Gadgetoid

Stereo bluetooth headphones are all well and good when you want to get audio out of your phone for personal listening, but what about using it as a replacement for a kitchen radio, or a bit of living room easy listening?

Unless you’ve got an iPhone, the chances of picking up a purpose built dock are approximately nil. Intempo have the solution to this problem, however, with a convenient, bluetooth connected wireless speaker that you can connect to your phone, netbook, laptop or desktop computer for a bit of relatively short range audio beaming.

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I was perusing Halfords a couple of days ago, admiring pink steering wheel covers and seat covers emblazoned with teddy bears in a thoroughly manly fashion, when the in-car DVD Player display caught my eye.

Dominating over half of the display was the new NextBase Click & Go range. The range consists of a 7″ and 10″ player, the former of which has an excellent balance of features and price and the latter is, perhaps, a little too excessive.

Naturally, my first instinctual response to the Click 7 was “buy, buy, BUY!” Fortunately for my significantly strained wallet, my partner reminded me that I didn’t become a technology journalist to rush into more ill conceived gadget purchases.

So, rather than let my lust for gadgetry take its hold over me, I acquired a Click 7 to have a gander at on behalf of Gadgetoid and anyone thinking of purchasing on.

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Before I start I should probably say that I’m not particularly a fan of earplug style earphones. I tend to find them somewhat intrusive, however I put this aside to write this review.

First off. How do the Cygnett Groove Fushion ‘phones look? They’re pretty much identical to every other earplug style earphone out there, however they have an attractive silver finish and feature an equal split cable and a plain zinc connector. They have nothing to differentiate themselves from any other earplug and are nothing to write home about.

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You can pick up a tolerably good Bluetooth headset right now for just £9.95 and not only make yourself look like a cyborg with the daringly shaped ear-piece but connect the supplied stereo earbuds and rock out to your music from an A2DP compatible phone.

I’m referring to the Qstik EVOQ Bluetooth Headset which has received plentuy of positive feedback, and it’s not difficult to see why. The EVOQ is a flexible bluetooth headset which can go from being a (slightly ugly) ear-piece to affixing to your car dashboard as an in-car hands-free system or sitting in your pocket piping tunes to your ears via bluetooth A2DP and the supplied earbuds.

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Review by Rob Farley

The Sennheiser CX550 Style II earphones are your typical, in-ear, noise blocking affair. These noise blocking, sound producing earplugs are loved by as many as they are hated and their form factor is as close as you can get to the Marmite of ‘phones.

Most of the “hate it” camp, however, could be safely assumed to be comprised of people who have never tried in-ear headphones, or simply tried a cheap pair without an adaptor suitable to their ear size. There’s absolutely no doubt that good quality in-ear phones consistently sound better and fit better than regular earphones.

Retailing at about £50-£60, and produced by the enormously popular and successful Sennheiser the CX550 are much more than just noise making earplugs and are certainly not cheap, especially when the excellent MX560 earphones, and many other entry-level ‘phones retail at under £20.

So, are the CX550 Style II Earphones worth the extra mulah?

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Do you remember the days when interchangeable face-plates and casing on phones was all the rage? These days, everything from dinky feature phones to behemoth smart-phones flatly refuses to be defaced with cheap market-stall *bling*, but not all is lost.

The world of device skinning has exploded into a wealth of online sites. They all offer glorified custom stickers or decals which you can adhere to the front of your device to afford a little personal touch.

DomeSkin isn’t just another device skin, however, it combines the increasingly popular trend of skinning with a clever, thickened, dome-like layer that affords your iPhone, iTouch, iPod or BlackBerry enough protection to warrant *gasp* you placing it in your pocket otherwise naked (the device, not you).

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I’ve been using the Proporta Universal Emergency Travel Charger on the odd occasion for a while now. It was a difficult device to actually test in the short run, because you don’t really know if it fits the bill until you have an emergency I-really-need-to-charge-this situation.

I didn’t quite get there, but managed to try this handy little device with a range of gadgets to test its charging abilities.

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I’ve thus far resisted the temptation to pick up a portable DVD player favoring, instead, a humble, hand-holdable PMP to pacify a bored, car-bound baby. I picked up the Proporta DVD/Netbook case after seeing it in the results for Samsung NC10 cases, alas it doesn’t actually fit the Samsung NC10 nor any other 10″ Netbook (see below for 10″ options). It will, however, fit their smaller, and rapidly diminishing cousins of the 7″ variety.

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The Griffin PowerDock is one of those products that does exactly what it says on the tin in a largely unexciting but elegant way. Capable of charging either two or four iPods, be they iPhones, iPod Touches or any other iPod product bar the shuffle, the PowerDock is an attractive desktop stand that will consolidate all the iPod charging a family could need into one single and tidy solution that occupied only one mains plug.

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Sony have announced the W series wearable Walkman for the athletically orientated, and the X series with a 3-inch OLED wide touchscreen, bluetooth, Wifi and between 4 and 16gb of storage.

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