Two:Thirty AM

If you are a photographer that shoots with an SLR, you know why you prefer that to your typical point and shoot style camera. Control, picture quality, low light capabilities, etc. Unfortunately, carrying your bulky SLR around with you everywhere does not always cut it. You may be at a party, concert, or just out and about; there are times when an SLR just doesn’t work. You want something more compact that will fit in a pocket and is hassle free. Generally, point and shoot style cameras have too many trade offs to make them desirable to the SLR shooter. I thought the same, until I came across the Canon PowerShot S90. This small point and shoot changed the way I thought about point and shoots. With its wide variety of manual controls, wide aperture, and control ring, I was sold.

The Canon S90 weighs in at just a touch above 6 ounces, and you can pretty much fit it in any pocket. It has a beautiful 3 inch LCD viewfinder on the back complete with intuitive controls for camera settings. You have a large selection of shooting modes as well, complete with aperture priority (Av), shutter priority (Tv), and even full manual mode (M). The S90 has an f/2.0 – 4.9 lens with 3.8x optical zoom, and Image Stabilization. This puts the lens at about a 28 – 105mm focal length. At 10 megapixels, Canon decided to opt for low light capabilities rather than high megapixel count. This is fantastic for photographers, and casual shooters alike. One of the really innovative parts of this camera is the Control Ring. This ring is around the lens and allows you to customize what it controls (aperture, focus, shutter speed, etc.) for all types of creative shooting.

A few other features of note include: built in flash, HDMI out, video mode, and low light scene mode. If you are looking to shoot HD video in addition to making great images, then this is not the camera for you, as it only shoots SD video. However, if you are mainly interested in still shots, then absolutely take a look at this camera.

Pros:
- f/2.0 lens
- Control Ring
- 10.0 Megapixel
- Large beautiful LCD
- Ability to shoot manual
- Turns on very quickly
- Shoots RAW format
- Macro shooting mode
- Low light performance
- Battery Life

Cons:
- No HD video
- On the high end of the price scale

Retail Price: $399

It’s time to get creative with the camera that is with you every second of the day. Your cell phone camera! It may not be the best quality, or the fastest, or most versatile, but what it is, is available. It is rare you go anywhere without your cell phone, and it is even more rare that a cell phone does not have a camera. That being said, let’s get into it!

There are tons of apps out there for various platforms that are awesome for doing filters and effects on your camera phone photos. The problem is that no one app is available for everyone. What is available to everyone is a physical filters placed in front of your cell phone camera.

I recently stumbled upon a product called Jelly Lens at http://www.jelly-lens.com/. These awesome little filters fit just about every make and model of camera phone. They have a filter on one side and a round sticky circle on the other side so you can just stick the filter over your camera lens on your phone. The sticky material is re-usable and does not leave any marks on your phone.

As of this writing they have 14 different filters you can buy (I bought them all!). The best part? They are only $5 each! And for that 5 bucks you actually get a pretty damn good result. In some cases it actually improves the quality of an image you would get with just your camera phone.

Available Filters:
1. Wide Angle
2. Stretch
3. 6 Image Mirage
4. 3 Image Mirage
5. Heart Frame
6. Blue Filter
7. Star Frame
8. Sepia Filter
9. Polarizer
10. Close Up
11. Soft Lens
12. Starburst
13. Vignette
14. Spark

Short Youtube how-to from @alcedine:

Up until recent years, memory cards for cameras were all about the same. Sure there were different sizes and shapes, but as far as memory went, there was very little difference between them. In 2005, a small startup in Mountain View, CA changed the way we think about memory cards and shooting photos. A new product was released that was like no other: The Eye-Fi Card, created by a company with the same name. These engineering geniuses stuffed a WiFi chipset inside the already seemingly tiny SD card format. Wait, why WiFi? By having WiFi in the card, this enables the card to transfer your photos from your camera to your computer wirelessly without the need for plugging the camera in and then having to import the photos into your computer. The fun doesn’t end there, however. As if wireless photo transfer wasn’t enough, the card also will upload your photos directly to your favorite online photo sharing services effortlessly!

The product has come a very long way in just a few years. The first Eye-Fi card was a 2GB model that supported transfer of JPEG images to your computer and your favorite photo sharing sites. Flash forward to 2010 when the newest card, the Eye-Fi Pro X2, was released. This insanely powerful card boasts 8GB of storage, the ability to transfer the RAW file format, geotagging, 802.11n WiFi, SDHC Class 6 Read&Write speeds, and a brand new feature called “Endless Memory Mode”. With 8GB of memory, you might think it is basically endless already, but what they have done with this new feature is quite brilliant. Endless Memory Mode will begin to free up space on the card by removing images that have already been uploaded safely to their destination. Finally, a card that never runs out! A huge bonus that comes along with this feature is that the card is effectively backing up your photos as well. It is all well and good to have a giant card for your photos, but if that card is the only place they exist, if that card dies on you, you have lost everything.

Of course, the new Pro X2 card is not for everyone, as you may not need all of these very high-end features. Good news is that Eye-Fi offers a range of cards which will fit any style and level of photographer. From Point & Shoot to Digital SLR, these cards are a must have for your camera!

For more Information please visit: http://eye.fi/
Retail Price: $149.99

Electronic Ink? Yes, the future is now! The idea of eReaders is not new, however the idea of eReaders you would actually want to use is. The eReader space is going to be a huge growth area this year. With new devices popping up on the market what seems like every week, the days of just having Amazon’s Kindle as a choice are gone. For the most part, all of the current eReaders on the market have the same seven inch electronic ink display. That being said, it’s the form factor and little extras that really steer popularity.

Barnes & Noble launched their eReader, nook, in November of last year. But due to supply shortage and high demand on pre-orders, it was tough to get one until February of this year. A major plus for the nook from a selling standpoint is physical retail space. Barns & Noble will have nooks in their retail stores right in front of customers who may want an eReader device but are not ready to commit to a somewhat high purchase price online, sight unseen. The ability to have tactile feedback from the device is a selling point that is tough to beat.

In today’s world of multitasking, a device that does one thing can be a tough sell. But when it comes to an area like reading, you want simple and elegant. Just the words wrapping around each other and intertwining to form the intricate design of story telling. Sure, your smartphone, or laptop lets you read books. But they only accomplish the task, they don’t excel. eReaders are meant to do one thing, and do it very well. Electronic ink is meant to mimic the look of ink on paper.

Everyone is busy with their modern lives. Life has a way of making you think there just simply isn’t enough time. Some have even famously said, “no one reads anymore.” Reading a large novel can be intimidating, let alone in order to actually read it when you have a spare moment you must have the book with you. The nook solves these common problems eloquently. Weighing in at just a little over 12 ounces, it can be taken almost anywhere. As for a large novel being intimidating, the nook ensures that every book, no matter the number of pages is a mere half inch thick.

With value added features like expandable memory, replaceable battery, color navigation screen on the bottom, the open Android Operating System, and support for the open ePub book format, the nook truly is leading the pack when it comes to electronic paper media consumption. Will this change? of course, it wouldn’t be technology if it didn’t. That said, the nook stands to stay in the lead for a while given the limitless possibilities with software updates to the versatile device.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/

What sucks about Android.

Well, to be honest, very little! I switched from using an iPhone to using Android in November of 2009. After switching I never looked back. To this day I do not regret it one bit. Sure the platform is a little less polished, but it is so much more forward thinking and open. This makes it number one for me. All that being said, there is one thing that is absolutely driving me up the wall; OS updates. I see a huge problem in the way Android OS updates are rolled out. I am mostly speaking to version 2.0 and later since all the 1.x builds were still, in my opinion, in Android’d infancy stage. When the OS hit 2.0, I felt it was ready for prime time.

Since Android is open source, anyone can grab the OS and modify it how they see fit. A lot of hardware manufacturers are doing just that. It’s great on the one hand because you get a bunch of cool versions of the OS, it sucks on the other though because updates to those handsets are very slow to come and are never up to date with the virgin “Google Experience” phones. If a handset maker wants to make a custom OS version, at this point, they seem to be locked into using older 1.5 and 1.6 versions of the OS code. This sucks for the consumer because even with a brand new phone they are stuck with 3-6 month old technology on day one of using the phone.

With each new release of the OS like 2.0 and 2.1, the new OS seems to launch with a single phone. With 2.0 it was the Motorola Droid. With 2.1 it was Google’s very own Nexus One. Meanwhile everyone else is stuck with whatever version their phone came with. This almost makes it seem like if you want the latest OS you have to buy whatever phone is launched with it. This of course will not work.

I am not sure what, if any, are the technical reasons for this. Perhaps drivers for specific hardware are the culprit. What I would like to see is a more uniform release schedule of OS updates. If drivers are the problem, there should be a more common specification for how hardware is to talk to the OS and every handset maker should follow that spec. If you want to have a hardware keyboard, here is how it talks to the OS, same with touchscreens, trackballs, cameras, speakers, and so forth. Something similar to how USB peripherals work on a computer. If i get a new USB keyboard, no matter what it looks like, it still types normally. There should not be a difference in how an HTC keyboard talks to the OS vs. how a Motorola keyboard does.

I use a Motorola Droid so I have a “Google Experience” Phone. In this case I would like to see updates hosted by google. When google put out the Nexus One with 2.1, I would have liked to see a ROM download for “Google Experience 2.1 Update” and one for each of the carriers if necessary. This would ensure the platform keeps moving forward, and applications are more likely to work across the board

Currently in the Android market you are seeing over and over applications that say “does not work with droid” or “must have 1.5″. If the latest version of the OS were more readily available, I think more developers would be developing for the newest version and taking advantage of all the newest updates have to offer

So, to say that Android sucks, would be a gross mistake. Android is absolutely fantastic! Any of the problems I have seen up to this point are all nothing to worry about. I had an iPhone from the very first day it was launched, and to be honest it sucked until half way through version 2.0 also. Although I love Android and recommend it to a lot of my friends, I would still not recommend my mom use it, but very soon in the near future I think I probably will be able to.

(Keep in mind I have only been using Android since Nov 6)

Handcent SMS – A frontend for SMS/MMS. Adds a great deal of functionality to Android for messaging.

Home++ – A full home replacement that looks great and is coming along very nicely.

Movies – Find movies, theaters, and even manage your Netflix Queue.

Wifi Analyzer – A graphical WiFi analyzer.

Foursquare – Official app for the Foursquare service.

NewsRob – RSS reader with Google Reader sync.

Yelp – Official app for the Yelp service.

Seesmic – Relatively new to Android, but a fantastic Twitter client. I use Tweetdeck day to day on my laptop, but seesmic is very similar.

Advanced Task Killer – A must have app to manage running applications and even schedule app killing.

Barcode Scanner – All around barcode scanner for prodcucts or QR codes.

Evernote – Official Evernote app. Have your notes everywhere. Always synced.

DroidLive – Shoutcast internet radio player. Beautiful UI.

Remember The Milk – Official app for the best to-do list service there is, Remember The Milk.

Qik – Live stream DVD quality video from your phone.

LOLcats – Gotta get your daily fix of cheesburgerz!

Google Maps w/ Navigation – Hands down, THE BEST turn by turn navigation software I have ever used.

Weather Widget – Absolutely beautiful widget for the weather, with cool animations.

Amazon.com – Official Amazon shopping app.

Autorotate Widget – A quick one tap widget that will enable/disable the accelerometer for screen rotation.

AppsInstaller – Installer to install .apk files.

ASTRO File Manager – The best file manager I have found to date for browsing files in the Android filesystem.

Feel free to add more apps in the comments below or let me know what apps I should have picked. I will most likely have late additions since the year isn’t actually over yet. :)

I know it is kind of weird for me to talk about a toothbrush here, but I love this thing! I have used a good number of different electric toothbrushes in the past, then went back to “manual” toothbrushes after being disappointed with them all. During my last cleaning at the dentist I was given the pitch for this little gem. I was a little skeptical, but with the external LCD screen (i’m a geek) and the deal on it from my dentist, I thought, what the hell.

You get the toothbrush body, a couple brush heads, the external LCD display, and a dock type charger / brush head holder for the counter. You can use this toothbrush for multiple people since you can remove the brush head. The External LCD display not only tells you how long to brush on each section of your mouth, but also tells you when you are brushing too hard and when it is time to replace your brush head. Sounds gimmicky, but it is a really nice addition. Not to mention, it’s a nice clock for the bathroom.

My mouth has never felt as clean as it does after using this toothbrush! Once you use it, you won’t go back to a normal toothbrush. A little pricey, but totally worth it I think. I mean after all, I wrote a friggin review about it on my blog. :)

That’s it, short and sweet. Buy it at Amazon.

I will admit right off the bat that I have a photo and laptop bag obsession. There, now that’s out of the way. :) I have been eying this particular bag for a while due to it’s large amount of storage and it holds a 15″ laptop on top of all the photo gear. This bag is generally around $150 – $200. Price was really the only reason I was holding off on the purchase. Fortunately I was on eBay and found a seller with a Buy It Now auction that was accepting offers. I offered $90 not thinking they would take it, and they did! So now onto the bag itself.

You can easily hold 2 SLR bodies and around 6-8 lenses in this bag. You can customize the whole inside with the velcro padding. There are also several zippered pouches inside for storage. On the outside there are even more zippered storage areas. There is also a tripod holding system that can fold down and secure a tripod to the back.

The bag is very comfortable to wear. It has 2 very padded shoulder straps along with a chest strap and waist strap to secure it to your body. The zippers on this bag are big and easy to zip. I wore this pack for a photo hike that was about 5 hours and it was great. Everything was safe and secure with no issues. One thing I would like to see however is a memory card pouch on the shoulder strap that is easy to get to. Other than that, it is an all around awesome bag for your photo gear.

Well the HTC Hero has finally made it stateside..kinda. Instead of the
next gen looking Hero, we got the crappy knockoff version at Sprint
that looks like every other phone. It came out today, so we stopped by
the local sprint store to check it out. I didn’t really care too much
about the handset, nothing too special there. More important is the
Android Sense UI. The UI is beautiful, however feels very clunky sadly
:( I think it is a problem of a phone UI finally outpacing the hardware
it was designed for. Is this phone a winner? Probably, if you are with
Sprint. Am I switching from my iPhone? No. I am thrilled however that
this type of innovation will fuel competition in the mobile sector.