By Paul McCollum

USB drives have become almost as much of a mainstay in the pockets of computer users as their car keys. While flash drives are more convenient they don’t offer the flexibility that comes along with an external drive for speed and capacity. Kingston’s latest release bridges the gap between pocket-able flash drive and performance drive speed and size. Its HyperX Max USB 3.0 SSD boasts some of the highest drive speeds available in a portable drive and is smaller than almost every other external class drive.

The latest generation USB 3.0 bridge coupled with a top of the line SSD controller (backed with 128MB RAM) paves way for massive data transfers. The 128GB capacity should be more than enough room for business and personal file storage without the space management issues of generally smaller thumb drives. The backward compatible USB 3.0 mini-connector will allow you to use it on older computers not yet blessed with SuperSpeed ports. In terms of real-world scenarios, nothing really comes close with its 200MB/s read and 164MB/s write speed. Unfortunately, almost nothing rivals the Kingston when it comes to price. The HyperX Max costs about $300 for the 128GB when you can get a speedy 90MB/s 1TB portable drive for under $100. It’s really up to you to decide whether or not the Kingston is cost effective. Check out full review at Everything USB to find details of how well the HyperX Max USB 3.0 SSD compared amongst a large sampling of other drives.

[Kingston HyperX USB 3.0 SSD @ Everything USB]

By Paul McCollum

One of the few things we are missing, here in the future, (besides our rocket skates) is high quality wireless video. Audio compression has made great advances but video is lagging, literally. Several companies have released products in the past few years but all have been plagued with connection problems or bandwidth issues. Diamond’s new Wireless USB variant, VStream Wireless HD Video Streamer, may finally have all the components to deliver high definition video without wires or the headaches.

The VStream consists of a compact receiver for connecting to an HDMI input on your TV and an even more compact USB dongle to plug into your PC. The slim Certified Wireless USB transmitter sends compressed data over Ultrawideband to the remote unit to bypass any Wi-Fi traffic. The same dongle can also flex up to 90 degrees to best angle to the receiver. Since Windows recognizes VStream as another DisplayLink’s USB monitor, you won’t run into any problems streaming NetFlix, Hulu and YouTube to your HDTV. DisplayLink driver, however, isn’t HDCP compliant so Blu-ray and iTunes movies won’t work with VStream. In terms of picture quality, there’s some bit-grate degradation at 1080p, but you will have to be comparing the wired HDMI and VStream to really see the difference. For sale at roughly $108, it is definitely competitive in the space. Detailed video quality and wireless range data is available at Everything USB.

[Diamond VStream Wireless Video Streamer Review @ Everything USB]

By Andrew Liszewski

The real beauty of the iPhone and the iPad is that their simplicity allows them to be different devices for different users. The large touchscreen and endless assortment of applications means they can be far more than just tablets or phones. And an incredibly prolific third-party accessories market further enhances what each device can do. If you’re an artist, drawing and painting apps coupled with a stylus turns either device into a blank canvas. If you’re an automotive enthusiast, with dashboard mounts they can become navigation devices or even performance monitors. And if you’re a foodie, they can become a cookbook with an infinite number of recipes.

The only problem with that last application is that neither device goes too well with foodstuffs. In fact, we all know that Apple has hidden away moisture detectors in both the iPhone and iPad so that if they do get caught up in a spill, you’re completely out of luck when it comes to making a warranty claim. So keeping your iDevice in the kitchen while you work through a recipe is like playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette with your investment. Unless you take precautions. But do you need to go as far as to buy custom plastic wraps for either device? We’ll do our best to determine if CleverWraps are worth the investment in our full review after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Paul McCollum

ioSafe has made a name for itself by creating hard drives that can withstand all manner of natural disasters. By survive, it means that once you extract the internal disk from the charred or flooded rubble, all your data should still be there, even if your house or office isn’t. It’s the personal computing version of an airplane’s ‘black box’. Until lately, these indestructible vaults were meant to be nailed down or chained in place with security cables. The extra material required to insulate the drive from water and fire adds a great deal of bulk.

ioSafe’s Rugged Portable drive is meant to be a more travel-friendly version of the ioSafe SoloPRO. It is much closer to the same size as standard external hard drives, but it can easily fit into a laptop bag or carried in one hand from place to place. Being a much smaller drive, ioSafe did have to trim off some of the protective features, yet the drive still managed to survive in all three durability tests: water immersion; fire; and blunt force (basically, shooting the drive with a shotgun). The Rugged Portable also came out on top in the real-world performance test, thanks to the 2.5″ Seagate 7200-rpm drive and USB 3.0. Read a detailed review at Everything USB to find out if all these features and performance warrant the high cost per gigabyte.

[ ioSafe Rugged Portable Drive Review @ Everything USB ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Whipping your smartphone out every time it vibrates at an incoming email, text message or app notification is not always considered proper etiquette, particularly when you’re with a group of people. But the fear of missing even one hilarious tweet, or being out of the loop on the next internet meme, keeps us compelled to keep checking our phones at every opportunity. One solution to this so-called ‘problem’ is to simply realize that somehow life went on before the advent of social media and wireless communications, and to just leave our phones hidden away. But the more realistic solution, at least according to Sony Ericsson, is to find a more subtle way to stay on top of things.

Their LiveView is like having a secondary display for your Android-based smartphone, but one that’s considerably smaller, subtler, and easier to pass off as a high-tech wristwatch. What looks to friends or family like you’re checking the time, is actually you staying on top of calls, RSS feeds, tweets and a seemingly never ending list of info you can probably survive an evening without knowing. But you know you can’t. So does the LiveView serve as an adequate alternative to keeping your smartphone in hand all hours of the day? For that answer and more check out our full review after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

I’m as big a fan of streaming/downloading content online, or watching TV on demand, as anyone these days. But I also have to admit that at times I still enjoy the randomness of broadcast television, and just flipping on the TV and taking what I get. The feeling is hard to describe. But it’s like The Simpsons. While I own every season on DVD (up to season 10 of course) and can watch a given episode whenever I want. There’s still some appeal to randomly stumbling across a classic episode on TV.

But for most people, enjoying broadcast TV is limited to sitting at home on the couch in front of the flat screen. It’s not always easy to take it with you. Portable TVs are always an option, but who wants to bother when you probably already have a laptop with you while traveling? So most of the time you’ll settle for a show or movie you’ve ‘purchased’ online. But with Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid dongle you don’t have to settle. If you’re sitting in an airport and want to see what’s going on with the local news, you can just plug it in to your laptop and enjoy broadcast TV right in your lap. It can even turn your laptop into a portable DVR, stream a live broadcast to your iPhone or iPad and best of all, the hardware is smaller than some flash drives. Check out our full review after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Chris Scott Barr

The great thing about smartphones these days is that they can effectively eliminate the need to carry around a bunch of extra devices. Calculators, PDAs, MP3 players and even personal recorders are all obsolete when you have the latest technology. I personally use my iPhone for all of the above, and then some. I never thought that I had a need to record voice memos, but now that I have a phone that can do it, I use the feature quite often. The audio quality isn’t bad, but it’s not the best in the world. Thus, having an external microphone to attach could prove rather useful.

I’ve had a chance to take a look at the i-Microphone, which is a tiny mic designed specifically for Apple devices. If you own an iPhone, you’ll quickly find out that just plugging in an ordinary mic won’t work. This is because it uses the same jack for audio input and output. So how well does this little device perform?

Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

The reason I hear most often from people who don’t have or want a touchscreen based smartphone is that they can’t get used to typing out messages with just an on-screen keyboard. They prefer the tactile feedback of a real keyboard or a thumbpad, which I can understand. On the iPhone, where my typing never really goes longer than the 140 character limit of a tweet, I never have any issues. But on the iPad, which I occasionally use as a laptop replacement for taking notes, the on-screen keyboard can get a little annoying. So much so that I usually always bring along Apple’s own wireless keyboard for long typing sessions, which unfortunately really isn’t designed for traveling.

But the only way you can make a full-sized keyboard travel-friendly is to introduce some sort of folding mechanism, and that’s exactly what Verbatim has done with their new Wireless Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard. It folds in half making it easier to transport, and while it doesn’t necessarily get small enough to carry in your pocket, it’s certainly compact enough to stash away in a bag or briefcase. But does it work as well as the keyboard permanently fused to your laptop or tethered to your PC? Check out our full review after the jump to find out.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Paul McCollum

Following Kingston, PQI and Super Talent, LaCie has also jumped onto the USB 3.0 bandwagon with its FastKey. Bearing a strong resemblance to the IronKey drive, the $499 FastKey USB 3.0 flash drive keeps with the company’s tradition of devices that are easy on the eyes (and pricey). A smooth metallic exterior and a slim form factor make the FastKey a nice conversation starter. The cap and body are lightweight and metallic, giving the feel of a smaller drive. However, the above average width may cause problems blocking adjacent USB ports.

While the FastKey is slightly larger than most flash drives, it packs a whopping 120GB of storage. With this amount of storage, speed is a necessity. What good is 120GB of space if it takes an hour to fill it up? For FastKey’s real world performance, you can expect a read rate of 125MB/s and write of 85MB/s, provided you have a fast internal drive to match the speed. So, it will take about 16 minutes or so to copy everything from this thumbdrive to your PC.

Not all flash drives are built the same, even those as bold to call themselves an Express or Blaze are deceptively slow. When selecting a flash drive, pay close attention to the actual speed rating of the memory as opposed to the version of USB that they support. Full details on how well the LaCie FastKey lives up to its name can be found at Everything USB.

[ LaCie FastKey Review @ Everything USB ]