Into Tech

My love/HATE relationship with music cassettes ended a long time ago with the high-speed impact of my old, tape-chewing deck with a wall.

I still have plenty of those old briefcase storage cases around and, until this morning’s news that Curry’s is finally pulling the plug on music cassette sales, I hadn’t thought about them for some time. Hell, I thought they were already dead.

I guess it’s hardly surprising in our MP3 age though and according to the Daily Telegraph, Currys is the last big retailer to desert the once, Lord of the Dance. In 1989, over 83 million music cassettes were sold compared to just 100,000 last year. According to Curry’s MD, Peter Keenan:

“I remember the tape with some fondness. The hours spent putting together compilation tapes and the all-too-familiar experience of finding that your deck had chewed your tape will resonate with many now in their 30s and 40s. For today’s MP3 generation, it’s just a few clicks of the mouse to achieve what’s arguably a better outcome.”

I’m not sure too many people will be heart-broken since the writing has been on the wall for some time. Anyone out there upset?-Martin Lynch

cassette music MP3 music

At first glance, we thought the Portable GameCube Advance was the product of console miniaturizer Benjamin Heckendorn, who has shrunk some of our favorites into nearly portable packages.

But the Portable GameCube Advance is really the work of a random email tipster…surely not just a Photoshop rendition…but an entirely ready-to-go product complete with external OLED display and MP3 playback that will be in stores any day now.

Hit the jump for a picture of the music functions in action.

In the case that this surely real product isn’t real, look for Chinese OEM rip offs at a website near you. – Mark Wilson

Portable GameCube Advance [techeblog]

Nokia has taken the wraps off its latest phone – its thinnest yet – the 2630.

Measuring just 9.9mm the 2630 is a good looking slinky candybar with a reasonable feature set for an entry-level phone. Even sweeter is the price tag of around £58, when it arrives in Q3, which is not a lot for an anorexic blower. Features include a basic camera capable of taking photos in 640 x 480 resolution, Bluetooth, FM radio, MP3 ringtones (but no player) and a flashlight.

The company also introduced the Nokia 2760, a stylish flipper for just few quid more, boasting video recording and playback in addition to most of the features found on the 2630.

It also sports built-in hands-free functionality. Jump now for a photo.-Martin Lynch

phone mobile phonenokia

Creative is tackling the budget end of the MP3 player market with the new, colourful Zen Stone range of 1GB players which will barely tickle your wallet at £28.

Available in six colours - black, white, red, blue, pink and green –the player weighs in at 18.3g and measures 53.7×35.3×12.8mm. The 1GB capacity will take 500 songs, assuming a 4-minute track length, so Pink Floyd fans might want to do some math first.

It has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery which Creative claims is good for 10 hours and it supports MP3, WMA and WMA with DRM 9 files. You can even opt for some Zen Stone accessories, like the matching silicon skins, the sporty armband+skin combo and a “fashionable keychain” with a tiny case for putting the player in.

Pics of the keychain and the armband after the jump. –Martin Lynch

MP3 music creative zen

Sat-nav systems don’t have to cost a fortune according to Maplin, which has just launched a budget sub-£100 offering.

The AO5GW boasts a decent 3.5in touch-screen display and a built-in MP3 player – something that’s becoming increasingly common in GPS devices. It uses the Sirf Star III antenna for its GPS tracking and offers full UK mapping with 7-digit post code on the bundled SD Card, with Tele Atlas maps. It supports 2D and 3D views in day/night mode.

The AO5GW comes with a useful remote so that anyone in the car can use it, or the MP3 player, without yet another driver ditching their car while concentrating on the sat-nav instead of the road.

The battery life is three hours and the unit has 64Mb of internal memory. Tunes can be added to the unit via SD Cards. At a penny under £100, this really is a pocket-friendly, entry level arrival on the sat-nav scene.-Martin Lynch

sat-nav cars GPS travel

If beanbags had a version 2.0, the Slouchpad would be it. A gamer’s dream, it has two built-in 5Watt RMS speakers and a 10Watt RMS Sub Woofer for those outta-the-chair moments when you’re playing Gears Of War. And it’s not just gamer-friendly, as you can plug just about anything into it from MP3 players to TV, DVD and your laptop.

The Slouchpad comes in six colors, including classic black, cream and red, and the more nausea-inducing lilac, pink and white. The price is £299, a bargain at under £300. – Ad Dugdale

Product Page [Slouchpod via Red Ferret]

Medion has launched a sat-nav device with a difference. The GoPal S2310, following hot on the heels of the company’s uber-cheap UMPC announcement, can hook up with the Google Earth application.

You can use it to track and store your route and later, look back over the destinations you hit while on the road. The device sports a 2.8-inch colour TFT touch screen, is splash-proof and is Bluetooth-enabled for use with a phone as a hands-free car kit.

It comes pre-installed with a Points of Interest database and Western European mapping, with the option of flicking between 2D and 3D views. You can also use it as an MP3 player. Medion even throws in a pair of decent Sennheiser earphones to help you rock out on the road.

Due out next month but nothing yet on the price.-Martin Lynch

sat-nav google travel car

This is Bubble Gear’s multimedia handbag, which consists of a “Scrag” (that’s what I call a bag-screen hybrid) with built-in MP3 and DVD player. This bag is described as an “attention magnet”—thief magnet, more like—that will have people crowding round you as you sit in the mall watching the Teletubbies DVD bought by your latest boyfriend to keep you quiet on long journeys.

And when you’re bored of that, you can either listen to that Pussycat Dolls track that you know all the dance moves to, or set up a slideshow of photos for your newfound friends. “And this is my boyfriend… And this is my brain cell. Nope, just the one… Here are my favorite shoes… And this is the last picture of my mom and dad… no, it’s just a back view of the car, they didn’t say where they were going, but yeah, they were in a hurry…”

There’s a rechargable lithium battery, two sets of headphones, a car charger and a remote control, all included. The bag will cost you $399 and all the self-esteem you ever had. Find out after the jump where true gizmo girls stash their gadgets.

– Ad Dugdale

Hype around hip multi-media fashion handbag [Talk2MyShirt]

Lexar’s ExpressCard solid state drive is an interesting proposition: 4 to 16 gigabytes of non-volatile memory in a slot form factor. That’s not only more storage than typical USB flash drives can offer, but more than most based on microdrives can, too. For those with lappies with ExpressCard slots, it would seem like a sweet piece of storage, and even as a cache for Vista’s ReadyBoost, since its not hanging off the side of a laptop like a USB thumbdrive would. So what’s the catch?

Unfortunately, I found write performance to be a lot lower than I’d have liked.

It read a fair 15MB per second on several machines, confirmed using both synthetic and MP3 file copies. But only wrote at 3MB per second.

For comparison, the laptop drive in the DV9000 HP Pavilion churned about 30MB per second in both reads and writes, and the Lexar Lightning, the fastest USB drive I had on hand, scored 17MB and 14MB per seconds in reads/writes.

In a nutshell, write speeds really need to be much better before I can recommend it.

–Brian Lam

Home Page [Lexar]

NEW YORK (Billboard) - By now the practice has become old
hat: an eagerly anticipated album gets distributed and devoured
by MP3 bloggers before it ever hits stores. But when Columbia
Records released Beyonce’s “B’Day Anthology Video Album” on
April 3, it marked a rare instance of a similar phenomenon
happening with a music DVD.