Manifest Tech Blog

The Duracell Power Reserve line of portable chargers are rechargeable Lithium Ion batteries packaged in several sizes to provide additional power on the road for portable devices, from cell phones to media players to even some digital cameras.

These don't try to provide adapter tips for all your various devices (see previous post on Energizer Energi To Go). Instead they feature USB and/or mini USB ports for compatibility with the growing number of USB-powered devices, and are recharged through USB (from a computer or USB wall charger). For other devices, you can use the USB adapter / cable that came with the device to connect to a custom interface.

The Duracell Pocket Charger ($19) is a 500 mAh pocket-sized, supplemental charger for cell phones, providing up to 60 percent more talk time. It has a swinging miniUSB charging arm.

The Duracell Instant Charger ($29) is a small (~ 3 1/2 x 1 1/2) 1500 mAh charger with a USB port, plus miniUSB (and cable) for charging, and a power switch. It provides up to 180 minutes of backup power for cell phones and the iPhone, and 45 to 50 hours for iPods like the nano and classic.

The Duracell Powerhouse Charger ($49) is a 2000 mAh device that can charge two devices at once, with a USB port and miniUSB arm, and power switch. It provides reserve power for cell phones, PDAs or MP3 players, and even many digital cameras.

These allow you to bring along backup power when you're on the road, in a small, light, and convenient package.

See my Portable Power Accessories Gallery for more on portable batteries and power options.

Find the Duracell Power Reserve Chargers on Amazon.com:
Pocket Charger - Instant Charger - Powerhouse Charger

The Microsoft Zune HD is a touchscreen media player with radio, wireless, Web browsing -- and downloadable applications which can take advantage of its 3.3" screen and graphics performance (see previous post).

Microsoft recently released a set of new games optimized for the Zune HD to give you a sense of the device's capabilities.

These feature a 3D point of view driving game for racing through city streets, which can connect wirelessly to play with others.

• PGR: Ferrari Edition - Select your Ferrari cars and steer through the streets of London, Tokyo and New York with touch and tilt controls. Compete with three other players wirelessly.


• Lucky Lanes Bowling - Chose different bowling alleys, bowlers and ball styles


• Checkers - Classic game, play against the Zune or wirelessly with other player


• Audiosurf Tilt - Ride a song visually on roller coaster track based on the shape, speed and mood of the music. Tilt to avoid speed bumps and collect colored boxes


• Piano - Play portion of keyboard on touch-screen keys

You can review and download Zune apps using the Zune Desktop Software (under Marketplace / Apps) and then sync to the player, or download directly on the Zune HD device. Then run them from the Apps menu. However, apps do take a while to launch -- over five seconds, which is OK for a game but a bit painful for the Calculator app.

Microsoft also has release a new firmware 4.3 update for the Zune HD. Among other improvements, this provides the underlying support for upcoming 3D games and applications, adds an Auto Suggest feature for text input, and speeds Web browsing, with an Internet Settings option to swap between mobile or desktop layout when viewing Web pages. Get the firmware through the Zune Desktop Software (under Settings / Device / Player Update).

See my Portable Media Players Gallery for more on media players

Find the Microsoft Zune HD on Amazon.com

The new Microsoft Zune HD media player has a bright 3.3-inch touchscreen OLED display, ready to tilt into landscape mode for showing16:9 widescreen videos (see previous post).

And the "HD" in the name refers to the ability to store and play 720p HD videos. However, HD video doesn't do you much good if you're watching on the Zune's 480 x 272 display. So what's going on here?

The Zune HD is part of Microsoft's move to broaden the Zune brand from players into online entertainment, so you can buy movies and TV shows in HD, and enjoy them across the desktop (on Windows), set-top (Xbox 360), and portable devices (Zune HD). The first step is extending the Zune service to the Xbox 360, with unified video catalogs on the Zune Marketplace and Xbox LIVE stores.

But for the moment, you can turn your Zune HD into a HD video player with the Microsoft Zune HD AV Dock, available separately for $89 list ($70 street). Connect up to your HDTV with the HDMI cable, and watch 720p HD video in its full widescreen quality. The dock also includes optical digital audio output and an antenna for FM radio and HD radio reception, plus standard AV cables for display on standard-def TVs, and with other Zune models. There's also a wireless remote control.

The HD videos do take up significantly more storage than standard-def (and take longer to transfer and download) -- you can store some 10 hours HD video on a 32 GB Zune, but 48 hours of SD video. So stay with SD videos if you're only watching on the Zune itself, and then step up to HD with the AV Dock to watch your videos in their full quality.

Microsoft also offers a Zune Premium Car Pack for $79 that auto-seeks the best available FM frequency to play on your car radio, plus an audio out minijack, and a USB port to simultaneously charge a second device.

See my Portable Media Players Gallery for more on media players

Find the Microsoft Zune HD AV Dock on Amazon.com

If you want to customize your iPhone -- or other mobile phone -- with distinctive ringtones, then Sony Creative Software has a disc for you -- the Sony 1,000 Ringtones DVD. That's enough clips to assign a different sound to each of the callers in your contact list!

Priced at $19.94, and containing literally 1,000 sound clips, the disc includes 300 musical themes, 600 "Hollywood" style sound effects, and another 100 spoken words and phrases. It also includes a tutorial video(in both Mac .MOV and Windows .WMV formats), showing how to sync and install ringtones on the iPhone, plus demo versions of the Sony digital media applications.

The Musical ringtones are named for the spirit they evoke, with funk, dance, classical, space, and other styles.

The Sound Effects also cover a broad range, from aliens and lasers, bells and alarms, animals and insects, instruments and tools, plus classic effects like "Air Blowing On Plastic Wrap" and an always-appreciated Flatulence collection.

And the Vocals range from fun to goofy, from "Answer Me!" to "It's Your Mother" to "Yo Yo Yo Yo Yo Yo Yo!"

The ringtones on the disc are ready to use, without any additional downloads or editing or copy protection issues. The clips are provided in two formats: plain .MP3 for previewing on your computer or playing on many devices, and the iTunes .M4R ringtone format, ready to sync to the iPhone.

To install a ringtone, double-click the .M4R file to add it to your iTunes Library in the Ringtones category. Then check the Sync settings for your device under Ringtones to choose to sync the clip to your device. Finally, sync iTunes with your device, and then select the ringtone on your iPhone, under Settings, Sounds, Ringtone.

(You also can create custom ringtones in iTunes as .M4R files, although only from songs purchased from the iTunes Store. Choose Store, Create Ringtone, and then select the portion of the song you want to use as a ringtone.)

Be the first in your group to answer to the unique sound of "Plastic Baseball Inside Glass Fish Bowl Drop and Rolling" ...

See the Sony Press Release

It's almost Thanksgiving -- the important American holiday marking the traditional beginning of the Christmas shopping season, featuring Black Friday shopping action, with great deals and hordes or rampaging shoppers. This year, retailers are trying to spread out the peak by already starting with hot deals, to try to avoid the stampedes and encourage consumers to keep coming back to the stores.

Then right after the holidays comes the 2010 edition of the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (aka CES), back in Las Vegas from January 7 to 10 (see wrap from last year).

The CES is produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), now one of the top 15 trade associations in the U.S. with over 2,000 member companies. CES itself is the world's largest consumer technology tradeshow. While CEA expects the show to be slightly smaller than last year, it's still huge -- with some 2,500 exhibitors and 110,000 attendees.

The CEA held its annual CES Preview event in New York last week, and presented its market research projections for the holiday shopping season.

Some highlights for the holiday season:

The CEA expects holiday spending on gifts to rise 4% this year to $764 per household, still down from $882 in 2007. But 29% of that gift spending will be on consumer electronics products, up 8% from last year.

The CEA is then projecting a 6.0% growth rate in unit sales for fourth quarter 2009, compared to -6.3% in last year's collapse. This growth will be driven by computers and audio / video equipment (including portable devices).

The holiday gift wish list for CE products by adults is similar to last year, with notebook PCs, portable media players, flat panel TVs, video game systems, and digital cameras rounding out the top 5. But then there are some new entries on the list, with E-readers, iPhone, and Blu-ray players, good old desktop PCs, and smartphones at number ten.

The CE gifts wanted by teens is similar, with more emphasis on portable devices, with portable media players at the top, mobile phones at number four, portable game devices at seven, and another new category, netbooks, appearing at number nine.

The Top CE Gifts list -- products people actually are planning to buy as gifts -- echoes these trends (so people may actually be getting the gifts they want), with portable media players at number one, notebook PCs and portable game devices in the top five, smartphones now tied with cell phones at seven (combined they would be at the top), followed by portable navigation devices, portable boomboxes, and again netbooks rounding out the top ten.

Several trends are already apparent for holiday shopping, which may help in finding good deals: more focus on CE products at mass merchants (like Wal-Mart) instead of electronics stores, an effort to spread out the "Black Friday" peak with earlier and ongoing deals, and an attempt to raise spending through offering both low-end and higher-functionality produces, as well as through aggressive bundling of related products.

The CEA is looking to Internet TV and then 3-D TV to help drive interest in new products. More TVs and set-top devices, including DVD/Blu-ray players, will be Internet-enabled, enhancing viewing with interactive links and informational widgets. Already 56% of viewers have visited the website associated with a TV program, and 42% are watching online.

As to 3-D TV, the CEA sees a gradual growth much like the prior experience with HDTV, which would be a nice boost for the industry. However, the need to look nerdy by wearing special glasses will be an inhibitor to consumer acceptance.

See my article from last year's show for more details on the event and lots of links: 2009 International CES Summary.

Adobe has really extended its Photoshop brand, from desktop to online, and now to mobile. There's the legendary Photoshop CS4 for advanced professional photo editing, now with an Extended edition expanding into 3D and motion. And there's the more accessible Photoshop Elements for consumer photo organizing, enhancing and sharing.

And the brand has moved online with Photoshop.com, a free service for uploading and organizing your photos and videos online, editing with fixes and enhancements, and sharing on social-networking sites or on Photoshop.com galleries. It's available in the Web browser from your computer, directly within Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements 7, and from compatible mobile phones.

The ability to download applications to smartphones has allowed Adobe to extend Photoshop.com Mobile from Windows Mobile phones to the Apple iPhone last month, and now to Google Android phones.

With Photoshop.com Mobile for Android on the Verizon Droid (see previous post), you can flick through thumbnails of your photos on the touch screen, and view full-screen and in slide shows. Then use the left drop-down menu to tighten up the photo with Crop, Straighten, Rotate, and Flip, the center menu to adjust Exposure, Saturation, Tint, and Black & White, and the right menu to apply Soft Focus to add a subtle blur for artistic effect. The iPhone version also offers a Sketch tool to make photos look like drawings, plus effects including Warm Vintage, Vignette, and Pop.

Photoshop.com Mobile saves a new version of your changed photos. It also has Undo and Redo options so you can freely experiment with multiple operations. You then can upload your photos and edits to share online at Photoshop.com, which includes 2 GB of free storage (or sign up for a plan with more). And you can access and view your online photos from the phone.

On the Android platform, Photoshop.com Mobile can automatically upload pictures in the background, even while you are using other applications.

So far, so good, though I'd like to see more viewing functions, to browse the photos organized by folders (and camera vs. stored images, which should help with the visible delay in updating thumbnails), and with the ability to zoom in to see details. And it would be helpful to have some ability to see the photo attributes and rename saved images, so they could more easily be shared though alternate means such as messaging and email.

Even in this first version, Adobe has done a nice job with Photoshop.com Mobile to create a fun -- and free -- tool for cleaning up photos, especially before uploading to Photoshop.com.

Adobe has announced a new free update to its Adobe Creative Suite 4 suite, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.2.

The previous update to Premiere Pro in June enhanced support for the RED camera, popular video hardware, 64-bit systems, and interoperability with Avid software (see previous post).

This 4.2 update to Premiere Pro adds native support for Panasonic’s AVC-Intra format, so you can work natively to import, play, and edit AVC-Intra clips with no transcoding or rewrapping. WIth this tapeless workflow, you can edit directly off the P2 cards, or on your local drive. Premiere Pro supports the 50 and 100 Mbps data rates, and 1080 and 720 resolutions at the 24 to 60 frame rates.

You also now can transfer Final Cut Pro 7 projects directly to Premiere Pro CS4 with FCP XML interchange, without conversions or re-rendering, and while preserving common effects and transitions.

For more details, see the Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.2 datasheet, and a video demo on Adobe TV showing the end-to-end workflow.

The CS4 updates are available at no cost via the Adobe updater and from adobe.com. Trial versions are available online for download.

See my full article, Summary: Adobe Creative Suite 4, for more on the CS4 suites and individual applications.

See summaries of video applications and versions in my Video Editing Software Gallery.

    Find the Adobe CS4 Production Premium
    and Master Collection on Amazon.com

Miccus makes wireless audio products for consumers, including the BlueBridge line of Bluetooth connectivity devices. But this post is about the simple and sleek Miccus ChargeBlock compact charger for Apple's iPods and iPhones that don't believe in removable batteries.

This is a nice, simple, functional device -- basically a rechargeable battery with the iPod 30-pin dock connector attached. It's less than 2 1/2 inches wide and around 1 1/2 ounces, so just plug in your iPod or iPhone to boost it up for up to 11 hours of audio, 3 hours of video, or 3.5 hours of talk time.

It has a mini-USB connector on the back to recharge with the included USB cable, LED lights for charging status, and a snap on cap to protect the connector when you carry it in your bag.

The Miccus ChargeBlock is priced at $39.99. It's a nice clean design to provide a useful function to keep your iPod / iPhone going longer.

See my Portable Power Accessories Gallery for more on portable batteries and power options.

    Find the Miccus ChargeBlock on Amazon.com

Why is it so hard to build portable electronic devices that use a standard power / data plug? After all the "U" in USB stands for Universal, and lots of products do fine with it -- Bluetooth headsets with micro USB, mobile phones and media players and cameras / camcorders with mini USB, and laptops with USB connectors.

But no such luck when you head out on a trip, and you find yourself packing multiple power supplies with special connectors for devices like a Nokia phone, Apple iPod player, Sony camcorder, and Dell laptop. Yeesh!

One alternative is to carry one power supply with a system of interchangeable tips for powering your various devices. Even better, you can carry a separate rechargeable battery like the Energizer Energi To Go XP line of Rechargeable Power Packs which supports both USB and swappable tips, so you can recharge on the go to extend your time on the road.

These are portable lithium polymer rechargeable batteries, typically with USB ports and power ports at different voltages. They include adapter cables to connect interchangeable tips, for devices from cell phones and smartphones, to digital cameras and camcorders, to netbooks and laptops (see the Tip finder).

The Energi To Go XP line is developed in partnership with XPAL Power, and includes a Free Tips for Life program: register online to get two free tips per year to fit new devices, for the life of your product.

The line includes the credit-card sized 1.3 oz. XP 1000 with tips for cell phones, Apple iPods, and other MP3 players Bluetooth headsets though mini/micro USB ($19), and the 2.5 oz. XP 2000 charges smartphones, plus gaming devices and even digital cameras ($39). [The model number is the mAh capacity.]

For larger digital cameras, the 5.4 oz. XP 4001 charges two devices at once ($59), and the 4.9 oz. XP 4000 adds tips for camcorders to charge up to 6 hours, plus a EZ-Charger clip that charges internal batteries ($79).

And for portable computing, the 7.9 oz XP 8000 also charges netbooks for to 3 hours ($99), and the 17.5 oz XP 18000 charges laptops up to 6 hours ($179).

So if you're going to be on the road, and want some auxiliary power for your devices, the Energizer Energi To Go line can give you the boost you need.

See my Portable Power Accessories Gallery for more on portable batteries and power options.

Find the Energizer Energi To Go Power Packs on Amazon:
XP 1000 Cell Phone - 2000 Smartphone - 4001 2 Devices - 4000 Camera - 8000 Netbook - 18000 Laptop

Another example of Microsoft's hardware design ingenuity (see previous post) is the Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000 -- It's thin, light ... and curvy.

The keyboard is only a few millimeters thicker than a AAA battery at the back, and then tapers toward the space bar and front edge. It fits in an area of around 14 x 6 1/2 x 1/2 inches and weighs 14 1/2 ounces.

And the Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard is really curved, for natural wrist position, including the individual rows of keys, so the design takes up less space than adding a curved palm rest or using split blocks of keys.

The Mobile Keyboard is priced at around $89, including a separate portable Number Pad with carrying case. Both use Bluetooth wireless technology to connect to your PC or laptop, so you can go mobile without requiring a separate transceiver dongle.

It's very nice design to work comfortably and securely on a desk, and take up a minimum of space.

See my Portable Peripherals and Accessories Gallery for more on these and related products.