LONDON (Reuters) - Telecoms regulator Ofcom said on
Thursday it would legalise the use of low-power FM transmitters
such as the “iTrip” to be used to connect MP3 players to radios
or in-car entertainment systems.
LONDON (Reuters) - Telecoms regulator Ofcom said on
Thursday it would legalise the use of low-power FM transmitters
such as the “iTrip” to be used to connect MP3 players to radios
or in-car entertainment systems.
LONDON (Reuters) - Telecoms regulator Ofcom said on
Thursday it would legalise the use of low-power FM transmitters
such as the “iTrip” to be used to connect MP3 players to radios
or in-car entertainment systems.
Ofcom legalises the use of FM transmitters which allow iPods and other MP3 players to play through car radios.
All you nasty, evil criminals using FM transmitters in your cars to transfer tunes from your iPod to the car stereo will soon be honest, useful citizens again. It was news to me that it was illegal in the first place. To think my blind flirtation with the dark side of the law could have gotten me a sound thrashing and a telling off.
From next month, FM transmission products like the Griffin iTrip and many others will be legal according to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ESTI). I’m not sure it mattered to us normal law-breaking folk but the manufacturers will be chuffed.
A statement from the UK regulatory body, Ofcom reads:
“The use of certain low power FM transmitters, which wirelessly connect MP3 players and other personal audio devices to radios and in-car entertainment systems, will be legal for use in the UK from 8 December 2006. Equipment previously available carries a high risk of interference to other broadcast services. However, in response to consumer demand Ofcom has led negotiations in Europe to develop a harmonised technical approach designed to limit the potential of interference to other wireless devices.â€
All you need to do if you haven’t got one already is to by one with a CE mark.
All these rules, eh? Thanks God burning copies of rented DVD movies is still legal.-Martin Lynch
[More]
By Brendan I. Koerner
My wife is a lingerie designer (seriously), and thus makes semi-frequent trips to China’s Guangdong Province to oversee sample production. Upon her last return, she made a bold pronouncement: the Middle Kingdom’s days as the world’s chief producer of affordable ladies’ undergarments are numbered. Lingerie companies are already finding it cheaper to deal with factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and other nations with a dearth of modern skyscrapers.
Her learned observation got me thinking: will China’s reign atop the low-end electronics heap soon end as well? After all, the natural cycle in gadget production has been for a country to start out as a purveyor of discount knock-offs, then gradually reinvent itself as a premium supplier. We’re all probably too young to remember this, but “Made in Tokyo” was a sign of inferior quality circa 1950. And weren’t LG and Samsung considered cheaper alternatives to Japanese goods just a generation (or less) ago?
You can already see what might be the first stirrings of China’s maturation—the transformation of Lenovo into an IBM-buying global brand, for example, or the efforts of Japanese companies like Matsushita Electric to move high-end manufacturing operations to Shanghai. I’m not saying that the flood of cheap MP3 players from Shenzhen is gonna stop in the next twelve months, but maybe it’s time to start asking: when it comes to low-end gadgets, what’s the next China? Oddsmaking after the jump. PLUS: The Van Morrison riddle resolved, and Low End Theory goes on hiatus—in the jungle.
The obvious prerequisites for a successful low-end electronics industry are political will, stability (even, alas, of the odious authoritarian variety), and a low-wage workforce. China offers all three, at least in the regions especially set aside to interact with foreign economic interests. The cycle starts out with established foreign manufacturers either showing an interest in contract factories, or actually establishing their own industrial operations to handle low-level products. Local managers are thus mentored on the details of technical production and international trade; they soon split off to form their own contract factories, and the deluge of cheap watches and whatnot begins in earnest.
Where will this low-end answer to The Lion King’s “Circle of Life” next kick into existence? A list of possibilities, from likeliest to the darkest horse in the race:
India (3-to-1) The obvious candidate, though the political will might be lacking—having already conquered the programming and call-center worlds, does going the cheapo manufacturing route make sense? Perhaps in one of the nation’s less economically developed provinces, as part of a concerted top-down effort to attract even more foreign investment.
Vietnam (5-to-1) A huge population (over 83 million), a government akin to China’s, and seemingly more than a passing interest in pursuing a “to get rich is glorious” economic makeover.
Indonesia (10-to-1) Archipelagos are bound to seem chaotic at times, and Jakarta can be a mindbender. But democracy is taking root, and the proximity to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore has to count for something. Already has some solid domestic brands.
Mexico (20-to-1) Location next to world’s largest consumer market is an enormous plus, and already hosts manufacturing facilities for the likes of HP. But a lot of concerns about the industry’s ethics; supremely depressing as this is going to sound, it’s much easier for Joe Q. American to ignore the plight of overseas workers. (Low End Theory categorically does not advocate the mistreatment of fellow human beings for the sake of saving a few bucks. We’re good people over here, honest.)
Turkey (50-to-1) Like India, already established in affiliated industries. Also, a lot of government-trained talent thanks to military programs. So why the longer odds? In a word, bureaucracy—will have to curtail the hoop-jumping faced by foreign investors, in a much more aggressive manner than just establishing some “technology parks”.
Longshots (99-to-1 or worse) The Philippines, Morocco, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand
An important disclaimer: I’m an expert on being a skinflint, not international business, so my gut instincts here could be way off. Please, no angry e-mails from Bangladeshi programmers or Turkish product designers explaining why their country is about to become the Japan of the 21st century. Civil arguments in comments much preferred, thanks.
A last point, though: perhaps the successor to China will be China itself, albeit a different part. Guangdong got first crack thanks to its proximity to Hong Kong, and special rules designed to encourage foreign involvement. Once Shenzhen is played out, could the Chinese government simply move the low-end playing field to, say, Fujian of (gulp!) Yunnan? In other words, will the Sungale of tomorrow simply churn out its products in a different province?
FINAL WORD ON VAN MORRISON: Thanks to a couple of very dedicated Van Morrison fans, I’ve finally been able to resolve the controversy over the lyrics to “Brown-Eyed Girl”. A JPEG of the original sheet music was forwarded to me, and the lyric is, indeed, “the old mine,” not “the old man.” I was almost convinced by one reader’s suggestion that Van was simply butchering the pronunciation of “Ormeau”, a main Belfast road. But the hard evidence is clear on this one: Van and his lady (supposedly Janet Planet) were listening to a transistor radio in some quarry somewhere (most likely California).
TO THE JUNGLE: No Low End Theory for the next two weeks, I’m afraid. I’m currently in Delhi, first stop en route to the Indo-Burmese jungle, where I’ll be researching my forthcoming book. (It’s slated to come out from The Penguin Press in 2008—start saving up now!) Won’t be checking e-mail from the road, so best to leave anything germane in comments. And if I have any readers in Dibrugarh, hey, let’s grab a beer while I’m over there.
Otherwise, see y’all again on December 7th. Until then, keep it cheap.
Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Low End Theory column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.
Having to move to twiddle knobs or just reaching for a remote control can be so taxing which is why I like the look of this Motion Speaker from Question Mark Entertainment.
Alongside its alien good looks, a mere wave of your hand is enough to control the volume or even change the radio station. How Royal is that? The speaker also emits moody light patterns and has a flexible array of power options: mains, USB or AA batteries.
It’s compatible with PCs, Macs and MP3 players and costs just under £30.-Martin Lynch
Via I4U
By Brendan I. Koerner
Let me begin this week by paraphrasing the great customs inspector Herman Melville: Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp and drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to 125th Street as soon as I can. For nothing puts a smile upon my face, nor sparks so many column ideas, as my travels among the ceaseless stores hawking camo coats, shea butter, faux alligator shoes, and, above all, really cheap electronics.
How cheap are we talking here? Well, I’ve waxed poetic before about 125th’s plethora of Discmen knockoffs and shelf systems that resemble Voltron’s constituent parts. But I think I discovered the strip’s cake-taker this past Saturday: a store near Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard had a sidewalk bin filled with $9.99 RCA Lyra 128 MB MP3 players.
A low price, to be sure, but a real bargain? If you break it down logically, the answer is definitely “no way.” But I can see what the store’s proprietors were thinking: they’re hoping the Bandwagon Effect will help ‘em clear some inventory. A semi-coherent definition of said effect after the jump. PLUS: The Van Morrison lyrical debate heats up!
Let’s start with a little mathematical breakdown here. Those ten-dollar Lyras are offering a meg’s worth of storage for approximately 8 cents. Compare that to this one-gig player from Kinamax, which gives you a meg for about half that price. Since features on low-end digital audio players tend to be pretty non-existent, storage capacity is the one spec that really merits attention. Better to save up $20 and go for the better bang-for-your-buck deal.
But if you’re stuck on a sub-$40 budget, does it really make sense to go all digital in the first place? The superior deal is a Discman descendent that can play MP3s. They go for about $15 nowadays, and assuming that you max out each disc to its full 700 MB capacity, that’s a real bargain—about two cents per meg. Can’t get much more low-end than that, now, can you?
Such calculations are rarely made by us cheapo consumers, however. We want something that inexpensive, sure. But rare is the bargain hunter who wants to be left in the technological dust. We know we’re not gonna be getting top-of-the-line equipment, but we also don’t want to feel we’re settling for yesterday’s news. In other words, we’ve got egos, just like the rest of humanity (save for those who’ve attained Nirvana, and the late Larry “I Had an Ego Death” Hagman).
With iPods and their ilk way out of the low-end price range—you know how long it takes me to make $200?!?!—that means we’re stuck with the likes of the Lyra. Sure, there’s a nagging internal voice that lets us know the player’s a rip-off at its core. But the temptation to join the future is strong among low-enders, even if it’s only a symbolic gesture such as rocking an MP3 player in lieu of a CD unit. And upon seeing that one can join that glorious digital future for the low, low price of $9.99, well, forgive a skinflint for experiencing a little irrational exuberance.
Alas, it’s all a mirage. Once the buzz of going purely digital wears off, one realizes that he or she’s saddled with an inferior product that earns one derision, not respect, from the geek crowd. Sort of like that time you really, really wanted some Air Jordans, but your dad bought you some counterfeit Reeboks instead—you think you’ve accrued enough footwear cache to impress your schoolyard pals, but they just end up ripping on you nonetheless. (Yes, I’m speaking from experience here.) The urge to hop on the bandwagon is quite strong, and leads to low-end consumer decisions that rarely have the intended effect. I shudder to think how many Jazz cameras have been sold to low-enders with a gleam in their eye.
Can’t blame a discount electronics merchant from trying to take advantage of this impulse, I guess. Not can I blame him for not affixing warning labels to each Lyra that read, “CAUTION: May not be as high-tech as you think, and will probably get you laughed at on the subway, thereby destroying your illusions of having joined the digital elite in some small way.” But then again, perhaps the momentary high of the purchase makes up for inevitable disappointment. For some people, ten bucks is a reasonable price to pay for a few minutes elation—an axiom that Pablo Escobar knew all too well.
MINE OR MAN: Several commenters have disputed the Van Morrison quote I cited in last week’s column. The general argument is that Van and his brown-eyed girl don’t take their transistor radio down to “the old mine”, but rather down “the old man”—”man” being slang for either a California highway or the Mississippi River.
Is there any way to settle this definitively? Does anyone know if Van ever commented on the lyrics? (Can’t say I trust lyrics sheets from any “Best of…” compilations, so please don’t cite them.) I did a little Google fight between the terms, and I still think it’s “the old mine”. I mean, hey, Van’s from Belfast, and I can totally see him and his girl drinking lager and heavy petting in some open-cast mine on the outskirts of town. Wait, does that make any sense? I’ve been to Belfast several times, and can’t remember seeing any mines, just lots of political murals and tumblers of Bushmills.
Help! Leave definitive evidence of “mine” or “man” in comments, or drop me a line. Can’t rest until I know the answer.
Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Low End Theory column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.
It’s not often you come across an accessory that works with multiple MP3 players, yet that seems to be the iMe Dock’s claim to fame. It lets you dock any player onto your car’s dashboard, from Apple’s ubiquitous iPod to SanDisk’s newest Sansa. Once docked you connect it to your car’s entertainment center and the iMe can charge your player while blasting out your tunes. It’s not what we’d call revolutionary, but if the pricing is right and you have multiple MP3 players, its a quick way to simplify your accessory collection.
iMe Dock [via CNET Crave]
Whatever happened/To Tuesday and so slow
Going down the old mine/With a transistor radio
When a whiskey-addled Van Morrison first belted out the above lyrics in 1967, he was trying to come to terms with a long-ago love—a brown-eyed girl obliging enough to give him quickies behind some East Belfast stadium, apparently. Yet Van was also celebrating the giddy 1962 high of realizing that, thanks to the wizards at Texas Instruments, Sony, and other electronics titans, you no longer had to hang at your parent’s house in order to enjoy some choice AM nuggets. You could, indeed, play music while drinking beer down the old mine. The only prerequisite was a pal rich enough to buy a cheap Japanese transistor radio, which ran around $20—$123 or so in today’s dollars.
A transistor radio nowadays, of course, is about as low-end a gadget imaginable—the Sony pictured at right goes for less than $13, putting it well within the price range of just about everyone. But who buys transistor radios anymore? Tell a girl that your idea of the perfect date is pumping Hot 97 on a Sony ICF-S10MK2, and your odds of removing her pants someday descend to absolute zero—what a simpler time you grew up in, Van.
Still, the likes of Sony and Panasonic ain’t dumb, and there’s obviously a market for these things. So who’s keeping the transistor-radio fires burning, and are they an endangered species? Read on, brothers and only friends, read on. PLUS: GSM phone recs for a reader headed for the Middle East?
The Paranoid At least two, and possibly three, generations of electronics consumers were raised to believe that any bomb-shelter or disaster-preparedness kit should include a transistor radio. I can clearly remember learning this in elementary school, when everyone quite earnestly believed that a nuclear exchange with the Soviets was right around the corner—don’t laugh, young’uns, until you consider what it must’ve been like to see The Day After as a nine-year-old. The idea was that, in the event my hometown of Los Angeles was turned into an apocalyptic wasteland rife with looting and zombies, our family would be able to receive news updates regarding just how screwed we really were.
Don’t get me wrong, I sort of get this mindset—in the event of a true catastrophe, it’d be nice to know where I might be able to snag a Red Cross meal, or which highways are still open. But given the abundance of multi-function gadgets that feature AM/FM capabilities—a lot of digital audio players, for example—should I really invest in a dedicated transistor radio just for emergency purposes? Anyone who grew up during the Cuban Missile Crisis probably disagrees with me, though, which is why I’m willing to bet a lot of transistor radio buyers are on the north side of 50—and probably still quite leery of a Soviet comeback.
Baseball Fans I actually saw the Panasonic RF-P50 (below right) advertised expressly for this market—the radio was in the window of a discount electronics store on 14th Street, above a star-shaped sign reading “Great for the Ballpark!” Again, I don’t see the wisdom in buying a radio-only unit like the RF-P50 when, for a few bucks more, you can get the radio capabilities integrated into a more versatile gadget. But aging baseball fans who grew up marveling at fellow spectators listening to the radio broadcasts? For them, there’s still something magical about the humble transistor radio and the one-piece earphone—it’s as much a part of the going-to-the-ballpark experience as 64-ounce beers and paying $29.95 for parking. Plus, if some drunken fan knocks your RF-P50 to the ground by accident, no worries—it’s only $13, which is about what it costs to buy a hot dog at Shea Stadium nowadays.
Hopeless Radio Geeks The Japanese word otaku deserves far more usage in the West—we English speakers don’t have a similar word that so succinctly conveys the obsessive jags of some smart-yet-maladjusted folks. Like trainspotters or model-railroad enthusiasts, radio geeks have a curious fixation on everything to do with the RF portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. That usually means ham radios and the like, but there continues to be an inexplicable fascination with low-end gear, too. Countless forums are filled with comparison tests between $10 transistor radios and pricier living-room units, with the former often winning the Battle of Reception. Believe me, there are few happier souls on this planet than the radio geek who just discovered he can pick up an FM station in a different time zone if he adjusts the antenna on his transistor unit just like so.
What’s the common thread between all these consumers? I’ve gotta say it’s age—I just don’t think you’re going to see many under-30s buying transistor radios. That’s in large part because radio is a common feature on MP3 players and Walkmen knock-offs, but also because there’s no wow factor in the technology—in the era of the baby cellphone, getting AM/FM reception for twelve bucks ain’t all that.
Kinda sad, as the Van Morrison lyric at this column’s top so neatly encapsulates the thrill of technology, a thrill that seems pretty hard-to-come-by in today’s more electronics-saturated world. I mean, is there a “Brown Eyed Girl” of the iPod Era, a song that conveys the high of that first time you realized you could fit 4,000 songs in your pocket? Tips in comments or via e-mail, please.
HELP JEFF OUT: I didn’t get into this business to help people. But every once in a while, I get an e-mail appeal so moving, I can help but shed a tear and led a hand. So here goes: A devoted LET reader is traveling to the Middle East this winter, and asks the following: “In lieu of getting an unlocked Razr, do you have any
suggestions for a good, reliable, compact, unlocked quadband GSM phone for me
to travel with?” I’m both too cheap and too lazy to pass along any worthy advice, so I’m leaving it up to y’all—leave tips in comments.
Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Low End Theory column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.