Yet another addiction for me seems to be headphones.  It’s another area in which I never seem to be happy with what I’ve got.  Today I found myself at IFC giving the Bose QC 15′s a spin.  I have to admit, I know a lot of audio purists don’t care for Bose anything but I really liked the way these sounded.  (I’ve owned previous versions of Bose’s noise reducing headphones.)  But rather than pop for those, I managed to walk out of the shop empty-handed.  (Okay, I did ask if there was any Xmas sale or credit card promotion and the answer to both of those questions was no.)

So I’m home tonight, can’t sleep, figured I’d do a bit of comparison testing.  The music I’ve been using so far?  Two very different things but each excellently engineered – “5:15″ off the newly remastered version of Quadrophenia by The Who; in its day it was considered one of the best engineered rock albums.  And “Ifrane” from Randy Weston’s Blue Moses, a 1972 album on CTI, a vaguely big band-ish track with some deep clear bass.

The bottom rung is definitely the Beats by Dr. Dre Solo HD – these are the smaller on-ear cans.  And they sound decent enough as long as you don’t compare them to anything else.  Once you do, they suffer by comparison, everything sounds muddy.  I give Dre, or Monster Cable, or whomever it was, a lot of credit for positioning headphones as style/status items.  He’s making millions and everyone’s copying him now.  (BTW, pirate versions of almost all the Dr. Dre headphones are available all over HK and Shenzhen.  They’re cheap, they sound okay-ish, and fall apart after a couple of months of moderate usage.)

Next rung up is Ultrasone DJ1.  Huge (the picture above doesn’t do the size justice) over-the-ear things that despite the large driver sound overly bright on the jazz but okay on the rock.  This is also the only one in the batch that doesn’t have iPhone controls or a mike on the cable.

Next, back to Dr. Dre, sorry, Detox, a “special edition” of his studio cans.  They’re big, they’re black, they have huge drivers and sound quite okay on both but they’re heavy and they clamp my head really tightly and so I get tired of them really fast when wearing them.  (Okay, technically speaking, these don’t have an iPhone controller on the cable either.  Here’s a secret: the iPhone compatible cable from the Soul by Ludacris headphones works here.)

Finally, tonight’s winner, Bowers & Wilkins P5.  I bought these at the Apple Store in NYC back in June.  They’re on-ear, light weight, very comfortable to wear for extended periods, and the music sounds the most balanced.  The jazz definitely sounds better here.  On the rock stuff, it’s really close between these and the Detox.  The greater comfort means that these are getting the nod for tonight but I’ll be doing more tests tomorrow.

Now, keeping in mind that I don’t like in-ear earbuds and that I don’t want to wear something the size of a motorcycle helmet on my head when I’m on the MTR, does anyone have any other brands/models to recommend?  What goes on your head or in your ears every day?

No one and nothing is universally liked or admired.  Everyone and everything has its detractors.  My reflections following Steve Jobs’ death inspired a few negative comments and I understand that.

Richard M. Stallman, the leader of the Free Software Movement, was no fan of Jobs.  And his response to Jobs’ death is getting some attention – too much? too soon?

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

Mike Daisey’s piece in the NY Times is also attracting attention.  It acknowledges Jobs’ successes but raises valid concerns.

Apple has more power than at any time in its history, and it is using that power to make the computing experience of its users less free, more locked down and more tightly regulated than ever before.

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to.

It’s a high bar, but Jobs always believed passionately in brutal honesty, and the truth is rarely kind. With his death, the serious work to do the things he has failed to do will fall to all of us: the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones who think they can change the world.

Meanwhile, The Onion naturally has a unique take on this, with an obituary titled, Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.  Jobs was not the Anti-Christ and he was not a saint.  He did some amazing things.  He was a unique individual.  I mourn his passing.

But last night I made a transition.  I bought the Samsung Galaxy S II phone, which of course runs Google’s Android operating system.  My iPhone 4 will be going to my gf.  After looking at the rumors of the specs for the upcoming “NexusPrime” phone, I decided not to wait.  I went to the four big box electronics shops at Hang Hau, all of which were selling it for the same price.  As usual, Li Ka-Shing’s Fortress had the best trained staff and also tossed in far more freebies than the other shops – extra battery, extra charger, case, screen protector, $100 Mannings coupon and even letting me use my Park & Shop “money back” card.

After just a single night, I’m really intrigued by this device.  There are downsides to it – more than one occasion when I’ve been going through the Android app store and found something I wanted, only to discover that it won’t run on Samsung.  Samsung’s Kies software, which syncs the Galaxy with a PC, does offer wireless syncing but otherwise strikes me as a piece of garbage – not quite as bad as Nokia’s Ovi suite for Symbian but close in some ways.  And if there’s some unified front end to a world of audio and video podcasts similar to iTunes, I haven’t found it yet.  On the other hand, it seems to be infinitely more configurable and customizable than a non-jailbroken iOS unit.  The “infinite expandability” of the device, thanks to a microSD card slot, is somewhat countered by the fact that one has to open the phone and remove the battery each time one wants to swap cards.  And unlike my iPhone, looks as if I’m going to need to install anti-virus software here.  The final deciding factor for me, btw, was the faster internet access – 3 times faster than the iPhone 4, 2 times faster than the upcoming 4S.  Integration with social media seems excellent.

I’ll be keeping my iPad. The podcast section of iTunes has become an essential for me.  And there are some very elegant iOS apps that don’t seem to have iOS equivalents.  Flipboard is the first that comes to mind – on the iPad it’s a very elegant news aggregator; Android has an app called FlipBoard that is a “simple yet fun game.”  I’ll also be keeping my MacBook Air, but that remains a far more open device than the iPhone or iPad.

Probably the major part of my weekend will be spent learning what I can do with the Galaxy.  After 4 years on the iPhone, I’m anticipating something of a learning curve.  More to come later, I’m sure.  Recommendations for online resources – blogs, review sites, user guides, apps, widgets – all will be gratefully received.

Well, the announcement has been made.  It’s official – no iPhone 5 for now.  Apple is releasing the iPhone 4S this month.  Same form factor as the iPhone 4, same black and white colors, just some seriously bumped up specs.

* The CPU becomes Apple’s A5 processor, the same chip that’s in the iPad.

* A bumped-up graphics processor.  This and the A5 mostly impact the hardcore gaming crowd, of which I’m not a member.

* A very bumped up camera – 8 megapixels, backlit CMOS sensor, 5 element lens that opens wide to f/2.4, 1080p video, and claims that far less lag time to get to your first shot and from shot to shot.  All of which means very little to me.

* 4G network speeds (but not 4G LTE) which doubles throughput, 14.2 mbps downloads.

* New software includes what could be a revolutionary voice assistant called Siri that allows one to speak in “natural” language rather than remembering specific commands.  If this works as advertised, this will be setting the bar pretty high for the competition.  Apparently in order to function correctly, internet access is required.

* Increased storage; a 64 gig model will be available.

This gets rolled out to the first batch of countries on October 14th and the next batch on October 28th.  The question many HKers are asking this morning is if the Apple Store opening last month was so monumentally successful, why isn’t Hong Kong included in the first or second wave of releases.  No official word, of course.  I am guessing it has to do with that 4G network speed.  Probably 3 and SmarTone don’t have their 4G networks ready yet and maybe Apple has made that a prerequisite for country rollout?  But by now we all know what that means – grey market iPhone 4S’s selling at Sin Tat for double (or even triple?) the retail price.

Aside from that, Apple also announced iOS 5, which can be downloaded on October 12th.  A key part of that is their new iCloud service with 5 gig of free cloud storage, more available at a price.  But so far, many of the iCloud features appear to be US-only.

The US Apple web site is accepting pre-orders for the iPhone 4S starting on October 7th.  On Apple’s HK web site, it merely says “coming soon.”

So what will I do?  The 64 gig upgrade is meaningful to me.  The voice assistant has potential.  Better chip set and camera are not deciding factors for me.  So I’m going to be very interested to see what next week’s Android announcement is.

My best guess is that the iPhone 5 is another 6 months away.

My gf lost her iPhone last week.  Did it drop out of her bag or did she leave it on a bus seat or did someone snatch it from her bag?  She’s not sure.  We went to Sin Tat over the weekend and got a used middle-of-the-line Nokia to tide her over.   I’m already hearing on an almost-daily basis about how it doesn’t do Facebook.

Next week is when Apple will announce the next … something.  Analysts are divided over whether it will be the iPhone 5 or a lesser upgrade that would probably be called either the 4S or 4Gs.  The new whatever will come out, I will buy it once it’s available and pass my iPhone 4 on to her.  (Mine is less than 6 months old – I got a free replacement from 3 when I ran into some dock connector problems with my original one.)

Alternatively, if the next announcement is less than impressive, the Samsung Galaxy II S is starting to look more impressive to me.  And in particular, the Galaxy II S LTE (is that one even available in HK yet?).  It’s not the larger (but lower resolution) screen.  It’s not the higher megapixel camera.  It’s the micro-SD slot.  Expandable storage is mighty attractive.  It seems as if 3 times a week, I have to thin down the contents of my iPhone to make room for new stuff (mostly recently rips of the 3 audio CDs in the Dark Side of the Moon Immersion box set).

I’ve always said I wouldn’t switch to Android because of the huge investment I’ve made in iOS apps.  Sure, I can still run all of them on my iPad.  But I don’t want to go out and re-invest in dozens of Android apps.  But thinking about it, I wouldn’t be buying Angry Birds again … it runs on my iPad and I’d just continue to play it on that.  The stuff I really use every day on my iPhone – stuff like Evernote, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare – that’s mostly free stuff anyway.

So I’m curious if I have any readers who’ve made the switch from iOS to Android for their mobile device.  What did you gain?  What did you lose?  If you could do it all over again, would you?

As expected, Amazon announced a tablet computer yesterday under the Kindle banner.  They announced two new Kindle dedicated e-readers as well.  But their biggest announcement may be their new web browser – more specifically the technology behind it.

(all images via Mashable)

This is the Amazon Kindle Fire, a 7 inch tablet running Android that will sell for US$199.  It has a dual core processor, ultra-strong Gorilla Glass and has built in WiFi.  On the other hand, it has no built-in 3G capabilities, no camera and no microphone and has only 8 gig of RAM, non-expandable.  Its main purpose, at least for the first generation, seems to be as a content consumption device – specifically as a front end to the Amazon store.  No big surprise there.  You get free cloud storage via Amazon for streaming music and movies.  It can also do email and games and presumably run thousands of Android apps.  It is, at least for the time being, US-only.  The lack of 3G and the small amount of on-board memory are of course a big part of why the price is so low but these are also big drawbacks for me.

Overall, I think this stands the best chance of any non-Apple tablet of gaining a strong foothold in the market because it’s the first tablet I’ve seen that isn’t trying to just copy the iPad.  It is just what I expected from Amazon – that they would look at this in a different way.

Meanwhile the e-ink Kindle loses its hardware keyboard, gains a much-needed touchscreen and shrinks down in size.  The Kindle Touch will retail for US$139 with 3G and $99 for WiFi only.

And then the bottom (pun intended) of the line Kindle is just $79.  It doesn’t have a touchscreen – if you want to type, you have to negotiate an onscreen keyboard via the few provided buttons on the device.

One thing to note about all of the prices above is that those are devices that by default stream ads across the bottom of the screen, the so-called “special offers.”  An ad-free Kindle will cost you $30 more.  An ad-free Kindle Fire will run you an extra $40.

Amazon’s new Silk browser for the Kindle is said to be lightning fast because it splits the workload between the device it’s running on and Amazon’s EC2 cloud service.  Mashable reports, “In a demonstration at its press event in New York, Amazon loaded 53 static file images, 39 dynamic files, 30 Javascript files and three Flash files within seconds.”  Yes, for those who care, it runs Flash.

So the question I’m asking myself is, would I buy one?  I have no interest in the e-ink Kindles at this stage.  I find the Kindle software on my iPad is more than enough for me and my Kindle 2 has been gathering dust for months.

The Kindle Fire is another story.  Here’s how I look at it.  I’m able to buy content from the U.S. iTunes store because I maintain a U.S. credit card and a U.S. shipping address.  iTunes never bothers with geo-checking when I go to make a purchase; it simply looks at the address on my account.  In some ways, Amazon functions in a similar method.  I can get at their U.S. eBook store (a larger selection and cheaper prices than the international store) again because I have that U.S. card and address.  But when I’ve tried to purchase MP3s from them, they geo-check and the sale doesn’t go through.  This has happened even when I’ve used a VPN that makes it appear as if my computer is in the U.S.  (My VPN provider may have gotten smarter lately but I haven’t tried this in a long time – why go to all that hassle when I can get the same stuff, usually at the same price, via iTunes?)

So while I’d love to get my hands on that Amazon Silk browser and like the idea of sometimes going out with a smaller tablet (and I can get around the WiFi only by tethering to my iPhone), it’s the not knowing if the content streaming would work outside of the U.S. that gives me pause.  So while it’s tempting to order one now (and have it shipped to me via a friend in the U.S.), I’m going to hold off until I’ve read more about it.

The TV in my living room was more than 9 years old while the one in the bedroom was closing in on five years.  Technology marches on and I thought it was time to upgrade.

One gating factor was that 9 year old living room TV.  It was a 36 (or 37?) inch Sony, the last of the big monster CRTs.  It weighed 100 kilos (according to the published specs, I never tried to lift it).  And while it may have cost HK$24,000 back in 2002, I couldn’t find anyone who would pay even $1,000 for it now despite the fact that it still worked.  Well, it worked okay enough.  One of my dogs, when he was a puppy, had chewed up the remote and a corner of the TV many years ago.  I didn’t want to just toss it out in the trash and at this point I figured the best I could do would be for someone to take it for free.  Finally after some online ads and Facebook posts and phone calls, someone came over and took it off my hands.

I’d pretty much made up my mind that I was going to get a Samsung.  These days they seem to have equaled or surpassed Sony in terms of picture quality; they’re the ones manufacturing the panels that many other brands use.   And I figured that since I want a TV to last many years, I’d go for the top of the line, which in this case I thought would be the Samsung Series 8.  But in looking around in Times Square, I discovered that while Samsung lists a 47 inch Series 8 model on their web site, no one bothers to carry it.   I went back to the web site and saw that the differences between the Series 7 and Series 7 were relatively minor so I figured okay, Samsung Series 7 47 inch.

At that point, it was over to Hang Hau, where there are 4 big box electronics shops all right next to each other in the East Point City mall.  I figured they’d all be pretty much the same price and it would be a matter of which shop would give me the most extra stuff for free.  The first three shops weren’t offering much and so finally, somewhat reluctantly, I went to the last shop, Fortress.  (Li Ka-Shing.  Or as I like to call him, Li Ka-CHING!)

Well, first off, Fortress’s sales people spoke the best English, including one sales guy whose English name was Cyber.  Cyber didn’t want me to buy Samsung though.  He wanted me to buy LG.  I figured sure, the LG’s at the front of the store, it’s the promotion of the month, of course he’s going to push me in that direction.  I asked him if he’d throw in a free 3D Blu-Ray player for me and he said no.  I listened to what he had to say and told him I needed to go home and research a bit more first.

At home, I found out that the stuff he’d told me was basically the truth.  LG’s beaten Samsung to market with the latest 3D technology.  LG’s 3D is clearer and allows you to use the same cheapo plastic glasses they give you in movie theaters.  Samsung’s is older, perhaps not quite as clear and also requires you to get these expensive glasses that use batteries.  In terms of 2D viewing, the Samsung may have had a slight edge in the reviews but not enough that I thought I’d notice the difference.

So with two LG 47 inch models to pick from, I had my eye on their 6500, with a much faster refresh rate.  But back to Fortress the next night, Cyber told me the faster refresh rate wouldn’t make a difference on TV or movies, only for computers and video games.   It didn’t hurt that the 4500 series was also about 30 or 40% cheaper than the 6500 series.   And then the kicker – Cyber told me that he checked his stock and today he could throw in a free 3D Blu-Ray player.  Not to mention 10 pairs of 3D glasses, an HDMI cable, $100 in Watsons coupons and $400 in Park ‘n Shop coupons.  So.  Done.

Next day, while waiting for delivery, over to the DVD shop to see what 3D Blu-Ray discs are out there.  3D’s not a big thing for me – I got it because, as I said, I want the TV to last me for several years and so I figured I might as well get the latest and greatest.  And since I’m getting the 3D capability, I might as well use it.  Well, the 3D disc selection is pretty poor.  It’s mostly animated films, as you might have guessed.  And Drive Angry with Nicolas Cage.  I already had the boxed set of both Tron films at home (which includes the 2nd movie in 3D) and so I picked up Despicable Me, which I recalled enjoying and seemed like the best of a bad lot.  And then … yeah, I know some of you were waiting for this … the 3D Blu-Ray of 3D Sex and Zen.  3D porn at home!

So another day goes by, the TV is delivered and set up.  I set up the new Blu-Ray.  Put on the glasses.  Yes, actual 3D at home, lying in bed.  The guy who set up the TV did a quick & dirty job of it.  The corners were far too bright and it was distracting the hell out of me.  (These new Edge LED sets are actually LCD sets that use LEDs for their backlighting.  If set too bright, they can wash out the corners and leave the center of the set looking dark.)  So a lot of time tinkering with the numerous presets and adjustments (not finished yet) but eventually I got a fucking great picture.

LED sets look very different from previous sets.  The higher brightness and contrast ratio make everything look, to my eyes, more like video than film.  I watched the Blu-Ray of the restored version of Sergio Leone’s epic Once Upon a Time in the West today.  Everything was sharp.  Super sharp.  Hyper sharp.  And while I could still see the film grain, there was more of a 3 dimensional look to the thing that sort of made it look as if it was shot on video instead of on film.  It takes some getting used to.

The TV also can up-convert 2D to 3D.  That means, yeah, I confess, last night I watched The Big Lebowski in 3D.  It didn’t make the movie better or worse, it was just a smidge different.  I know, Roger Ebert would scream (if he could) but one of these days I might try watching Maltese Falcon in 3D.  Or Buster Keaton.   Simply because I can.

In terms of TV, I watched the latest episode of Louie, which I’d downloaded in HD.  That show is shot on digital video using the RED camera and it looked amazing on this TV.  But after that I watched the latest episode of Entourage, which I’d grabbed in standard definition, and that looked pretty amazing too.  We also watched Return of the King (astonishing detail in the image) and a bit of Avatar – regardless of how you feel about the film itself, it is probably THE demo blu-ray disc.  Nothing surpasses it in terms of video and audio quality.

One thing worth noting – my 5 year old A/V receiver is equipped with HDMI 1.3 and comes from an era when these things were built without internet connectivity or USB ports.  So there’s no way to upgrade the sucker.  And that means that if I route the new Blu-Ray player through the receiver, I can’t watch 3D.  So I had to hook the HDMI from the Blu-Ray directly into the TV and use the Blu-Ray’s optical out so that I could use my surround sound set-up rather than just the TV’s speakers.  Yes, I know, this makes me think about upgrading the receiver now.   Except that with just 3 3D discs and hundreds (if not thousands) of 2D Blu-Ray and standard definition DVDs, I think I can wait and exist this way for quite some time.

Upcoming 3D Blu-Ray releases include Thor, The Lion King and a boxed set of all 3 Toy Story movies.  Feh.

So, overall, 3D – not so much.  LG LED TV?  I’m really happy with it so far.  But the very different look to the image takes some getting used to – and perhaps cinema purists will have a problem with it.

Thursday was a cloudy day.  A friend had told me that sound quality would worsen on cloudy days and that turned out to be true.  Driving to work I was listening to Oasis’s Time Flies compilation and it sounded like I was listening to a cheap AM radio.

So Thursday night before Thanksgiving dinner (very nice turkey dinner with all the trimmings at Doghouse with my gf and a couple of non-American friends) I returned the Belkin to the shop from whence it came.  They’d previously told me that I could exchange it for something else if I didn’t like it.  And so I did, but they tried to get their “revenge.”  I wanted a USB 3.0 hub and they told me the price was HK$640 but “special price for me” of just HK$580.  I hadn’t checked the price on these but it seemed wrong for a 4 port hub, even a USB 3.0 one.  So I stocked up on printer ink.   Then went to a friend’s shop and the hub, exact same model, was HK$380.  Caveat emptor indeed.

Today, Saturday, off to Mong Kok and to Nelson Street to hit all the car audio shops.  I went into half a dozen.  All had pretty much the same stock at pretty much the same prices and the staff in each shop couldn’t really give me too many details; they just kept handing me brochures which were all in Chinese of course.   By the time I hit shop #6, I pretty much knew what I wanted.  In the last shop, the prices were slightly cheaper.  There were three older women working in that shop and I think I got the discount because they were laughing so hard from my Cantonese – what little I know I tend to speak with a Bronx accent.

At any rate, one hour later, Sony Xplod installed.  Bluetooth for both hands free calls and audio streaming from my iPhone, USB plug on the front that works with anything and everything from memory sticks to iPhones – plug the iPhone in and control it from the head unit or remote control.   On the drive home, cranked up Nicki Minaj’s new album (which is not as consistent as I was expecting but has plenty of fun moments) and the sound was what I wanted (though I found myself thinking, “Hmmm, should I be getting a subwoofer for the car?”).   (FYI, my gf was concerned about draining the battery on the phone.  I do have a car charger but didn’t have it with me.  I noted that the phone’s battery was at 100% when we got in the car and after an hour drive, music streaming via Bluetooth for that hour, the battery was at 97%.)

Geeky stuff.  Feel free to skip if car audio is a meaningless topic for you.

So, now that the old SpikeMobile is gone and the new one is here, I need to figure out the audio entertainment options.

The car comes with a relatively nice standard set-up – the head unit holds a single CD and is capable of playing CD-Rs with MP3 files on it.  There’s a six disc changer inside the armrest but that’s only capable of playing regular CDs.  There’s AM & FM radio, of course.  What there isn’t is any sort of auxiliary input that would allow me to connect an iPod or an iPhone, which is my preferred way of listening to music in the car.   I can wake up in the morning, download an album, transfer to my iPod Nano in seconds and then listen to it in the car during my hour-plus commute.   But it’s not an option with my car – I double checked was told that this option didn’t start to appear until the 2009 model (mine is 2007), when they added a “media socket” into the glove box for connecting other devices.

Without an AUX input, there are only two solutions that I know of.  The first would be to replace the car stereo altogether, which is expensive and also changes the look of the dashboard, which is quite nice right now.  I’d actually done this two cars back – getting a Pioneer head unit that had an iPod cable (so that I could connect the iPod and select songs/see what was playing on the Pioneer’s screen and using the Pioneer’s controls) and also Bluetooth, which allowed for hands-free phone calls and Bluetooth audio streaming.  I kept that when I got the previous car but decided to include it with the car when I sold it off last week.

The other option is an FM transmitter, something that connects to the output of the device and then broadcasts the signal to an unused FM station on the car radio.

Hong Kong FM radio is kind of unique in my experience.  There aren’t many stations here compared to the US.  And because of HK’s physical geography, the few stations we have broadcast their signals across multiple frequencies.  Find an unused station, start driving, go around some bend and all of a sudden there’s a signal coming through loud and clear.

The last time I tried one of these devices was four years ago and it seriously sucked.   First you had to load a data CD into iTunes – each FM frequency was a “song”.  Sync to the iPod.  Get in the car.  Fiddle around on the FM dial till you find what seems like an empty station, play that “song” on the iPod to set it to that frequency, fire up your music and then start to drive, only to find out 5 minutes later that the frequency that seemed dead is quite active.

I was hoping that in 4 (or 5?) years the technology had moved on and last night I took a chance on Belkin’s TuneCast Auto Live.  Nothing to load into iTunes or the iPod itself.  Plug this into the cigarette lighter and hit a button on the device and it scans to find a station that it thinks is clear.  Then set the radio to that station and bam, you’re ready to rock.  It retails for $70 in the US but Amazon sells it for $37, far cheaper than shops in Hong Kong.

So I got in the car yesterday morning, plugged it in, hit the button and it chose a frequency in less than a second.  Got the music going, got over a hill and around a bend and, sigh, the station wasn’t clear after all.  So pushed the scan button again, it found another frequency it liked, and I was good to go for the rest of my commute.  The only place it didn’t work, oddly enough, was in the garage at Cyberport and, later in the day, at Taikoo Place.  The rest of the trip, it was fine.   Coming home, it did start beeping and squawking a tiny bit at the entrance to the Eastern Tunnel, the rest of the trip it was fine.

Belkin also makes a free iPhone app called ClearScan Live (the link is to the U.S. iTunes store).  This app uses the iPhone’s GPS to determine your location and then compare it to a crowd-sourced database of supposedly clear frequencies to recommend the best frequency for you.

So on day two, I downloaded this app to my iPhone and used it to set things up.  The whole GPS thing falls under the header of BFD if you ask me.  One could simply input one’s location and query a database and get a result set back, no?  Anyway, it came up with two stations, both of which I’d already found.

Tonight, a different route home and trouble.  The music played fine from Cyberport almost to Shatin and then RTHK 4 kept creeping in.  It’s bad enough when it’s just a split second or two, horribly distracting when it seems to have switched over permanently and there’s nothing one can do except to shut off the radio till one hits a red light and has time to play with it.  But 107.9 got me home.

The other problem is that with this set-up, all one can effectively control is the volume.  If you want to skip a track, you have to fumble around for the iPhone, hit a button, swipe, find the “skip” button on the phone’s screen; basically forget about it while driving.  And since the car’s head unit only displays the radio station, there’s no way to glance over and get a song title.

Last, you lose something in converting even MP3s to an FM signal – frequency response is reduced, dynamic range is reduced.  And of course it doesn’t offer a hands-free solution for phone calls.

So it sort of works – at least it works better than similar devices did a few years back.  But for me, it’s a far from optimal solution.  If I was just a weekend driver, it wouldn’t be a big deal.  But I’m spending an average of 2-3 hours per day in the car and so it makes a big difference to me.

How long will it be until I get so frustrated that I go over to Mong Kok and get a replacement car stereo?  Certainly not before the next paycheck.

From here, a place Tech Crunch calls a “how-to site for crazy people.”

I’ve learned over the years (often the hard way) that just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true.

A friend had told me he’d read “in a paper” that a man entering China had to pay RMB1,000 as duty to bring in his own iPhone 4.  I haven’t really googled around on this but tonight did spot two stories on the MIC (Made In China) blog here and here.

The story is about a Chinese-American crossing the border at Shenzhen with his iPad (not iPhone).  And that customs told him he had to pay 20% of the value as duty or have the iPad confiscated.  According to the story, this guy had just one iPad, not a bag full of them, and that it was filled with personal photos and files that prove he’d been using it for months.

In a bid to prevent smuggling, Shenzhen authorities are imposing a tax of 1,000 yuan ($150) on several gadgets, including iPads and other microcomputers. According to Shenzhen customs officials, a traveler is allowed to bring along goods with the value not exceeding 5,000 yuan for personal use. Goods such as television, cameras, or other 20 types of electronic gadgets are not duty-free. Since iPad belongs to ‘microcomputers’, a traveler needs to pay 20% import duty for bringing along, no matter it’s used or unused. As far as we know, authorities seize an average of 10 iPads a day and, so far, 60 are suspected of being smuggled. The rest were returned after owners paid the tax.

The two stories cite three sources:  Zol, Joowii and  Apple Daily (the first two links will take you to the Chinese language pages via Google Translate, the last link is Chinese).

So the question is:  Is this for real?  Is it just one guy that this happened to?  In other words, do any of my readers have any personal experience along similar lines or have a friend IRL that this happened to?  Inquiring minds want to know!