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Motorola TX500 Bluetooth…

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funkyfresh electronics

Uniden DECT 1480-3 Cordless System Review

Electronics and Home Entertainment
Saturday, 18 June 2011 14:51
If you still like the convenience and reliability of a traditional landline and are in need of a new cordless system, the Uniden DECT 1480-3 offers really good value, under fifty bucks, for a 3 handset bundle. It’s kind of silly to spend a lot of money on a cordless phone system these days. Many households have lost the landline all together preferring to keep it simple with just a cell connection or perhaps Vonage or Magic Jack. The Uniden DECT 1480 features DECT 6.0 technology which provided very good range and clear reception. DECT 6.0 works in a frequency band that does not interfere with WiFi so that’s a nice improvement over the older 5.8 GhZ technology. For under $50 you get three decent handsets and a digital answering machine with 14 minutes of record time. There is no setup required at all. Simply plug everything in. Let it charge for a while and you have a working 3 handset system. The buttons are decent, the call quality good and each handset has a speakerphone. The handsets are light and comfortable to use without feeling cheap. On the other hand, the answering system is really bare bones. You cannot record your own message without first reading the manual. It's actually a nice way of doing it where you use a handset to record the greeting versus using a mic on the base unit. However, we imagine a lot of folks will be stuck with the computer voice to let callers know to leave a message as no one RTFM these days. Other than that, it's a dead simple system to understand. The ringer volume for some of the ring tones could be a little louder but there are others you can choose if you want a really loud ringer. Uniden is making some decent stuff these days and if you’re looking for a bare bones cordless system with good call quality the DECT 1480-3 system is a very good value. Visit Uniden for more information.

Panasonic BD655 Review

Electronics and Home Entertainment
Tuesday, 11 January 2011 07:36
The Panasonic BD655 is an entry level Blu-ray player with online connectivity and streaming apps but suffers from minimal file format in spite of having both USB and SD card slots on the front panel. If you have a lot of DivX material and other formats you’re out of luck. The BD655 only supports mainstream file formats such as JPEGs, MP3s and AVC lite from Panasonic digital cameras. The BD655 does turn on quickly and is ready to play both Blu-rays and DVDs in seconds rather than minutes. The sound and picture is pretty much perfect as you would expect from Blu-ray. It’s also easy to pop in an SD card for watching the dailies. However, beyond the basics the performance rapidly deteriorates. Launching the online apps is painful. The menu structure is clever and easy to navigate but it just takes too darn long to refresh the screen. Many Blu-ray players run on Java and while that’s good for updates and such these systems are often underpowered. So software feels like you would expect software to feel running on an underpowered system. Slooowww. The firmware update was also painful. It just took a really long time. We confirmed it was not our network just a slow process. We didn’t notice any performance improvements with the latest firmware either. If all you’re interested in is playing shiny discs than the Panasonic BD655 is a solid choice simply because it loads so quickly and comes with a decent remote. But if you’re interested in the online apps such as Pandora and Netflix we’d recommend looking elsewhere. Samsung is a better choice with much richer file format support despite the slow boot and touch controls on its fingerprint happy glossy products. Visit Panasonic for more information.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 Review

Electronics and Home Entertainment
Friday, 07 January 2011 20:53
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 is just about the perfect point and shoot camera. It’s small, built well, takes great pics and has much improved video capabilities over previous Lumix cameras. We like how Panasonic went with a 25mm wide-angle to 300mm range. This allows you to get much closer to your subjects and still get everything in frame. There are plenty of presets and this camera does pretty well indoors, even in lower light. The biggest issue, as with most cameras in this price range, the performance slows when left in automatic mode in low light situations. Outside the DMC-ZS7 is nice and fast and the video very good. The sound is also improved on the video. Here, the wide angle lens also helps because you can get close to subjects and get better audio with the built in mics. The GPS tags are helpful down the road so you remember where and when pics and video were taken. The Panasonic DMC-ZS7 currently sells for about $250 and it’s a very solid choice for both still pics and video. Between this and smart phones it looks like Flip picked the right time to sell out to Cisco. Panasonic makes this camera in Japan. We love the way the controls feel and the layout is very intuitive. Panasonic does a great job here. We’d like o see a little more tactile feel on the grip but other than that the DMC-ZS7 feel really good in the hand. Visit Panasonic for more information.

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