– greggellman twitter: @greggellman
A little house cleaning and office organizing this week created a pile of great products that I’ve had in my possession for way too long.
If you don’t have a backup camera built-into your car, the Magellan device is simple to add for assisting with parallel parking or more importantly seeing small children or pets in your way before backing up.
Magellan estimates that the installation takes up to an hour, and if you’re handy, go for it; otherwise a professional installer is recommended.
The camera attaches to the top screws of your rear license plate but does not obstruct any of the plate itself.
Depending on the size of your vehicle, the camera can be adjusted up to 45 degrees vertically for the proper angle to view the picture, which gives you a 120-degree horizontal angle of view and 100-degree vertical view.
The camera is dust and water proof and has a 45-foot transmission range to the receiver attached to the Magellan RoadMate GPS unit. The long range makes it ideal for larger vehicles such as RVs.
A great feature lets you view the camera’s image on your RoadMate LCD when you are in reverse, but automatically switches back to your navigation maps once the car is taken out of reverse and vice versa.
As for the Bluetooth enabled GPS unit, it’s packed with every feature you would want, but the large LCD is what makes it for me.
Navigating the touch screen is smooth and it comes with lifetime map updates and traffic alerts so there is no need for the pricy updates many other GPS companies nail you for.
www.magellangps.com $249 for the GPS and $149 for the camera
Unlike many other tablets I’ve had in my hands, this one has a very responsive touch screen with an eye-catching resolution (600 x 800 pixels) measuring just 6.13 x 8.38 x 0.44-inches and weighing about 16 ounces.
It does have my favorite feature for this type of device; a microSD card reader, which gives the tablet unlimited memory past the 4GB of internal memory. Memory cards up to 32GB can be purchased separately.
It comes with many standard features for today’s tablets, including Wifi (b/g/n), Bluetooth (2.1) , headphone jack along with a built-in speaker and microphone.
Right out of the box the tablet needed very little setup to do what most everyone would do with a device like this - surf the web with a browser, which includes Adobe Flash. A one-touch entrance to the Barnes & Noble ebook store is preloaded.
Inside is 512MB RAM allowing apps, apps and more apps to be loaded to run on the Android 2.3 operating system.
I still don’t really understand the need and excitement for cameras on a tablet, but they are included with a rear 3-megapixel camera and a front facing VGA camera for video conferencing.
Connections to outside hardware are done with the USB and HDMI (out only) ports and the battery will last for about 6 hours depending on what features you are using.
http://pandigital.net $229
The Bagises aren’t going to be confused with a pair of high-end and high-priced headphones but you get great sound, especially for the price.
One thing that impressed me before testing them is how solidly constructed they felt out of the box. Often cheaper earbuds feel just like that - cheap, but it’s not the case with these.
Bagis features a rubber housing, with a combined fabric and TPE cord, which eliminates distortions that can be caused by friction. The pair of earphones can be snapped together to carry around your neck when they are not being used.
Urbanears shows off their creativity when it comes to naming the 10 color options, since they include mustard, tomato and mocha.
www.urbanears.com
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