Steelseries Siberia Neckband.........

Pain In The NeckThe Siberia Neckband is a product from Steelseries for the professional gamer, or so it seems. Steelseries has played an active role in the professional gaming arena and tied up with clans and communities.If you think wearing a headphone with a stretchable strap that attaches to the back of your head is comfortable, you’re wrong. Sure, for people with smaller heads, it should work fine, but anyone with a larger head will find it too tight or hanging from the top of your ears. You’ll also notice that they start slipping back from the back of your head and adjusting it from time to time can be irritating.The sound quality of the Siberia isn’t too shabby. It lacks the extreme low bass, so isn’t ideal for music or movies. For gaming, it should do fine. These phones do not distort or lose quality at high volumes, and the volume can get pretty high. These are open headphones and as they don’t hug the side of your face properly, a lot of the sound leaks out.There’s a flexible microphone that retracts into the headphone too. It performs pretty good quality audio recording. There’s an adapter for the Xbox360 supplied with it and a volume control too. The headphones are built well and the look is appealing. Good audio recording quality and an easily adjustable microphone are the good points of the Siberia Neckband but even then, a price of Rs 5,999 is a lot to ask for. There are much cheaper solutions without the Steelseries tag and slightly inferior, which do a better job without any of the discomfort.

iPod 80 GB

We’re Seeing Bigger Apples!The new iPod throws in an ultra-roomy 80 GB hard disk. Apple hasn’t changed the look of the new model, but the display is slightly brighter, making it more legible outdoors. The bundle includes a USB connector-and-charger, a slick suede protective case, and tiny, comfortable ear-bud type phones.Sound quality is good, but the bundled ear-buds lack punch—other headphones gave better results. The new iPod also makes for a great photo viewer, but the lack of zoom, pan, and rotate abilities is sorely missed. Video playback is quite smooth, and movies look great as always.Battery life is excellent—we got 18 hours of MP3 playback on a full charge. Video playback drains the juice quicker, and you’ll be cut down in a little less than six hours.SpecificationsFifth-generation; 80 GB; 2.5 inch display (320 x 240); multiple audio and picture format support; MPEG, H264, and MOV format video support

ASUS P525

Full PDA, Half PhoneASUS has brought their full line-up of PDA phones to India, and the P525 is a PDA with a number pad—something of a rarity. It’s a touchscreen running Windows Mobile 5 and the charcoal grey that made the P535 such a good looker makes another appearance. The P525 is a beautiful beast—all smoky grey with chrome buttons down the side panel in sharp contrast. We also liked the screen—crisp, clear and good contrast, visible even in daylight.The number keys look like sculpted buttons that have been integrated into the body—they give just the right amount of feedback when used, and never feel tacky. We don’t like the joystick, though—it’s too small and smooth and there’s insufficient tactile feedback. We also didn’t like the fact that the joystick’s in between the number keys 2 and 5—this affects access to the number 2.Voice Commander makes another appearance—a really excellent piece of code, this—that allows you to do so much more with voice commands. The excellent business card scanner is also preinstalled. There’s also a password protected security application called My Secrets that allows you to protect your files by encrypting them. All the usual Windows Mobile applications are present as well.There’s a dedicated button for the camera, which is surprisingly good for a PDA. The volume button is very ergonomic, as is the hold button—which prevents keypad, button and screen use.While the loudspeaker offers decent volume, we lament the volume levels on the hands-free kit—it’s just too low, be it music or a voice call. While on the topic of calls, signal quality could have been better—a patent weakness of most PDAs. If you need a good phone, please look elsewhere.Where the P525 scores is in PDA functionality (even though it foregoes a QWERTY keypad), looks—nobody will disagree here—and, of course, the software package that improves productivity by quite an extent. At Rs 19,000 the ASUS P525 is a good PDA, but a strictly average phone. It’s flashy for sure, and will draw glances anywhere. You’ll have to decide what is more important to you—PDA features, or a phone.

SpecificationsWeight—160 grams, Screen—2.8-inches, 240x320 pixels, 65K colours, 128 MB inbuilt memory, 2 MP camera with autofocus

Canon PowerShot A720 IS

Incremental UpdateThe Canon PowerShot A720 IS is an upgrade to the A710 IS, which was a very good point-and-shoot camera—one of the best that we saw during our comparison test last year. The most prominent change in the A720 IS, is its resolution. It is now an 8 Megapixel camera as opposed to the 7.1 MP A710.The picture quality has stayed pretty much the same too. The ISO level on this camera goes up to 1600. The A710 IS had a maximum of 800. The amount of grain beyond 800 is pretty bad and should be avoided as far as possible. The zoom lens is decent and there’s no serious degradation of quality at maximum zoom.The colours—as with all other Canons—are very neutral and not exaggerated. The images aren’t too high on contrast so there’s a smooth balance between the dark and the bright areas. This makes for some good portrait photography. The flash is pretty powerful too and the slow sync mode works rather well in illuminating the background in shots with the flash on. Macro shots are fairly easy to shoot and it’s possible to get extremely close to the object. The A720 IS now has a face detection feature, which works well and tracks people through darker areas as well.The movie quality is decent and actually usable in low light situations. There’re no sudden jumps in exposure while moving from bright areas to dark ones. Image stabilization evens out the bumps and the zoom works well, although a little aggressively, in the movie shooting mode. The A720 IS, is incrementally superior to the A710 IS. The problem with the A720 IS, is not so much to do with the camera itself, but with the other cameras even from Canon itself in the same price bracket. The SX100 is more or less available for the same price in the market and comes with a 10X optical zoom. If any, the A720 IS’s only advantage is that of being a little more compact than the SX100 IS.

Specifications:8.0 MP, 4x optical zoom, ISO Sensitivity: 80—1600, Shutter speed 1/2000th—15 seconds, Aperture range—f2.8—f4.8, Movie recording: 640x480 at 30 fps, 2.5-inch screen.

History Clean lets you clean up traces of your computer like deleting cookies, cache, history, typed urls, autocomplete data, recently run documents, find history, email sent/received, websites visited, files deleted and much more. You can also selectively delete or keep items that you want. For instance, you can set up the program so that it does not delete particular cookies. With its ultra security feature you can eradicate selected files and directories so that they can no longer be recovered. It also includes startup options and scheduling so that you can run tasks at specific times in stealth mode or after a certain interval automatically without operating the software. Plug-ins for the removal of other application tracks are also supported. This is useful if you have Windows Media Player tracks or other tracks left by other general purpose software that you wish to remove from your computer.

Macro Buddy.......

Macro Buddy is a four in one program designed to increase your productivity and save your time and effort working on your computer. It can automate your repeated typing phrases so that you never type those tedious phrases again, like salutations in letters or repeated email replies to your customers. It can fill your internet forms and login forms instantly. You can set macros for typing anything instantly. It can remember up to ten clipboard entries. These may be used at any time. This is useful if you want to keep copied data on your clipboard, even if you restart your computer or want to save the data while you work. It can run programs, files, websites or emails instantly with a hotkey combination. It can also search your keywords on favorite search engines like Google, Yahoo and Altavista. It is one program with lots of features.

The Folder lock.....

Folder Lock is a fast file-security program that can password-protect, lock, hide and encrypt any number of files, folders, drives, pictures and documents in seconds. Protected files are hidden, undeletable, inaccessible and highly secure. It hides files from kids, friends and co-workers, safeguards them from viruses, trojans, worms and spy ware, and even protects them from networked PCs, cable users and hackers. Files can also be protected on USB Flash Drives, Memory Sticks, CD-RW, floppies and notebooks. Protection works even if files are taken from one PC to another on a removable disk, without the need to install any software. It locks files in Windows, DOS and even Safe Modes. Additional Options include Stealth Mode, Hacker Attempt Monitoring, Shred files, AutoLock, Auto Shutdown PC, Lock your PC, Erase PC tracks, 256-bit Blowfish Encryption and Context Menu in Explorer. It is Windows Vista/2003/XP/2000/NT/Me/98/98S compatible and works on all kinds of disk types like FAT16, FAT32, NTFS. Folder Lock is the most downloaded file-security program in the market today.