If you have been reading previous posts on this blog you may  be familiar with what a great part headphones in general and lately headsets specifically play in my life. In my line of work you spend a lot of time on the phone, so I need to be able to do so in the most convenient way available.  Not only that, but I’m also constantly listening to music while working, or in the car, or on my bike. And I am doing so from a variety of devices, sometimes from the computer, sometimes from the phone, sometimes from my other phone..

Finally there is a product on the market that allows this to happen. The MW-600 works great for this. Like other products I have reviewed in the past it is multi-homing, that is it can be bound via bluetooth to several devices at once.  This is normally tricky business since Bluetooth seems to be a rather flexible protocol, and some phone brands abuse this (Apple, I’m looking at you) and never lets the other phone in on the action. Other glitches with bluetooth and music I have seen in the past like music occationally dropping out, or being at a wierd, unchangeable volume, seem to finally be fixed.

So with the MW-600, you finally get the feeling that you get a product using bluetooth that is a really polished product. You get a nice friendly display which lets  you pick   1.  where do you want your calls to come from and  2. where do you want your music to come from.   So you can even, without any hassle, be playing music from one bluetooth source while accepting and making calls from another bluetooth device. Wicked!  You also get a built-in FM radio as a music source.

The MW-600 can handle three simultaneous devices. For me that means my work phone, my personal phone and my iPad.  But other choices could include a laptop with bluetooth or even a gaming console.

Now my only gripe is that the display works great with the iPhone, showing the names of music tracks in the display and the names of contacts calling you also. But oddly this does not work on Sony Ericssons own phones, whats up with that?  A very minor gripe on an all-around awesome product. Also the display is OLED, which I thought would mean that it would be really cool, but It’s not.  In any kind of outdoor enviroment the display is impossible to read. It’s not a dealbreaker, but annoying.

Did i mention its going for really cheap?  A solid investment.

This is the same model cellphone as the first one I owned. I didn't have the flashy headset however.

It’s been a while since i bought a new cell phone. As a matter of fact the only phone I ever bought with my own money was my first phone. An Ericsson, back in 1997 or something like that when it was still quite exotic to have one.

You would think that that technology has progressed since then, but what we see today is a market totally overcrowded with bad products. I’m not joking when I tell you that the SonyEricsson p990, a phone I had the misfortune to meet at my current job, actually choke on the task of dialling a number. Out of memory after two digits! Receiving a call was the same gamble, the phone could run out of memory as it tried to recieve the call.. system restart.

So it was with pretty low expectations that I went shopping last week. What I wanted was so simple.

• A phone that is small, and that I can drop without it going a million pieces. A “vacation” phone if you will.
• Not an iPhone clone.
• As less keys as possible and as minimal design as possible.
• Wi-fi  and ability to stream music from my home network.

Ok so that last point was a bit of a joke, because I never expected to find a phone like that. The iPhone does that kind of, via the tversity web-interface. But it’s pretty slow and only works when it feels like it.

But what do you know, looks like Nokia r&d have been reading my mind.  I went and bought a Nokia 5630. The rest of this post is going to be about how great it is, and how UPnP changed everything.

I bought a budget Nokia for emergencies some months ago, it’s in itself a pretty good device, but as basic as you could possibly get. So the question arises: What else could you possibly need to have in your phone?  Turns out… lots of things!

The Good

There are the normal things you would expect, here are the things that first strike you:

• Its fast
• Its stable. I have managed to crash it a few times, but nothing major.
• Good battery time
• Nice design! Minimal.  Me like.
• Games games games. The Ngage gaming platform is built in. And no, I don’t care about that.
• Good camera.  Video editing is built in.
• It’s Symbian OS, so you can install lots of nice apps. I have seamless syncing with Googles Calendar and Contacs for example. Everything i put into the phones calendar, gets auto-synced.

The Awesome

Nokia 5630

Here is a rundown of the features that for me were totally new: I didn’t know any phone could do this.

• The voice-control is amazing: You can call anyone in your contacts by saying their name and what number to use. ie “Anders, mobile”. You can also say the name of any artist, album or song that you have in your phone, and it starts playing it.
• Total support for UPnP. That means that you can browse up music from your computer to your phone and stream it. So for example listen to anything you like when in bed, your whole collection at your fingertips, from your cellphone. Or why not copy it over so you can listen to it later when you leave home? You can also play music from your phone, on your computer or whatever else you happen to have in your home that supports UPnP. I have an old hacked xbox, works great. Fantastic way to move music between friends etc.
• Support for wi-fi.  Auto-detects hotspots and shows you an icon when there is a hotspot you can connect to.  This is the smallest cellphone I know about that supports wi-fi.
• Support for SIP.   I realize I’m coming late to this party, but it seems that there is built-in support for Voip (voice over internet).  That means that when the phone is without wi-fi range, I should be able to get a SIP account somewhere, and make REALLY cheap calls with my normal cellphone. The tech in itself is not so cool, but boy, that it comes built into my cellphone, that is pretty cool indeed.
• Podcasts,  every morning it grabs the latest episodes of whatever is new. Automatically, over wi-fi. This is how it should be.
• It can read you your new SMS’s and emails. (again to your headset if you like). A bit cheezy perhaps, but I like stuff like that.

The Problems

Here’s what doesn’t work:

• It’s pretty clear that this device was meant to be sold in Finland. The manual was in Finnish.. no big deal I thought I can get the manual from the web in some non-ugric language. But sadly there are functions in the phone that are in finnish only. Still trying to sort this out with Nokia support. Update:  I discovered that you can also download a voice for almost every language on earth for this feature. Very cool.
• This phone is not listed on the Nokia Support pages yet.  Update: Don’t bother with Nokia support. Read forums instead.
• When listening to music over bluetooth, there is no way to adjust volume. I trust this will be fixed. Right now its LOUD.  Very bad for my tinnitus.
• After installing some apps, the camera no longer works.  No big deal since It’s not a feature I use a lot, but still annoying. Update: After a  complete wipe of the phone the camera function is still broken! I guess I have to take it in for service. First time I own a phone where a software installation messes it up for good!

In the credits of their new exercise program My Fitness Coach, you can read that it is “Inspired by an idea from ResponDesign”. This is what could be called the understatement of the year, what Ubisoft means by “inspiration” is using the graphics, the music, the textures, the animation from the game Yourself! Fitness.  Yes its a port of an old PS2 game, and boy does it show. No anti-aliasing for you.

Also for some reason they decided to ugly up the model of maya by about 80%, so where she before looked completely natural, she now looks like a character from the zombie game House of the Dead. What I miss the most, and the feature I was really looking forward to was the simple change to metric units in the weight charts. But no, its as untouched as the rest of the game. A couple of the workouts are different, but in essence the same game that looked ok on the xbox 1 now comes to your Wii, blooming out into all-out ugly.

Of course the game is not about it looking good, but about making YOU look good. And in this area the game delivers big time. When you get tired of Wii Fit, this is the real deal. It is still a great product despite getting no love at all from Ubisoft.
So go buy it and get to work!

The bassline is of course limited in the amounts of sound it can produce, as it is meant to mimic the classic TB-303. The “Transistor Bass”, while being a great synth, is possibly the most cliché thing any studio doing electronic music could feature. I’m not very interested in how accurate the cloning of the sounds are, as every instrument is and should sound different. But I can say this: They successfully transferred the things that are fun about the TB-303 to the MSSIAH.

The best thing about this cart is of course the whole idea of making new software for a 25 year old hardware platform. Some corners have to be cut of course, and 8-bit ventures do a great job of navigating between the flaws in the c64 computer while keeping the cart easy to use in the hands of non-technical musicians. The whole sampler application (another review for another day) is for example built around a bug in the SID-chip. It wasn’t intended to work as a sampler at all..

You get a wide array of different ways to play and use the synth. You can hook it up to your midi sequencer and just play notes, while still being able to do glides and accents, or you can trigger patterns from the midi sequencer, OR most interestingly of all you can let Bassline do its thing and only slave it to the midi clock. This is perhaps the most interesting mode of them all, since it allows you to control every parameter of the synth with CC midi messages from your midi sequencer. Transpose the pattern, turn up the accent. Tweak the filter, fantastically useful.

On the other hand if you prefer to keep things hands-on you can also run it competely stand-alone. If you feel like doing some light soldering you can even add potentiometers to the top of the casing of the c64 and use them to control the synth realtime as it plays.

So in essence, this is a geeks wet dream. 8-bit ventures have done their homework well.

Just in time for Christmas I got a pretty unique piece of gear in my mailbox. The MSSIAH is something so rare as a brand new accessory for a 25 year old computer.

It was with trepidation I approached the studio yesterday. We worked ourselves to the bone preparing the apartment, I had no time at all to prepare or research. With so many factors could go wrong, and only two hours at my disposal, I was curious to see how far I would get.

C64 and tv worked directly, the cart plugged in fine and everything just worked  right away fantastic!  Then reality set in. Just like with the old apps back in the day, I realize that I have no clue how to actually use the software. I forgot to download the manuals!  Just like the warez of old I was resorting to the old “press every key and see what happens” tactics.  Also my iPhone could not display precisely THOSE pdf’s from the 8-bit ventures websites.. modern technology eh?

So in the end it was a big day for retro technology, everything worked flawlessly, i could remote control it via midi, i could play notes on the keyboard. And thats about all I had time for during my first session. Turns out that the parts of the system that failed was me! and my iphone. Not the candidates I was expecting.

Update

One more session later and I have made the special little cable that was needed to connect it to the mixer. Enabling me to present to you the following sweet sweet sounds:

Aron spent the entire day at his grandmothers house, so we had the entire day for ourselves. Fantastic! Even if parenting is great, it’s important to remember who you are yourself once in a while. Of course the day without the little one meant we had a chance to fix a lot of the things still left unfinished at home.. L painted windows and I fixed some electricity stuff in the kitchen.. That has only been broke for something like two years..

We rounded off the day with a visit to the cinema! Namely the latest Bond offering. While I think Daniel Craig is perfect for the new version of the agent I think he goes too far into Terminator-mode here. There was a raw edge in the last one that is missing here, replaced by explosive effects. I believe this is also the first Bond movie that relies heavily on previous movies. Bond deals with his feelings for Vesper throughout the length of the film. Sadly I have no memory of who Vesper was, oh well…