X340 is merely average in this department.

WIRED Gorgeous design; slap an Apple sticker over the MSI logo and no one will ever know. Performance bests most netbooks, though it's hardly top-notch. Surprisingly good graphics and responsiveness. Includes the usual goodies: 1.3-MP webcam, Bluetooth, 802.11n.

TIRED Flaky touchpad. Disappointing battery life.

$900 (as tested), us.msi.com

Read our full MSI X340 review.

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The first day we took the car for a spin we kept the front-mounted 5.9-liter 470 BHP vehicle on a strict diet of city driving: no freeways, no tightly coiled back roads. Trudging through heavy traffic almost felt sadistic — kind of like taking a thoroughbred racehorse and giving it polio. But after exiting the city limits and tearing down a stretch of asphalt connecting San Francisco with Napa Valley, the DB9 snapped up, greedily devouring 90-degree curves with just a hint of oversteer.

WIRED Fast like a sports car, more refined than a quart of 40-weight. Gorgeous; induces whiplash in head-turning bystanders. Zippy acceleration for a GT — you can't front on a 4.6-second zero-to-60 time ... unless you're armed with a Ferrari or a Bentley.

TIRED Hood-release switch located in impossibly hard to find/reach nook (as if an Aston owner would ever do that). iPod access tres difficult to set up. Chugs gas like an ASU freshman rips beer-bong hits. Back seat harder to get into than MIT.

$209,000 as tested, astonmartin.com

Read our full Aston Martin DB9 review.

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If you don't mind looking like an extra in a 1-800-Dentist commercial and have no reservations about looking like a crazy person yammering to yourself, the Plantronics Voyager Pro may be the perfect Bluetooth headset for you.

This headset is big, bulky and (surprise, surprise) silly looking. The 3-inch boom extending out toward your mouth is the main culprit of these crimes against style. But despite being tacky, the Voyager Pro delivers strong performance. It's easy to use, withstands drops, bumps and haphazardly tossed laptops, has decent battery life and pairs effortlessly with a range of smartphones, including the iPhone.

WIRED Easy to use. Super sound quality. Stays attached to your ear. You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.

TIRED You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.

$100, plantronics.com

Read our full Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset review.

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After a few grim years ceded to the iMac, PC-based all-in-one desktops are making an LL Cool J-esque comeback. Their next move: Make the switch from semi-luxe gear designed for highly aesthetic environments to the megacheap world that the netbook has built.

Specs look exceedingly promising at first: 250 GB of hard drive space, 2 GB of RAM, integrated Wi-Fi, DVD burner, an SD card slot and a very bright 19-inch touchscreen display. If nothing else, it's one of the best-looking touchscreens (non-capacitive; a stylus works better than your finger) we've seen at this screen size.

But the Achilles' heel of the Wind Top is its baffling choice of an Atom 330 processor to power these guts. Although the dual-core 330 is known as the "fast" version of the Atom (it draws 8 watts instead of the 2.5 watts used by the netbook standard Atom N270 and has double the L2 cache), it's still woefully inadequate for a computer this ambitious.

WIRED Amazingly affordable and loaded to the gills. Touchscreen makes this a perfect kiddie computer. Slim profile lets it fit just about anywhere. Cuter than a box of puppies.

TIRED Performance problems dog the user at every turn. Flashing blue hard-drive activity light is front and center, terribly distracting and impossible to cover up. Bundled keyboard and mouse are beyond cheap. Webcam aim can't be adjusted.

$590 (as tested), us.msi.com

Read our full MSI Wind Top AE1900 review.

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The new Chrome Soyuz is an ambitious (if slightly crazed) reimagining of the urban commuter backpack. It's a weird hybrid of a river-rafting drybag and laptop case, all contained within a stylish wedge of black and red nylon.

It sits comfortably behind your back, letting you weave through traffic on your fixie without fear of snagging on the projecting mirrors of double-parked delivery trucks. It can ride between your knees on a crowded train. And it tucks neatly below an airplane seat, leaving just enough space on either side to squeeze in your feet so you can stretch your legs.

WIRED Wedge design keeps load balanced, trim and compact. Expandable waterproof compartment shrinks down to nothing when empty. Heavy-duty 1,000-denier cordura nylon withstands abuse. Main compartments are completely waterproof. Heavy-duty metal strap locks make adjustment easy. Glorious enameled metal "Chrome" logo.

TIRED Narrow openings + deep compartments = where the hell did my keys go? Not quite big enough to contain a six-pack (unless you put the bottles in one by one). Padding traps heat, steaming your back on long rides. No hip belt. Pricier than a metric ton of pig iron.

$180, chromebags.com

Read our full Chrome Soyuz Backpack review.

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The pristine fidelity these headphones deliver is the result of a dual-armature layout, which bathes your tympanic membranes in accurate audio reproduction. The earpiece's dual drivers have the added benefit of propping up the typically flaccid base that seems to plague many other in-ear monitors.

The only major downside is that great sound comes at a considerable price — $230 to be precise. For most people, that's likely to be as much (or more) than you spent on your MP3 player. But as my neglected Audio Technicas can attest, in this case, you undoubtedly get what you pay for.

WIRED Exquisite sound reproduction in an insanely small package. Handy in-flight attenuator saves you from Captain Blowhard's eardrum-exploding announcements. Fuller, richer base and wider frequency response than previous UEs.

TIRED Spendiferous. Cable noise will distract joggers or anyone planning to use the headphones while exercising. Despite its redesign, the pocket case is still too small to fit all the accouterments.

$230, ultimateears.com

Read our full Ultimate Ears 700 Noise-Isolating Earphones review.

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Digeo's Moxi HD DVR sports a slick, Emmy-winning (seriously) user interface and all the commercial-skipping accouterments of competitors like TiVo. It even ditches a monthly bill in favor of flat pricing and grants access to online video and music.

The Moxi's stunning high-def UI is full of slick transitions and responsive performance. Unfortunately, sleek visuals don't conquer all. Basics like surfing through the program guide (or accessing a previously recorded show) took a lot of hunting and pecking through a menu tree. Finding pre-recorded shows and getting them to play took searching, highlighting, selecting Play, confirming that you selected Play, and then finally watching.

WIRED No monthly bills. Sleek high-def interface has nifty animations and transitions. Hard drive expandable to 1 TB for power recorders. Dual tuners let you watch one show while recording another. Offers a whopping 1.5-hour buffer time per HD channel.

TIRED Hefty entry fee. Online video chops not quite up to snuff. No dedicated Guide button on the remote?! Unnecessarily complicated menus. Programming schedules are displayed in cramped vertical list instead of friendly grid.

$800, moxi.com

Read our full Digeo Moxi HD DVR review.

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We're a little dismayed by the E71x. The device is almost identical to the E71: same 3.2-megapixel camera, same .04-inch profile, same vibrant 320 x 240 QVGA display, same business apps and multimedia functionality. The operating system is slightly tweaked so there are some differences in transmissions and page loading. But as a whole, the phone is relatively unchanged.

These are the key differences: a new $100 price tag (good), a black paint job (badass) and the omission of our favorite feature from the original E71 (ugly). We're talking about the two separate, customizable home screens, something we absolutely loved about the O.G. E71. One screen was designed for business, the other for personal use. It was a great function: You could literally edit spreadsheets from 9 to 5 on one screen, then toggle over to the other and watch a couple of episodes of 30 Rock on the media player.

WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.

TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.

$100 with 2-year contract, att.com

Read our full Nokia E71x Smartphone review.

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The Replica comes with bare-bones software and strikes a good balance between peace of mind and individual-user control.

After the hard drive is plugged in, the Replica starts mirroring your computer's content. The startup process is short, taking only a couple of minutes, though the actual backup is a time-gobbling endeavor. (It took us about four hours to transfer 130 GB of data). A blue light on the top of the Replica's case blinks continuously while data is being transferred. It's also stealthy for a hard drive, emitting only a quiet whir when working at full speed.

WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.

TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.

$200, seagate.com

Read our full Seagate Replica 500GB review.

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Panasonic's new HDC-TM300 shoots in "Full HD," marketing speak for 1080p — aka 1080 x 1920 resolution with progressive-scan video. Translation? Stunning Blu-ray-level video that should more than lives up to the most critical expectations of prosumers and video enthusiasts.

The highlight of this shooter is the high-def footage. Not only does the phenomenal zoom reel in distant objects, but thanks to the triple sensors and quality lens, it nails far-off details perfectly. The architectural features of distant buildings we shot in downtown San Francisco showed up like we were standing on the window ledge -- not in a park three blocks away.

WIREDReproduces colors like a Crayola factory. Closeups pop with sharp, clear details. Nice performance in low light. Einstein-smart automatic shooting features are like having your own DP built into the camera. 32-GB onboard memory is expandable via SDHC slot. Great zoom tackles action better than Jason Statham.

TIRED Fast pans in bright daylight turns up more artifacts than a Mayan ruin. May require second mortgage.

$1,300, Panasonic.com

Read our full Panasonic HDC-TM300 HD Camcorder review.

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In the aftermath (heh heh) of the bass-heavy Beats by Dre Studio headphones, Monster decided to pack the Doctor's finicky sound quality specs into two tiny earbuds. Naturally, audiophiles (including myself) were skeptical. Sure the Beats suffered from shoddy construction and fell apart after a few months of ownership, but they also provided some of the best bass we've ever heard in a set of cans.

Sure enough, the bass response from these things is rich and full. The lowest frequencies rumble with a force akin to the thud of a decent subwoofer. Keep in mind these are not miniaturized 12-inch Kickers designed to blow your eardrums out. But for a device that is essentially a tiny speaker with no auxiliary power, they're superb — especially when compared to the white earcruds doled out by Apple with every iDevice.

WIRED Excellent all-around frequency definition and particularly impressive bass response. Monster’s durable, ingenious anti-tangle cable means jumbled cords are a distant unpleasant memory.

TIRED The bright red cable is slightly ostentatious. Peak bass only hits at earwax shattering volumes.

$150, beatsbydre.com

Read our full Monster Beats By Dre Tour High-Resolution In-Ear Headphones review.

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The UE-11 Pros are packed with four, count 'em, four drivers: There's a double dose of bass, one for the midrange and one chiming the highs. If you're looking for the most precise, separated sound possible, then this is the earphone for you. Throughout the play list I heard clarity and detail in the music I'd never heard before. This rang especially true with classical tunes — it literally feels like sitting in a symphony hall and having every instrument speak directly to you. To get that kind of superior fidelity you'll certainly have to pay the piper. But you'll really love the music while Rome — or your bank account — burns.

WIRED Most clear, separated and detailed sound.

TIRED Try convincing your spouse you need a $1,150 set of headphones.

$1,150, ultimateears.com

Read our full UE-11 Pro review.

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The slate-gray, high-impact polymer body houses three LEDs capable of blasting out a peak 270 lumens for 15 minutes, or a more useful and long-lasting 90 lumens for 60 minutes. Both settings have an emergency low-power 25-lumen mode (equivalent in brightness to most common household D-cell flashlights) for an additional 60 minutes.

WIRED High-power pro flashlight pumps out awesome illumination and recharges ridiculously fast. Flashlight will outlive you. Seriously brilliant, blinding — a boon for flashlight junkies.

TIRED Pricy front-end investment. Comes with a 12-volt car charger.

$170, 511tactical.com

Read our full 5.11 Tactical Light review.

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In our tests, we threw all things digital at this 68-pound slab. And while it does not perform as superbly as its higher-price brethren from Sony, Samsung and Sharp, it still shows off a completely acceptable high-def image and above-average sound.

So where has Westinghouse cut corners? Oh, let's see. How about the borderline embarrassing 1000:1 contrast ratio? In a well-lit room, the screen looks more washed out than a warehouse full of Maytags. And even though the set offers the 120-Hz spec, fast motion still looks a bit blurred.

WIRED High resolution and decent sound at incredible rock-bottom price. Convenience features integrated into menu. Quality remote not found in higher-priced TVs.

TIRED Displays some pixelated speckled noise in darker and mid-hue images. Analog-station reproduction is downright blurry. No worries though — analog TV has flatlined.

$700, Westinghouse.com

Read our full Westinghouse TX-42F450S review.

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It's not quite a netbook, not quite an ultralight PC. Whatever it is, Samsung's NC20 is a dazzling feat of engineering: an extremely usable 12-inch laptop with epic battery life, impressive specs and a downright mystifyingly affordable price tag.

But the NC20 doesn't make depressing tradeoffs to achieve those scores. Battery life is three hours, 40 minutes (22 percent longer than the S10) and weight is just 3.3 pounds, comparable to the Asus Eee PC 1000H. All that and you get a 12.1-inch LCD, too, instead of the usual 10.2-inch netbook display.

WIRED Everything a netbook should be: Offers the best performance available from a computer this portable and inexpensive. Very usable keyboard. Good quality audio. Includes three USB ports, 1.3-megapixel webcam, and SD card slot.

TIRED LCD could be a touch brighter and quality sharper. Chassis design is a bit boring.

$550, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung NC 20 review.

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Pure Digital's Flip has proven that it's possible to build a super-small flash memory camcorder and offer it up for fewer than two hundred bucks. But there are tradeoffs with going small and cheap, like optics and battery life. Canon takes a completely different tack with its newest solid-state cam, the Vixia HF S10, which delivers some fantastically brilliant moving pictures, but at a stiff cost.

Out in the field, auto focus and auto exposure were both very impressive in a wide range of situations, from the intense brightness of the beach to shady and contrasty venues. Every camera suffers indoors, thanks to low light, and everyone complains about it, but the S10 did a credible job with low-light shots and it's clearly better than previous cams of this ilk.

WIRED Improved audio quality. Big, bright lens. Speedy processor. Lots of creative control options. More intuitive menus than previous generation Canon camcorders.

TIRED Loose lens cover noisier than cutlery caught in a garbage disposal. Still images come off looking a bit overexposed.

$1,300, canon.com

Read our full Canon Vixia HF S10 review.

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Dry your eyes, plasma junkies. The untimely demise of Pioneer's Kuro line doesn't mean you'll have to forgo those deliciously deep blacks and theater-perfect colors for long. In fact, even as the last of the Pioneer Kuro Elites make its way into a few lucky U.S. homes, a new lineup of HDTV sets are already poised to seize the plasma king's vacant throne.

Key to this plasma's visual appeal is its integrated THX mode. In addition to blessing various audio components, the home-theater ninjas at THX began bestowing plasma and LCD certification a few years back. Each set is subjected to approximately 400 individual tests, ranging from evaluations in signal processing to luminosity. Basically, the idea behind G10's THX mode is to recreate the precise color gamut filmmakers use during the in-studio post-production process.

WIRED Mind-boggling blacks with tons of detail. THX mode is a godsend for movie buffs. Integrated SD card slots transform your plasma into a giant digital photo frame. Amazing color saturation.

TIRED THX mode is bit dim for brightly lit rooms. Ethernet connectivity is nice for VieraCast, but Wi-Fi would've been better. Three HDMI ports (two in the back, one on the side) don't cut it. More power-hungry than LCD TVs. Where's the PiP?

$1,300, panasonic.com

Read our full Panasonic TC-P42G10 Viera G10 Series Plasma review.

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The PogoPlug is a device, which looks like a supersized AC adapter, plugs into almost any external hard drive (even a USB stick) and then pumps that content onto the web, giving you access anywhere in the world you can get an internet signal — including your iPhone.

But the PogoPlug isn't without the occasional snafu and annoyances. Only image files are available for preview. PDF, Word documents or even HTML files have to be downloaded before viewing. Worse yet, when we unhooked the device, it caused our PC to crash twice in a row. We're still not entirely sure if this was due to a glitch in the PogoPlug or in Windows.

WIRED Easy to use. Simple setup. Great utility: I must be able to access my collection of LOLcat photos from anywhere. The iPhone app is solid software.

TIRED No wireless mode ... yet. Poor security — it's a wise idea to keep those tax returns or bank documents off the PogoPlug. Computer crashes are deeply flummoxing. The iPhone is currently the only mobile device that supports remote access.

$100, pogoplug.com

Read our full Cloud Engines PogoPlug review.

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NatureMill's Pro edition is an indoor composter we can pretty much dig. Using minimal electricity, a small motor turns a heavy-duty mixing bar, heats the mixing chamber (no sunlight needed) and powers an air pump that works with a carbon air filter to help reduce smell (each filter lasts four to five years).

Just add starter dirt, drop in some sawdust pellets to combat odors and dump your food scraps in. NatureMill recommends that you cut organic material into 4-inch bits before plopping it in. We didn't, but aside from the motor making some gnarly noises, it didn't seem to affect compost production. NatureMill's Pro version also features some automatic activation. We were able to leave ours sitting for weeks without pushing the button even once; it mixed and heated itself just fine.

WIRED Stainless steel mixing bar made short work of uncut banana peels. Relatively small and exceptionally lightweight = easy to stash and transport. Foot pedal eliminates lid touching. Mighty Morphin' Power Saver: only draws 5 kwh a month (roughly 50 cents on an average electric bill). Not as much of an eyesore as it could be and it's available in a range of colors (including, you guess it, green).

TIRED Little to no stench — until top opens (that's hard to remedy, and burger/fish/salad remnants smell worse than a dead wildebeest doused in Eau D'Bile). Polypropylene housing is light, but may not last forever. Disposable carbon filters reduce smell, but also cut down on the green factor. Regular maintenance (scraping the mix chamber walls) isn't fun.

$400, naturemill.com

Read our full Nature Mill Indoor Composter — Pro Edition review.

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You can get away with a lot if you're beautiful. Such is the case with the new Porsche Design P'9522 phone. In some ways, it's a wonderful and capable cellphone, but in most others, it's dumber than the gorgeous block of aluminum it was machined from.

Someone forgot to include e-mail — an absence that had us trying to mar the Porsche phone's scratchproof screen with claws of rage. Unfortunately, that screen is tough, so the P'9522 will be lauded and drooled over — despite our many gripes with it.

WIRED Gorgeous. Touchscreen interface is easy to understand, if limited and frustrating. Preloaded ringtones include the roaring engines of the 911 GT3 and Turbo. Its 5-megapixel camera has autofocus and captures clean, vivid images. LED flash doubles as a flashlight. Unlocking the phone with its fingerprint scanner is very MI5.

TIRED Fingerprint scanner is also very POS: Who thought it would be a good idea to use fingerprints to access a device you're likely holding in one hand while juggling multiple other tasks? Preloaded ringtones include bad German techno. Touchscreen is deeply frustrating. Seriously — no e-mail?

$800, porschedesign.com

Read our full Porsche Design P'9522 Phone review.

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Weighing just 140 grams, the handset offers some of the best optics we've ever found crammed into a cell phone: sharp, noiseless pics (3,264 × 2,448 pixels) and decent image stabilizer punctuate video capture that puts full-figured handicams from 2008 to shame. You can even shoot VGA at 30 fps or QVGA at a whopping 120 fps (yes, 120!), including slow motion footage in 1/4 and 1/8 speeds.

Amazing, sure, but not a picture perfect phone. The i8510 functions almost exactly like a standard point-and-shoot, except for the zoom button, which is placed inexplicably, and awkwardly at the bottom of the device.

WIRED Beaucoup codecs, including — wait for it — DivX! 2.8-inch screen excellent for playback. Intuitive photo/video editing suite. Equally intuitive navigation. Automatic lens cover. MicroSD slot good for 16 GB (enough for aspiring Scorseses to go epic). All the usual smartphone suspects: 3G, Wi-Fi, USB, Bluetooth, accelerometer, GPS. Decent earbuds with ample cord. 3.5mm audio jack. Most excellent: TV-out capability.

TIRED Side-mounted headphone jack makes phone harder to pocket. Optical control pad is a tad sensitive (between us and you — we don't want to hurt its feelings). Most bogus: Metal shell retains enough scratches to fill a DJ Shadow album. A little on the clunky side. Most bogus: Flash needs to be brighter.

$500, samsung.com

Read our full Samsung i8510 INNOV8 review.

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As the successor to Logitech's G11 and G15, this huge hunk of plastic comes with gaming hardwired in its DNA. Like its relatives, it has a blocky aesthetic that harkens to the days of the Model M. There are, however, a handful of very modern flourishes that make this latest G-board a distinctly modern marvel.

In the end, the G19's main drawback is the same one that has plagued fancy keyboards since the days of yore: It's freaking huge. That swiveling LCD? It actually requires a tiny onboard Linux computer to run, which in turn requires its own power source. Should you choose to make use of the two self-powered USB ports, you'll potentially have more wires shooting out of this thing than your computer.

WIRED More customizable than a box of Legos. Two self-powered USB ports. Dedicated D-pad and menu keys let you control LCD directly from the keyboard. Convenient cable management lanes carved into bottom of unit lessens clutter … slightly. Choose-your-own-color adventure with adjustable backlighting. Keys are pleasantly clicky and responsive.

TIRED Limited desktop space? This is not your keyboard. Price tag to match gargantuan footprint. Requires power brick to run. After its novelty wears off, built-in LCD becomes more of a distraction than a useful tool.

$200, Logitech.com

Read our full Logitech G19 Keyboard review.

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Want to catch the last episode of Battlestar Galactica while hanging out in the local java joint? Going to download a season of The Simpsons for viewing on the plane? Giving an impromptu screening of your vacation photos at a friend's house? The Mini 10 is your machine.

But there are infuriating shortcomings to the Mini 10. The trackpad is one of the worst we've seen. Dell's decision to integrate the buttons underneath the pad itself makes using it both unpredictable and challenging. When you click on a button, the cursor may hit the target, wiggle off a centimeter or two, or teleport off into a remote corner of your screen. While it got easier to use after a week of practice, our advice is to invest in a cheap travel mouse.

WIRED Bright, responsive screen. Integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam. Not gunked up with crapware. HDMI-out port shows charming, if unwarranted, optimism about the netbook's video capabilities. Light weight: Just 2.6 pounds.

TIRED Infuriating trackpad with integrated buttons hidden underneath. Excessively glossy screen produces distracting glare. Windows XP is starting to look pretty tired. What, no solid-state option? Despite the HDMI port, the netbook can't deliver HD video without fits and starts.

$470 (as tested), dell.com

Read our full Dell Mini 10 Netbook review.

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The new 370Z upgrades come in the form of a sexy body with a hood, hatch and doors of lightweight aluminum and a chassis significantly stiffer to reduce performance-robbing flex. To make up for the beefier chassis, Nissan's engineers pared more than 225 pounds from the rest of the car — even the audio system lost 3.5 pounds — and the result is a car that weighs 88 pounds less than the previous 350Z.

Every model gets the same 332-horsepower V6, an engine that makes this Z the quickest yet with a zero-to-60 time of 4.6 seconds. That kind of performance, however, is contingent on your skills as a driver. If you don't posses Lewis Hamilton levels of talent don't fret. The Z's abundant power and excellent handling will let you think you do.

WIRED Insanely easy to drive, insanely quickly. You'll run out of nerve before you run out of grip. Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a gramophone.

TIRED Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a vinyl record. Tympani-like tire roar, piccolo-like exhaust note. Hummer-sized blind spots make lane changes a gun-it-and-go-for-it leap of faith. Fake brushed-aluminum interior bits don't fool anyone.

$33,970 (as tested), nissanusa.com

Read our full Nissan 2009 370Z review.

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Using the BookReader is simple: Just plunk a novel on the platen, punch a button and you're relaxing to the dulcet sounds of Jill, a computerized voice with a voracious appetite for literature. All the menus read themselves off when you mouse over them, and they have keyboard shortcuts, which is useful if you have reduced vision. Jill is pretty good at recognizing words. We tried out several books, including one heavy with medical jargon, and she held her own with just a few exceptions.

Useful as it is, we could not help noticing that the BookReader seems to be slightly undercooked. A few of the buttons don't really do anything, and you can't customize the dictionary to alter Jill's interpretation of commonly used, but horribly flubbed words, acronyms or numbers. The unit seems to be terribly overpriced as well. Plustek wants $600 for the BookReader, despite the fact that the OpticBook only costs $250 — and has its own text-to-speech function.

WIRED Reads books to you at the push of a button. Platen glass goes right to the edge to accommodate books without strain. Turns text into MP3s for portability. Includes several accessibility features to help the visually impaired.

TIRED The included software lacks polish and seems rushed. Squat, ugly looks make it seem at home in a cubicle farm. The reader voice may not screw up often, but when it does, it's a doozy. High price nears gouging territory.

$600, plustek.com

Read our full Plustek BookReader V100 review.

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: Photo: Dylan Tweeny/Wired.com

Apple's newest Shuffle (almost 50 percent smaller than previous Shuffles) could easily be mistaken for a stick of Trident, features no buttons, and pimps voice-identification technology. But even given its apparent readily consumable stature, there are a few features on the Shuffle that are a bit tough to swallow.

The biggest gripe on the 4-GB Shuffle we tested is definitely the control set. First off, it's completely counterintuitive; Apple says you can easily use it without looking. We still don't have the hang of it after a few days of testing. What's worse, if you have a decent set of earbuds (say, a pair of Shures or Ultimate Ears) you're totally hosed — you'll have to endure the 'buds that come with the Shuffle or pick up specially made third-party headphones. Our recommendation? Pick up a new Shuffle only if you're prepared to deal with proprietary headphones and ambiguous controls.

WIRED Thumb-drive size. Can double as a tie clip. Battery life lasts for 12 freaking hours. Short USB sync cord is sexy. Yes, we'll admit, it's another beautifully designed piece of hardware from Apple. Battery bonked out after 11 constant hours of blasting Thunderstruck on loop.

TIRED Proprietary headphones required. Control set awkward to use, hard to get used to. So small, it nearly gets lost in the packaging it comes in.

$80, apple.com

Read our full Apple iPod Shuffle 3rd Gen review.

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Rather than foam, gel or compressed-air cushioning, the soles on Newtons have a series of "actuator lugs" just below the ball of the foot. The lugs are designed to help encourage you to land on your forefoot, to protect that part of the foot, and (best yet) to propel you forward. When you land, the lugs push into hollow chambers in the midsole. This cushions your landing, and helps make it comfy to land midsole or forefoot rather than on the heel as you might be accustomed. As your foot moves forward, these lugs then essentially lever out, and as you lift your foot, they return the energy by pushing up and out in the same direction as your stride. Newton claims this makes them more efficient than traditional foam or gel soles that simply absorb energy but don't return it.

WIRED So cozy they're like a Snuggie for your feet. Actuator lugs get you off your heels better than a La-Z-Boy. Lightweight at 10.2 ounces. Designed for all stride types. Stomps cold weather like global warming, and keeps out the drizzle for shizzle.

TIRED Not waterproof. Worse on single-track trails than a skateboard. $175??? OMG, for that much money I could just pay somebody to run for me.

$175, newtonrunning.com

Read our full Newton All Weather Trainer review.

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The Firebird features a hybrid design — using 2.5-inch hard drives (two 320-GB models) and dual graphics cards originally designed for laptops — but powers it all with a desktop CPU and desktop-sized DIMMs. As with a laptop, wireless is built in, but the power supply is not: To save on wattage, HP breaks out the (enormous) power adapter instead of integrating it into the box.

As cool as the Firebird is on the whole, it isn't without some foibles. The inclusion of an ExpressCard slot is on the baffling-to-useless side, and the external power supply (it's huge) is more annoying to deal with than it sounds. But our biggest gripe is that the Firebird's streamlined shell means it includes no front-mounted ports at all, not even a single USB slot for your thumb drive. Seriously HP, even the Mac Pro finds room for that.

WIRED Amazingly quiet and conscientious in its power consumption. Outstanding design; belongs on top of the desk, not beneath it. Solid all-around performance at a fair price.

TIRED No front USB port. Curvy design means you can't put anything on top of the case. Functionally locked down, with no real upgrade path.

$2,100 (as tested), hp.com

Read our full HP Firebird 803 review.

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I shouldn't love this truck. I should hate it. I purposely do not own a car, and this all-black behemoth represents everything I hate about SUV culture: conspicuous consumption, insensitivity to our rapidly shrinking world and crowded cities, middle finger raised at global warming.

You could slap a cold fusion generator under Big Poppa Cadillac's hood and the first two issues would still apply, but I was kind of wrong about that last one. Have you ever seen Godzilla vs. Megalon? Where Godzilla fights on behalf of the people of Japan against a giant rhinoceros/cockroach? Sure, Tokyo's favorite monster still smashes a bunch of buildings and steps on some people, but he's trying to be good. Same goes for this Hybrid Chromedaddy.

WIRED Decent pickup for a motorized bomb shelter. Combined ABS and regenerative braking system do a terrific job of hauling the beast down from speed. Trick motorized step makes it easy for shorties to climb into your rolling condo.

TIRED Thing has a car phone. No, not Bluetooth, but an actual phone built into infotainment system. (It's actually just Onstar, but there was no other option for hands-free calling.) What is this, 1989? Cadillac — God love 'em — uses the fact that this is a hybrid as an excuse to bling up the truck even more: Hybrid badges are plastered on every hard surface, on the sides of the door, even the windshield. —Joe Brown

$74,085 (as tested), Cadillac.com

Read our full Cadillac Escalade Hybrid review.

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The Kindle 2 is zippier, with pages turning 20 percent faster (yes, you can tell the difference). It has more memory (2 gigabytes, enough for storing more than 1,500 books onboard). And it flaunts a more powerful built-in battery: Amazon claims that the Kindle lasts four to five days with the wireless on (we got 4.5 days in our first test) and up to two weeks with it off. After a week of limited wireless, my meter is around 50 percent. Amazon also says that after 500 charges, it will hold 80 percent of its original juice. That means that most users won't have to replace the battery (a $60 procedure) for about a decade or so.

Looking over the horizon, it's clear that Amazon's biggest competitor in selling digital books will be Google, whose recent agreement with publishers and authors will make it the virtually exclusive seller for millions of books in copyright but not in print. But right now at least, the Google and Amazon formats aren't compatible: I was unsuccessful in getting a PDF of a public-domain book downloaded from Google to appear in readable form on my Kindle.

WIRED The best e-reading system on the market. Welcome improvements to aesthetics, more functional industrial design, better graphics and longer battery life. Sleeker than the original: One-third of an inch thick and 10 ounces.

TIRED Quite expensive. Book content shackled with DRM. Interface is improved, sure, but it could be even better.

$360, amazon.com

Read our full Amazon.com Kindle 2 review.

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The iWOW adapter from SRS Labs promises to coax more "immersive" sound from your iPod, and it actually delivers — provided you're listening to the right kind of music. Setup is easy: Snap on the slick little 1-inch extension, plug in some spendy headphones, press a button, and you do indeed get a fuller sound with more depth — especially if you enjoy songs like Sting's "Fragile," a track hand-picked by SRS to highlight the effect.

But when iWOW was applied to songs that were heavy on low-end thump or had multilayered sound (Exhibit A: Beck's "Cold Brains") the iWOW performed more like iMeh. At top volume, bass beats splintered, while at lower volumes tracks sounded muddled and crowded. SRS claims the device "dynamically locates and restores audio detail" and creates a more natural sound. We're not buying it — most of the audio we threw at the iWOW was punctuated with a subtle hiss and fuzzy bass.

WIRED Relatively small adapter. Snaps easily onto your iPod and lends some oomph to certain tunes.

TIRED The effect is nearly lost when using ear buds, the device won't work with older generation iPods, and music that already has a fair share of bass sounds muffled.

$70, srslabs.com

Read our full SRS Labs iWOW Adapter for iPod review.

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Leaps ahead of other cam phones, the Memoir's not limited to the 8 megapixels it captures. In shooting mode, the touchscreen has shutterbug controls — zoom, brightness, timer and flash — that float around the image. And just hitting the shutter will take you into camera mode. The Memoir includes a 1-GB microSD to augment the phone's 100 MB of storage (and it's an easy-access slot, rather than hidden under the battery).

But for all its convenience, the Memoir simply isn't a competitor for even the lowliest of dedicated cameras. First off, it's pokey: slow to focus, slow to snap and very touchy when it comes to movement. And though it touts a 16x digital zoom, it has no optical-zooming option.

WIRED Cool touchscreen and accelerometer helps you shoot or view pictures. Compact, pocket-friendly shape, even for hipsters in painted-on jeans.

TIRED Vampiric light sensitivity makes for washed-out shots. Slow to focus, shoot and recover. E-mail functions are even slower. The screen is hard to see in sunlight. Lens cover doesn't close all the time, so the lens can get dusty.

$300 (with 2-year contract), t-mobile.com

Read our full Samsung Memoir.

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From the outside, the 1000HE doesn't look much different from other netbooks. But it's the machine's heart — the brand new 1.66-GHz Atom N280 processor — that makes it faster, stronger, smarter than its opponents.

Intel claims the silicon slab boosts computing power across the board, especially HD video playback — something that has been woefully horrid in past machines using Atom processors. It's not lying. This is the fastest netbook we've tested (by about 7 percent) in our benchmarks. And HD video playback was noticeably smoother and devoid of chop.

WIRED The first netbook to feature the new Atom N280 chip. MMC and SD media reader slots. Attractive, pearly finish. Decent 1.3-megapixel webcam.

TIRED At 3.1 pounds, it's one of the heaviest puppies in the netbook litter. Lame keyboard.

$400 as tested, asus.com

Read our full Asus Eee PC 1000HE review.

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The R50 is remarkably easy to set up and use. As you program each component into the remote using the setup wizard, you test a few controls to make sure it has the right code. The remote instantly recognized all our components, and it took us about 10 minutes to get the AV rig up and running. As part of the setup, you name each component, which then appears as an icon on the screen: in my case, a Sony HDTV, Yamaha amp/receiver, Squeezebox, Oppo DVD player and Soundmatters speaker.

WIRED Cool, reddish backlight perfect for nighttime navigation. No computer or web connection needed for operation. No charging cradle required.

TIRED No user manual means gizmo novices might get lost in setup. $150 price point isn't super pricey, but then it's not the cheapest universal remote out there.

$150, universalremote.com

Read our fu [Source: Wired News]

QA: Hobbit Director Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Film

Two years ago, few outside of fanboyland knew who Guillermo del Toro was. Film geeks name-dropped him as one of the "Three Amigos," a triad of up-and-coming Mexican-born buddies that includes Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzàlez Inàrritu (Babel). But del Toro was probably the nerdiest of the three—the pasty indoor kid behind Hellboy who doodled in his notebook and painted pewter dragons while his pals made "important" films with Clive Owen and Brad Pitt.

That changed with Pan's Labyrinth, his grimly vivid coming-of-age fable set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Nominated for six Oscars and winning three (including Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction), Labyrinth instantly elevated the talented schlock-meister from geek totem to critically beloved prophet. He was handpicked by Peter Jackson to helm the two-part prequel to The Lord of the Rings and took on a slew of projects that will keep him in the spotlight for years. His plate is now piled high with a Frankenstein adaptation, revisionist Dickens, loyalist Vonnegut, and more. Suddenly, we're looking down the barrel of the Del Toro Decade.

But don't worry: While he's poised to succeed Spielberg and Lucas atop Blockbuster Mountain, the 44-year-old kid from Guadalajara is still a talented schlock-meister. Who but a committed nerd would carve out time between making Hellboy II and developing The Hobbit (with executive producers Jackson and Fran Walsh, as well as scribe Philippa Boyens) to cowrite splattery vampire novels? (The Strain, a sort of modern reply to Bram Stoker's original Dracula and the first volume in an epic bloodsucker trilogy, is due out June 2.) Del Toro is tight-lipped about his three-year Hobbit odyssey—the screenplay isn't finished, and casting has yet to be announced formally. But he's more than ready to hold forth on vampires, his creative process, and the future of movies. Hint: They'll be more than just films—and you, dear reader, will be in them. If you dare.

Wired: You're pretty busy these days. What made you want to write vampire-themed horror novels?

Guillermo del Toro: I originally wrote a very long outline for a TV series I wanted to do called The Strain. And then the network president at Fox said to me, "We do want something with vampires—but could you make it a comedy?" Obviously, I responded, "No thank you" and "Can I have my outline back?"

Wired: So you turned a TV show into a novel, which you cowrote with best-selling crime author Chuck Hogan. Why a collaboration?

del Toro: I've written short stories in Spanish and English. I've written screenplays. But I'm not good at forensic novels. I'm not good at hazmat language and that CSI-style precision. When Stoker wrote Dracula, it was very modern, a CSI sort of novel. I wanted to give The Strain a procedural feel, where everything seems real.

Wired: But "real" for you is so ... unreal. You set The Strain in New York. In the past, your depictions of the city, from Mimic to Blade II to Hellboy, have had a fabulous aspect.

del Toro: It comes from my first trip to New York as a child. I was walking around Central Park, and I saw one of these expensive apartment buildings. At the top was a Gothic tower, and I said to my mother, "A vampire lives there." I wasn't being metaphorical. Then we went into the subway and—wow! For a guy from Guadalajara, the subway is mythical. The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters.

Wired: With Pan's Labyrinth, you proved you can indulge your love of monsters and seek artistic credibility at the same time. Do you still get push-back from an industry that believes the science fiction/fantasy genre and "serious filmmaking" don't mix?

del Toro: People think because you love genre you don't know anything else. It's condescending. If the emotion is provoked and the goals are achieved, what does it matter? Is Thomas Pynchon a more worthy read than Stephen King? It depends on the afternoon. And I love Kurt Vonnegut. He threads the profane and irreverent with the profound and soul-searing.

Wired: Is that what attracted you to Slaughterhouse-Five?

del Toro: Of course. Enormous truths can be revealed with a sense of humor and whimsy. With Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone, which is a less well-known film, I was trying the same thing, in a way. And with my first feature, the vampire fable Cronos, too. I tried to take genre premises and explore them obliquely, where the fantastic is either tangential or illuminates reality in a different way.

Wired: The movies you've booked will keep you busy for another decade or more. They will also make you the dominant fantasist for this period, which promises profound tech-driven upheavals in both content and distribution. What will we see?

del Toro: In the next 10 years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform "story engine." The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It's going to rewrite the rules of fiction.

Wired: It sounds like you're talking about an entirely new form of storytelling.

del Toro: Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.

Wired: How is that interactivity going to change Hollywood—and the way directors like you make movies?

del Toro: [Legendary B-movie producer] Samuel Arkoff once told me there are only 10 great stories. That's where the engine and promiscuity come in. Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages—only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don't think so.

Wired: So how will the public story engine tell those same 10 stories differently?

del Toro: We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We're still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you're following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.

Wired: You're describing a model that's more like a videogame. Is the merger of movies and games the first step?

del Toro: Unfortunately, I've found in my videogame experience that the big companies are just as conservative as the studios. I was disappointed with the first Hellboy game. I'm very impressed with the sandbox of Grand Theft Auto. You can get lost in that world. But we're using it just to shoot people and run over old ladies. We could be doing so much more.

Wired: But these nonlinear, hybrid storytelling forms involve gaming tech, which could trap them in a geek ghetto. What's going to bring down that wall?

del Toro: Go back a couple of decades to the birth of the graphic novel—I think we can pinpoint the big bang to Will Eisner's A Contract With God. Today, we have very worthy people doing literary comics. I think the same thing will happen on the Internet-gaming side. In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.

Wired: Are you going to create it?

del Toro: I'll be trying to make it. But I won't be trying until after The Hobbit.

Wired: Seems like you're pulling an Obama on us: doing everything at once. That's an interesting strategy.

del Toro: Look, the fact that I have a simulacrum of a career is a wonder. To paraphrase John Lennon, a career is what happens when you're making other plans.

Contributing editor Scott Brown (scott_brown@wired.com) wrote about the Terminator franchise in issue 17.04.

[Source: Wired News]