The 2009 iProng 50 Awards

Announcing the top fifty accessories on the market for iPhone and iPod!

iProng Magazine #42: Black Eyed Peas interview, the iProng 50 and more

iProng Magazine 42: Black Eyed Peas, iPhone 3.0 and 3GS, iProng 50 and more

iProng Magazine has released its 42nd issue featuring a cover story interview with the Black Eyed Peas along with the iProng 50 Awards, hands-on with iPhone 3.0, and reviews of TweetDeck and ooTunes. Also interviewed: Butterfly Boucher, Davy Knowles, Endless Hallway, Gretel, Kingsfoil and more.

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Shure SE115 for iPod

Last year Shure launched the SE110 earbuds which were respectable but weren’t necessarily anything to write home about. But what a difference a “5” can make, as the company’s new SE115 earbuds offer an expansive audio experience that’s head and shoulders above its predecessor despite the only mildly upgraded model number. In fact the improved audio experience os the SE115 was so immediately noticeable when we first tested it out at Macworld Expo that it ended up being one of our Best of Show winners despite a fairly crowded crop of new earbuds at the show.



In addition to awesome-for-its-price sound quality, the SE115 manages to offer noticeably better isolation of external noise than other competing products in its price range, another aspect which was immediately apparent in the cavernous and chaotic expo hall. As a bonus, the product comes in a choice of colors pictured above, something we don’t see often enough with earbuds of any price point.



The only catch is for iPhone users. While some iPod earbuds also come in a separate (modestly more expensive) model that includes the iPhone mic/button functionality, and other iPod earbuds leave iPhone users out in the cold altogether, Shure attempts to split the difference with a $49 adapter that replaces the bottom half of the SE115’s cable, placing the microphone closer to your waist than your mouth. The whole thing ends up being absurdly bulky and heavy in comparison to competing earbuds that have the mic and button built in. The misguided Frankenstein nature of Shure’s iPhone adapter kit (along with its inflated price) makes the SE115 not really recommendable for iPhone users who care about having a microphone or play/pause button. But that shouldn’t discourage iPod users who don’t plan on upgrading to an iPhone anytime soon, as the SE115 is an absolutely fantastic product for iPod users.


Blue Microphones Mikey for iPod

First impressions don’t always prove to be indicative in the long term. But sometimes they turn out to be dead on, and that’s the case with the Mikey, the snap-on audio recording tool for iPod (and unofficially, iPhone) from Blue Microphones, the company whose previous consumer offerings such for use with a computer, including the Snowball and Snowflake have been widely well-received. So we were intrigued when Blue demoed the Mikey for us back at Macworld Expo in January. Far from the first snap-on iPod recorder to come to market (I’ve been using existing offerings from Belkin and Griffin to record in-person musician interviews for iProng Magazine for years), what makes the Mikey stand out is that while it’s a little larger and a little more expensive than existing offerings, the resulting audio quality is head and shoulders above the competition.



And while the rapid pace and hundreds of new products on display at the Expo means that we only get to spend a brief amount of hands-on time with each demo unit, the little bit of recording and playback we conducted in the Expo hall made it immediately clear that the company’s claims about audio quality were indeed true. And it only makes sense, as the Mikey is the first iPod audio recorder to be offered by a microphone-specific company.

But there’s a reason why we wait to hand out our official star ratings for products until the product goes into mass production and we can get our hands on a final shipping unit. Changes (not always for the better) can be made to preproduction units before they go into mass production, and even without any such changes, first impressions can occasionally turn out to be flat-out wrong.

However, now that the Mikey is finally shipping and I’ve been able to spend some quality time with it here in my office, I can confidently say that I’m even more impressed with the product now than I was back in January. My tests included recording my own voice from a few feet away and from across the room, with and without staged background noise, and the Mikey did a great job of both recording my voice at high quality and filtering out the background noise; and while existing iPod recorders have always done a decent job of the former, the latter has always been their achilles heel.



A big part of what allows the Mikey to rise above it its built-in swivel (five positions through 180 degrees) allows you to point the Mikey’s front face at whatever angle you want; with other recorders you’re more or less limited to either trying to hold the entire iPod/recorder contraption in your hand at the angle you’re hoping for, or trying to prop the whole thing up at an angle on a flat surface. But the Mikey can be positioned however you want (see above diagram), and in my tests I found that it does indeed allow you to focus on the audio source you want. Another key to audio quality is the three-setting gain switch which allows high-quality recording of audio sources that are up close, at a moderate distance, or far away from you.



But perhaps where the Mikey really shines above existing recorders is when you use it to record not just spoken voice but actualy music. While I was unable to test the Mikey in an actual concert setting, I simulated one by firing up a live album on my computer speakers and then simulated crowd chatter by playing a TV news channel in the background, and the results with the Mikey were noticeably superior to the recordings I got by using the aforementioned (admittedly smaller and less expensive) recorders from Griffin and Belkin.



The big surprise, though, came in the form of battery usage. Since devices like the Mikey tap into the iPod’s battery instead of having a power source of their own, using them causes your iPod’s battery life to be (sometimes significantly) shorter than normal. And generally speaking, the larger and more sophisticated the attachment, the faster you can expect your iPod’s battery life to disappear. Accordingly, heading into hands-on testing I was expecting the Mikey to eat through my iPod nano’s battery even faster than smaller competing products – which in my experience can sometimes burn through an iPod’s battery at an almost alarming rate. But because the Mikey doesn’t use auto-gain, it uses power than recorders that do, and as such I was able to get a few hours of recording time with the Mikey on my nano whereas I’m sometimes barely able to get an hour with some of the competing recorders.



Here in 2009 the iPod recorder market, which had long consisted strictly of medium-sized, medium-priced, medium-quality products that were largely similar to each other, is now branching out in both directions. On the one end we’ve got tiny budget-priced recorders from companies like Incipio that cost $18 and stand a mere half-inch tall, and on the other end we have the $79 Mikey at the high end of the spectrum. So the question is not whether the Mikey is worthy, as it’s essentially a perfect product for those who are going to take advantage of its quality and features, but more of a question of just who those users are. If you’re only going to record your own voice from a few feet away with little to no background noise, an you only care about audio quality in so much as being able to understand yourself during playback, then you can probably get away with one of those tiny sub-$20 recorders. But if you care about audio quality (particularly if you plan to let others hear the recording, such as on a podcast), and you’re okay with your recorder protruding nearly two inches out the bottom of your iPod, then the Mikey is easily worth the $79 investment.



A few notes: while the Mikey is only listed as being officially compatible with traditional iPods such as the nano, classic, video, etc., it is in fact compatible with the iPhone. When you connect the Mikey to the iPhone you’ll be greeted with the now-familiar incompatibility warning. But once you dismiss it, you can then use the Mikey via any of a number of free or paid recording apps from the App Store. In my tests I found that doing so resulted in the same audio quality as when I used the Mikey with an iPod nano. A representative from Blue told me that the next generation of the Mikey will include the authentication chip that prevents the warning dialogue from appearing at all, but even in the current generation it’s a needless warning on Apple’s part. The Blue rep also confirmed that there’s currently no way to use the Mikey with the iPod touch without hacking the software, something we don’t recommend under any circumstances.



Mophie Juice Pack Air for iPhone

Hands-on with the first external iPhone battery solution aimed squarely at mainstream iPhone 3G users

For those iPhone users who are heavy email users, or like to change songs frequently, or are addicted to Twitter, or any other task which requires the screen to be turned on frequently, the iPhone’s battery life has always been of questionable suitability. And with the rise of third party apps, most of which require having the screen turned on most of the time, we not only have a sharply increased percentage of the user base longing for more battery life, we actually now have different classes of battery hogs: the hardcore users who need every extra minute of extra battery life they can get their hands on at almost any cost, and the more casual users who would like some additional juice but aren’t willing to turn their iPhone into a bulky monster.



Until now, the most popular iPhone battery products have only addressed the former: cradles that make your iPhone oddly asymmetrical and large enough to barely fit in your pocket while leaving the iPhone’s top corners exposed, along with less expensive (and less stably attached) snap-on batteries which don’t add any depth to the iPhone but make the device almost unusably tall. But now Mophie, who started it all with the Juice Pack awhile ago (I remember playing with an original pre-production Juice Pack prototype back in December 2007), has released the Juice Pack Air for iPhone 3G. It’s a product that’s not just a battery cradle but a full-fledged battery case. It’s about 20-25 percent thinner than the Juice Pack, largely symmetrical, and (dare I say it?) aimed squarely at the average iPhone user.



Having spent ten days with the product there are a number small details I could throw at you, but here’s what you need to know right at the top: perhaps owing to the fact that Mophie has prior experience in making iPod cases, the Juice Pack Air is well done as a case. The two-piece snap together design comes apart easily when you want it to, but is unlikely to come apart by accident, which is all you can ask for.

The acrylic surface (my test unit is black but there’s also a choice of white or – interestingly – purple) is very similar to that of the back of the iPhone 3G itself. It’s prone to pick up fingerprints, but then so is the back of the iPhone. In ten days of real-world usage, the exterior of my Air didn’t pick up any scratches, for whatever that might or might not be worth over the long term. The cut-outs for the ports and controls (including the camera) are of the right size.



You also need to know that the $79 Air does NOT have the same battery life as the standard $99 Juice Pack. But I could have told you that back in February when Mophie announced the Air; while the Juice Pack has a 1800mAh battery, the Air only sports 1300mAh. That means that in theory the Air offers about 70% as much “juice” as the full-on Juice Pack does. So instead of your battery life being a little more than doubled with the Juice Pack, you’re looking at the Air getting you and your fully-charged iPhone through a twelve hour day instead of a seven hour day. Or twenty hours instead of twelve. You get the idea. Everyone uses up their iPhone’s battery life at a different rate, and while the Air won’t quite double the battery life of a fully-charged iPhone, it’ll come pragmatically close.



As it turns out, my real-world tests with the Air yielded results that were pretty faithful to what the numerical capacities would have predicted: the Air consistently gives me about two-thirds to three-quarters as much extra battery life as the standard Juice Pack.



Or course neither the Air nor the standard Juice Pack will provide nearly as much battery as FastMac’s iV, which essentially triples your iPhone’s battery life. But comparing these products head-on gets lost in the context of their varying sizes; the FastMac is a semi truck, the Juice Pack is a cargo van, and the Juice Pack Air is a minivan. None of them are going to be ideal for someone who’s used to driving around in a sedan, but the minivan is going to come closest to feeling natural of the three. So if you can haul everything you need in the minivan then that’s your best bet. Similarly, my recommendation is that unless you’re going to routinely need more than a seventy percent boost in battery life each day, the Juice Pack Air is the way to go. I’ve got all of these products (and more) here in my office, but on most days I’ll be reaching for the Air as my first choice (although in fairness, when flying across the country last week I did opt for the iV instead of the Air because in that instance I needed as much juice as possible).



And it’s not just the fact that it’s slimmer than the other options. Anyone can make a slimmer product with less capacity. What makes this work so well is the fact that it’s a real case. When an iPhone gets dropped it most often lands on one of its top corners, and unlike battery cradles that expose those corners in such a manner that there’s no way to protect them, the Air protects the top corners explicitly. And it also works because it’s not awkwardly shaped. Sure, it’s as large as the largest non-battery iPhone cases I’ve ever tested, but the iPhone inside the Air is a largely symmetrical product. It doesn’t have an awkward docking mechanism hanging off its bottom, or the awkwardness of the top portion of the iPhone jutting out above the cradle, like other products do. It feels natural in your front pants pocket, which is a breakthrough for iPhone batteries.



That having been said, there are some things Mophie is still doing wrong with the entire Juice Pack line. The four indicator lights on the back are great except for the fact that they’re on the back, meaning that you have to flip it over each time you want to check your remaining battery life. In fairness there’s not much room on the front of the Air for indicator lights, but they could conceivably go in place of the Mophie logo just below the iPhone’s home button.



And while the micro-USB port (yes we’re now done with the mini-USB typically found on digital cameras and we’ve moved on to an even tinier new version of USB) allows you to charge the Air from your computer’s USB port using the included cable, and to sync your Air-clad iPhone with your computer by using the same cable, the lack of a “real” Apple dock connector port on the Air means that if you want to dock your iPhone into any dockable iPhone speaker system you’re going to have to remove it from the Air first. Which is a shame because the Air is just thin enough that it appears that if it had a true dock connector port then you could fit it into almost any universal iPhone/iPod dock simply by not using any model-specific insert.



But what more to say? We’ve reached minivan status, and while it would be nice to get that down to sedan size, we’ll have to wait for breakthroughs in battery technology first. In the mean time, despite not having nearly as much battery life as some competing products, the Juice Pack Air is hands-down the best external iPhone battery solution I’ve used yet. And at this point I’ve spent quality time with just about all them.



My rating for the Air is a rather lofty 4.5 stars out of five – but with the understanding that I want Mophie to keep trying to make the next one better.


iHome iP9 for iPhone and iPod

Once upon a time iHome got the idea to build an alarm clock that not only docked with your iPod but allowed you to wake up to your iPod’s music, and an entire industry was born. A few years later and we’ve got companies releasing everything from extravagant several hundred dollar iPod alarm clocks with dozens of built-in features to inexpensive fold-up iPod alarm clocks that fit easily in your suitcase and everything in between.



And now here comes the iP9, the fifth generation of iHome’s own original iPod alarm clock (the original version was called the “iH5” if that helps you understand the nomenclature a little better), and while it doesn’t necessarily look that different from the original, it turns out the iP9 runs circles around it for the same original $99 price tag. And equally important for a certain segment of users, it works with the iPhone. Which wasn’t always a given.



First there was the iH9, which was essentially the same product as the iP9 but wasn’t shielded against cellular signals and was therefore essentially unusable with an iPhone (unless you count putting your iPhone in airplane mode to be “usable” anywhere but on an airplane, which I don’t). Then there was the $149-priced iP99 which was iPhone-compatible but was otherwise just a minimal step up from the iH9, meaning that iPhone users were essentially paying a $50 surcharge. But now the iP9 gets it right on all counts. It works equally well with the iPhone and the iPod, offers audio quality superior to any other sub-$100 iPod/iPhone alarm clock product on the market, the dual alarm clocks that so many iH5 users used to complain about not not having back in the day, and the remote control that used to cost $20 extra is now included the $99 package. In fact that remote control has also come a long way as it now offers EQ adjustment as well as the ability to navigate up and down your iPhone or iPod’s hierarchal menus (so long as you’re standing close enough to your iPhone or iPod to be able to read its screen). Throw in the built-in AM/FM radio with presets, and the value proposition keeps increasing.



Suffice it to say that iHome’s flagship $99 alarm clock product has come a long way in the four years since it first hit the market. Being picky would be asking why it now only comes in a choice of black or grey and no longer in the original white, but I suppose that would be like asking Apple why there’s no longer a white iPod on the market.



And of course there are other options out there. Altec Lansing’s Moondance Glow alarm clock (which is annoyingly still incompatible with the iPhone) offers superior qudio quality and a wider set of features, but it also comes with a $179 price tag which puts it in an entirely different category. And iHome’s own iP99 is still around, with its price now reduced to $129, but since it doesn’t offer $30 worth of additional audio quality I can only recommend the iP99 over the iP9 to those users who strongly prefer the iP99’s more tunnel-like styling. And of course Chestnut Hill’s $499 George alarm clock is in a category unto its own.



The bottom line is that the iP9 is the best sub-$100 iPod/iPhone alarm clock product on the market, an impressive fact considering that companies like Logitech and XtremeMac (and too many others to list) have been nipping at iHome for years with impressive alarm clock offerings of their own. And those competing products will continue to come to market as more iPod and iPhone users decide they want to wake up to their own music (and of course we’ll review those products as they do).



But right now my money is on the iP9. If $99 is your budget and you’re not looking for a portable alarm clock (iHome and various competitors offer those as well), the iP9 is hands-down the best alarm clock stereo system for use with your iPhone or iPod.