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When it comes to keeping mobile devices, the choice of options is wide and includes the subject of this review.
The Eclipse 3 is a Li-Ion battery power bank from Besiter. For those, like myself, who perhaps know little about Besiter, I should offer a few words of explanation. Besiter is a professional power bank manufacturer. The company was founded in 2008 in Shenzhen, China where it has a factory covering 17,000 square meters with around 700 employees. The Eclipse product comes in capacities that include 2500mAh, 5000mAh, 7500mAh and 10000mAh.
Available from GSP, now part of Maximum Games, Evil Pumpkin: The Lost Halloween sets you the task of discovering what happened to Halloween.
Developed by Two Desperadoes, Evil Pumpkin: The Lost Halloween is a Hidden Object Adventure game. This game is set in the city of Dern, a location that, for some reason, has been ostracised from the Halloween community. You are cast in the role of a young boy named Lemuel Barnabus who is tasked with the challenge of discovering what has happened to Halloween and help the residents of Dern.
While it is a pod coffee machine the Bosch Tassimo Joy can dispense other hot drinks and unlike most coffee machines it accepts coffee from a range of manufacturers and so if you have a favourite coffee shop brand and they do a Tassimo pod then you can have your fix at home.
This coffee machine is 28cm tall – this increases to 36cm when the top is open to insert a pod – 22cm wide at the front and 34cm deep. Before you can start using it you need to follow the instructions to flush the unit out and this unit comes with Britta Filter tablets to ensure good water.
Are you in the mood for adjustable lighting and background music? If so then let me introduce you to Sengled and the company’s Pulse product.
Sengled is an internationally active manufacturer and supplier of innovative lighting solutions. With more than a decade of experience in the lighting industry, Sengled has registered more than 200 patents both domestically and internationally. In 2014, the company started its smart lighting portfolio with one of the offerings being the Sengled Pulse which is the subject of this review. The Sengled Pulse is an LED bulb with a built-in loudspeaker from JBL.
It seems a shame that virtually no phones come with a protective case as standard. Here are two offerings the first for the excellent Huawei P9 and second for either the iPhone 6 or 6S, the first called Tudia and the second Defense.
This is a light but strong case to protect what is a very good camera phone yes the one with the dual Leica lenses. This is my phone camera of choice and I have taken a lot of great images with it apart from it doing everything else expected of a quality phone. When you say to a lot of case manufacturers what cases do you have for the P9 or P9 Plus the normal response is silence, so when I was offered this I certainly made space in my review schedule.
These days young children know all about Dinosaurs even probably before they can read, I have to assume that the Miposaur was one of these but my childhood was a long time ago and while we were slightly more advanced than wooden toys the Dinosaur was not in our repertoire.
While I doubt that the real thing had a ball this one certainly does and he/she plays with it, he/she also has a wheel that moves it around, which it my historical knowledge is correct was yet to be invented. However this is a very interesting toy that like the child who will play with it has moods, and your child – like you – has to live with them. It is 39cm long, 15cm from the base of the wheel to the shoulder and 19cm wide.
Having looked at a number of Jam Speakers in the past, it was time to try out a headset from the company.
The Jam Transit Lite is a pair of Bluetooth wireless headphones. As part of the HoMedics Jam series of products, the Jam Transit Lite belongs to the On-the-Ear style of headphones. Predominately black in colour, with a mixture of matte for the headband element and lacquered surrounds for the earpieces, this headset is supplied with a micro-to-standard USB lead for charging purposes and an audio lead with 3.
Nikon have long been a good name in cameras both professional and even down to small amateur units. The Nikon L340 is such a beast available from some retailers for under £100.
The Nikon L340 measures 10.5cm wide, 9.5cm deep and 7.5cm tall it weighs 465grams, all those figures are when it is switched off. When the lens is fully extended that can add 3.5cm to the depth and if the flash is raised this adds 2.5cm to the height.
Combining art with modern technology is a speaker from Ultimate Ears.
The UE Roll 2 is a wireless speaker available as a Limited Edition Drippy model featuring a design by the American artist Jen Stark who is probably best known for her paper sculptures. As well as its rather unusual name, the Drippy UE Roll 2 also stands out with regards to its circular appearance and the patterned Jen Stark inspired front fabric skin.
Your world is under threat from an evil force and it is up to you to defeat this force by completing Match-3 grids.
Developed by Green Sauce Games, Age of Heroes – The Beginning is a game based on the battle between Good and Evil with your role being that of the former element. The game starts with a retelling of the tale of how the evil incarnate entity, known as Ysellian, was captured and bound up in chains by a band of heroes.
The main purpose of Wi-Fi extenders is to allow you to access your Wi-Fi signal in places that it does not comfortably reach. This kit does that but it can also give you an extra Ethernet port ideal for those devices that do not have Wi-Fi.
For those who do not know this Wi-Fi anywhere technology requires two 13amp plugs one near your router and the other in whatever far flung part of your property that cannot normally effectively receive the Wi-Fi signal, the two requirements to make this work are that they are on the ring main circuit and that it is an electrical socket and not a gang socket or a surge strip on either end.
Now where are my car keys? I am sure I left them in a certain place but they are nowhere to be seen!
Sometimes I am of the opinion that inanimate objects have a life of their own. Items, such as mobile phones, tablets and keys, have a habit of managing to move themselves from where ever you carefully placed them. I have lost count of the number of times that my keys or smartphone is not where I was sure I had left them ready for when I needed them.
Tablet prices are falling which I am sure everyone knows. The £49 being asked by Amazon for their latest 7" Fire sets a new low price for what is a very powerful Android tablet. So what if anything is not included in this latest offering?
The Android Fire 7" tablet measures 19x11.2x1cm and weighs 312grams. It has a shiny black front which has the nasty side effect of showing fingermarks and the back comes in a choice of colours I must keep telling myself that mine is magenta and not shocking pink. All the buttons and connections are on the top, headphone/earbud socket, volume rocker, pinhole microphone and on/off button. The back has its camera top left and its internal speaker bottom left. The viewable screen is 15.5x8.
Not a totally new item but an enhanced version and if anything it is a little smaller than previous versions I have seen. There are occasions when headphones or earbuds are unsuitable and for one reason or another full room speakers also so this small unit can then has its say.
It is 7cm tall and 7cm across at the base it then barrels out slightly and then tapers towards the top where it is 6cm across, it weighs 204grams. My unit was red apart from the bottom 2cm that was purple.
It was a rainy day in London as I made my way to find out more about the latest Honor handset.
Following the launch of the Huawei Honor 5X, the next product on the cab rank is the Honor 5C handset. This particular model is available in a choice of gold, silver or grey with the latter being the colour of my review sample. This handset, aimed at the young and courageous, has a price tag of £149 on a PAYG basis via sources such as Amazon, Ebuyer, Expansys and Honor’s own online store at vMail.eu.
Having recently told you about another USB3 external drive from Toshiba the Canvio Alu here I get to test the Canvio Connect II, the Alu had a metal body while this is a little smaller in size and lighter in weight yet the capacity of the unit supplied is 50% greater.
The Toshiba Canvio Connect II measures 10.5x7.5x1.8cm and weights 222grams with the supplied 40cm USB3 lead attached. Unlike the recently reviewed Canvio Alu this unit has a white LED showing at one corner when data is read or written, However after around three minutes of no data being read or written the LED will flash three times and then go out only woken by more activity. This 3TB unit has 2795GB available for storage.
Standard power plugs can tend to be a little on the bulky side which made Min-Kyo Choi stop and think.
When out and about with the constant companionship of your mobile devices, it can be a challenge to ensure that these devices are kept in a charged state ready for use. While several companies have taken the approach to offer a solution consisting of a power bank type of product that can supply a recharge capability to your power hungry devices when required, this is not the only solution available. One possible example is the solution on offer from a company entitled Made in Mind.
Time to put away any fears of monsters to one side as you enter a hotel chosen as the location for a battle to decide who takes control of Earth.
Haunted Hotel: Eclipse is a Hidden Object Adventure game from the Elephant Games stable. I have been looking at the Collector’s Edition of the game. This particular version comes with a number of bonus items. While most of the bonus items, such as Strategy Guide, Wallpapers, Concept Art and Music, can be accessed immediately, there are a couple of bonus items which require progress to be made before they become available.
I put a pair of glasses down around five months ago, they are still hiding from me, if they had this little item attached to them that could not have happened. In fact you can attach the Tile to anything that has a way for you to attach.
The 'Tile' measures 2.8x2.8x.5cm and has a large 1cm round hole towards one corner that means it could be attached to a key ring of you could even attach things to it by a piece of string. If you are worried by extra weight don’t be it weighs 8grams. The App downloads quickly and you then need to complete a Setup that consists of an email address and a password.
Like many companies, Amazon holds a Christmas in July event for journalists in order to promote products such as the Fire Tablet forming the basis for this review.
Along with the multitude of third-party products on offer from its Aladdin’s Cave of delights, sometimes known as its catalogue, Amazon has a number of its own brand offerings. One such brand is that of the company’s Fire tablets with the 7-inch model currently being one of the company’s favourite products of the year according to its own literature.
The Salter Kitchen Gift Set contains the digital tools -- scales, timer and thermometer -- needed to assist a cook to obtain consistent results
The three items, all of which have a matt black finish, have LCD displays. They are packed in a neat cardboard box which also contains the necessary batteries and separate instruction leaflet for each item. The scales are roughly 220 x 195mm in size and about 10mm tall. No scale pan is provided so items to be weighed are either placed directly on top surface of the scales or in any suitable bowl with a base of up to 16cm or so in diameter.
The men’s bathroom at a Philips Xmas In July event was where I saw a range of shavers and toothbrushes from Philips, the demonstrator called the first of these offerings for areas below the neck, while I was also presented with a ladies offering I never did find the ladies bathroom.
As with so many recent products you gets lots of small booklets and sheets of paper most of which are for safety and most of which are not even in English. There is a small 10.5x7.2cm 12 page booklet and eight of these have illustrations, the ninth has a web link to the . A lot of the illustrations are for different models a total of eight models are covered.
Here I am looking at two different brands of microwave cookware and both can be purchased from Lakeland. First from their own brand a casserole dish and second an egg poacher –OVO- from the Lekue range of microwave cookware.
I saw this at the Lakeland Xmas In July presentation that took place at Somerset House in London. It was a busy day and I had already seen a similar silicone product from Lekue at a different event which I shall tell you about below. This is a silicone oval casserole that works in a microwave, it is 27cm from end to end, 18cm from side to side and 5cm from ridged base to the top of the handle, it weights 405grams.
A trip to the BT Tower in Central London was the occasion to attend the launch of a new Wi-Fi product.
You may have seen the television advert, involving a helicopter, regarding the new BT Smart Hub which has been launched with the impressive claim of having the UK’s most powerful Wi-Fi signal when measured against its major competitors. As BT expects this particular product to be delivered to many customers via the postal route, this Smart Hub comes packaged in a box that BT feels should fit most letterboxes.
The claim from reichelt is that they sell up to ‘20% cheaper than others’ in the case of this item I see they sell it for £15 and I found another outlet at £24.80 so they certainly exceeded their claim by some way with this item manufactured by Panasonic.
So what of these on ear corded headphones that bear the Panasonic name. There are hard wired leads that run from the base of each headphone that are clipped together are 40cm and then run the next 80cm side by side to the L shaped 3.5mm plug. The headphones are Black and Blue with a white covering for the earpieces. The headphones break on the top of the head to allow them to reduce in size for transportation, the earpieces also rotate through 180degrees to also reduce the size.
The Wilko milk pan will be appreciated by those who like hot milk on their breakfast cereal or a hot milky drink at bedtime.
As anyone who has to heat milk knows, it is a tricky task. One moment it is sitting peacefully in the pan and then, just a moment later, it has boiled over. Hence the need for a deep pan designed especially for the task. This Wilko pan is roughly 11cm deep so that, even with 2 pints of milk in the pan, there is still over 6cm of headroom. Hence, as soon as one sees the milk starting to boil, it can be quickly removed safely from the heat before it has the chance to boil over.
Adding to its portfolio of Wi-Fi extenders, NERGEAR has released a new model.
My home is on a single level. What it lacks in height is partially compensated by its spread from the front to the back as it encompasses several intervening solid walls. As a result my wireless local area network (WLAN) does tend to struggle when delivering a signal from my work system and router-modem situated at the front of my home to a second computer located at the rear of my home.
Taking you on a trip into a magical land is a game that requires you to use the power of Sight to reveal important surroundings.
Developed by Boomzap, Otherworld Shades of Fall is a Hidden Object Adventure game that is available for downloading from sites such as Big Fish Games and Gamehouse. I have been looking at the Collector’s Edition of this game which features various bonus items. There is an Epilogue which only becomes available once the main game has been completed plus you can replay any of the various cut-scenes and mini-games once there have been covered in the main game.
This is said to be the world’s smallest A4 All In One unit, being small you lose the option to have a flatbed scanner as that would increase the size but the sheet fed scanner works well and the unit is ideal to use remotely with a mobile phone.
Unusually for me I started by downloading a small App to my phone and was able to print scan and copy within around a minute. The registered link then let me download the required basic software to a PC to print, in order to scan I needed to download another piece of software. While both these worked the speed angle might be a problem as the connection was via an IP address and output of both print and scans was slow.
Adding to its portfolio of graphics products, Xara has released its Designer Pro X365 offering. This product brings together elements of vector illustrations, photo editing, page layout and web design within a single WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) package.
To clear up any confusion, I should explain that the “365” part of the product’s title does not imply that Designer Pro X is a subscription type product, although there are certain online services available to which you could subscribe. The “365” is more to do with the Xara Update Services which allows the user to access updates regarding new features and additional content immediately without waiting for the appearance of a new version.
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