Insights For Success

Strategy, Innovation, Leadership and Security

Tablet

Veho 360 Bluetooth speaker review

Apple, Blackberry, Bluetooth, Google, Holidays, Hotel, Playbook, Smartphone, Speaker, Tablet, Travelling, Veho, WP7, iPad, iPhone, technologyEdward Kiledjian

 

Although this is primarily a European product, it is often easily available on ebay and I wanted to conduct a quick review for my readers. I received this as a christmas gift and have been using it daily for about 3 weeks now.

Quick look

The Veho 360 is a small cylindrical battery powered speaker. It stands 5 cm tall and 4cm in diameter.  The device has a  2.2 watt speaker that shoots sound out from the top. On the side, it has 2 ports: a charging port and a 3.5mm audio port. You can use the 3.5mm port to connect the speaker to a non-Bluetooth device.

Herein lies one of my pet peeves with electronic devices… why do I need a special proprietary tip USB cable to charge it?

On the bottom of the device is a little switch with 3 modes: Bluetooth, off and 3.5mm audio in. As you can imagine, the first mode turns on the speakers Bluetooth radio, the second mode turns off the speaker and the last mode allows you to use it with the 3.5mm audio in (thus saving battery by turning the Bluetooth radio off). The switch itself is easy to use and mode selection is clear with a solid click feeling when you change modes.

Cost

You can find this speaker online for about $50US.

Battery

The company recommends charging the unit for 4 hours for a full charge. I conducted a couple of charge discharge cycles then timed the duration of the battery and was able to get between 3.5-4 hours of constant playback. The battery is not replaceable and I was not able to identify the quality of the battery so I expect it to support 300-500 charge cycles.

Pairing

Pairing the device was simple. I simply moves the switch to Bluetooth mode and my iPhone asked if I wanted to pair with the Veho. It was that simple. If you want to pair it with another device, you have to force the original device to forget the Veho, switch Bluetooth off on the original device,  switch the toggle to off and back to bluetooth and the new device should see the pairing option.

Sound Quality

You control the volume of the device using the volume rocker of your source device (iphone, ipod, etc). Now let’s make it clear that this is not a high fidelity speaker system.  Sound quality seems to be a little better with the 3.5mm audio in (compared to Bluetooth mode).  Bluetooth has limited tranmital capacity and should not be used if you are an audiophile. 

For a small pocketable speaker, I was expecting lots of distortion at the higher volume levels but to my surprise, it handles higher volume levels well. As expected, you can start hearing sound artifacts and degradation as your Bluetooth source moves farther and farther away from the speaker. For normal use (5-10 feet from the speaker with open access) you won’t notice this. I pushed the Bluetooth connection to its technical limits and although the audio does degrade, I didn’t lose my connection once (staying within the allowable maximum Bluetooth distance standards of course).

Recommendation

Overall I think this is a nice little speaker especially if you want something small that travels well. I do with I could charge it with a regular USB connection.  How does this compare to the Jawbone Jambox or the Logitech Mini Boombox?

I have tried the Jambox and can say it is far superior to the Veho. The Jambox offers cleaner, louder and richer sound but costs 3 times more.  If you need something with longer battery life, louder volumes and the ability to add feature via loadable speaker apps then go for the Jambox.

I have not tested the Logitech mini Boombox yet so if Logitech wants to send a sample, email me ;-)

 

 

OnLive Desktop brings Windows 7 to your tablet

IOS, Microsoft, OnLive, Tablet, Windows, iPad, iPhoneEdward Kiledjian

OnLive is an innovative company that offers to stream console games to your TV, PC or tablet. So you can start a game on your TV, then move to the PC and continue playing them at the airport on your ipad as you wait for the plane. What amazes most people is just how smooth the graphics are for a remotely streamed offering.

The fine folks at OnLive are now bringing their remote streaming expertise to the wonderful world of Windows. They will be bringing to market (on January 12 2012) a new offering called OnLive Desktop. You will be presented with a full windows 7 operating system loaded with the Microsoft Office productivity apps you have come to love. What really sets them apart is that the entire experience is touch optimized and is so well designed, you can even stream a video and watch it on your device with little degradation or artifacting.

We know that their basic entry level offering will be free and offer some basic apps with 2GB of cloud storage. The next tier will be $9.99 and offer 50GB of cloud storage and the full suite of Microsoft Office productivity tools. An enterprise version is also in the works with all of the customization and control companies expect.

Blackberry Playbook fire sale at $99

Canada, EPP, FutureShop, Playbook, RIM, TabletEdward Kiledjian

In Canada, our major retailers have been selling the Playbooks for up to $300 MSRP for the last 2 weeks and some of them are now sold out (Best Buy and FutureShop). In addition to this promo, Research In Motion (RIM) is also giving away a free 16GB Playbook with the upgrade of an enterprise BES server to v5 until December 31.

Rim seems to be in a very festive mood because The Verge is reporting that Blackberry is hawking its 16GB tablet for $99 on its employee only portal. Looks like the 32GB model is going for $149 adn the 64GB $199. Each employee can pickup 8 devices so if you know a RIM employee, this may make a great stocking stuffer.

I guess at -$300 from MSRP, the Playbook is a hot seller. Anyone remember the ill fated WebOS?

 

Good shows iPad's dominating the enterprise environment

Amazon, Android, Apple, Good Technologies, IOS, Tablet, WP7, iPad, iPhoneEdward Kiledjian

A recent activation report by Good Techbologies showed that the iPad and iPad 2 continue to dominate the tablet in the enterprise market (96% of all activations on Q3 2011 compared to just 4% for Andoird). On the handset front, the iphone commanded 28%. The most popular Android phone was the Evo 4G at 1.6%.

“This quarter, we saw Android smartphones gain in percentage of total activations,” Good Technology senior vice president of corporate strategy John Herrema said. “This is likely due to the consumers holding back purchases of new iPhones in anticipation of Apple’s latest release (the iPhone 4S) — as our reports indiciate, consumers are setting the agenda for enterprise mobility.” IPhone 4 activations fell from 32.4% during the second quarter to 28.3% during the third quarter as a result of that anticipation.

Important Note: Good's numbers do not include Blackberry or Win Phone 7 devices (since RIM uses BES).

You can download the full report here.