The Price

$80

The Verdict

Mikey is a nice, solid-feeling little mic for the iPod or iPhone. When used as a voice notes recorder, holding it up to your mouth, the standard setting of sensitivity doesn't offer much of a difference versus the built-in mic. The ability to set the sensitivity for other uses, however, makes a big difference.

Setting it on a table to record an interview or conversation, for example, results in distant-sounding and quiet audio using the built-in mic. With the Mikey set to the most sensitive setting, however, the audio comes across clearly and loudly. For louder recordings, such as concerts, it'll do its best to keep things from getting overblown. If you use that low-sensitivity setting for normal use, of course, you won't be able to hear a thing.

At $80, it's tough to recommend for casual users, but for people who want to turn their iPod or iPhone into a more versatile portable audio recorder, it's pretty great.

And a note: while the Mikey isn't certified for use with the iPhone, and will prompt you to put it into airplane mode if you plug it in to an iPhone, it works just fine. Blue Microphones tells me that the next version will be certified for iPhone and will lose the prompt. [Mikey]


Sensitivity settings work great for various types of recordings

Looks and feels really solid

$80 is too expensive for an accessory like this

According to Wired's source, they will go on sale in "two to three months." If I were AT&T, I would be very nervous about the prospect of Apple eventually gaining carrier independence with a 100% VoIP solution. The plot, boys and girls, is thickening. [Wired]

It's a single input, stereo output device, offering 24-bit audio between 44.1 and 48KHz sample rates in a package around the same size (though thicker) than an iPhone. Apogee's putting emphasis on the built-in mic (they even offer a stand so you can treat the whole thing like a handheld mic), though it's got one input for instruments or your own mic. That input is coupled with a preamp, customizable using the ONE's controls.

The ONE is designed to work with Apple's range of audio software, including iTunes, Garage Band, Logic, and Final Cut, though we don't imagine it would have trouble working with non-Apple software as well. It remains to be seen whether the built-in mic is everything Apogee claims; on such a small device, we're skeptical but remain hopeful. It'll be available sometime in "late July" at a pretty reasonable $250. [Apogee]

"OK, my pussy's hanging out!!!"

Oh you classy girl you! Apparently, someone in the control room forgot to turn off her microphone as she was going down to change her clothes. You can leave your Beavis and Butthead comments after the beep. [Britney Spears Blackout]

The accessory is also compatible with the 120GB iPod classic (claims its product page), and should be a decent way to conduct interviews or surreptitiously record your coworkers in the adjacent stall. What kind of person takes a dump while on the phone with the credit card company? [USB Fever via Get USB]

A number of things. Head to Kotaku if you want to see how the software side works (or doesn't work), since we're only focusing on the hardware and the media aspects. First, the hardware.

Hardware:
The two wireless microphones are fairly weighty, nicely balanced and can sense gestures you perform while singing. At least, on paper it can. In our tests we found that vague shakes of the mic can trigger the bonus mode, giving players an alternative to actually have to do fake air guitaring, fake rope lassoing and fake whip cracking.

As for actually singing, the three AA-powered microphones are at least as good as Rock Band's and Singstar's versions at picking up audio, if not slightly better. These are also wireless, which is a welcome solution to the problem of tripping over cords in the living room. They're also being adapted for Rock Band use eventually.

But wireless mics with no displays actually make it a pain in the ass to sync up with your Xbox 360. The wordless, diagram-only instructions were little help, telling us to hold down the power button for a second, then pause to turn on the 360's sync button, then hold down the power again for three seconds. We may have been beaten on the head a lot when we were kids, but it shouldn't take us 10-20 tries to get this to sync correctly.

Media Import:
Here's where Lips really disappoints. The implicit promise of having Lips take in any song from your music library as a track for you to sing and give you a comparable—if not quite as good—experience as a pre-packaged track is not just broken, it's shattered. Your own songs will be missing both lyrics and a tone bar, meaning you need to either recite lyrics off a nearby laptop or cull them from your memory. And, you don't know if you're hitting the right note other than your score going higher as you get in the ballpark.

There's also no option to import lyrics into your songs, even if you have lyrics embedded inside your MP3. Or timing data, if somehow you knew what Lips supported and rigged that up. There's nothing you can do to salvage the experience. It's the same as playing back an MP3 in iTunes and singing along, except with a halfway decent note detector grading you on how close you are to any noise being reproduced; even the guitar and backing string tracks.

The act of importing music isn't much better. For some reason—and we're guessing it's a memory constraint—you're limited to only viewing 5356 songs at once from input source. This includes your iPod, your Zune, your shared music over the network, your local hard drive or an optical disc. 5356 songs is quite a lot to actually import into the game, but most people's music collections, let alone their iPods, have more than 5356 songs on it. That means you can only SEE that many songs at once, leaving the rest of your songs hidden and unimportable. Huge oversight. As for the songs it can actually see, Lips takes about 30 seconds per 100 songs, so you're going to be sitting there for a long ass time waiting for your music to show up in the list so you can select it.

Verdict:
All these gripes aren't to say that the game is bad. The actual game itself with the set of 40 packaged songs is polished and fun. But the media import "use your own music" feature, which is one-third assed (not even half-assed) at best, should probably have been left off entirely than shipped in such a tattered state. It's only that this game had so much promise that were so disappointed. We predict that it will be a long time before we actually see a game that delivers on the promise of taking your own purchased content and presents it in a new and entertaining way. [Lips]

The AP reports that this Malaysian man was punched and stabbed because he refused to share the microphone and was hogging the stage. Of all the things to make a stand over, your right to belt out a Pussycat Dolls tune is not one of the ones we recommend. This has been a Giz Tech Tip. [Boston]

Griffin Technology Announces TuneBuds Mobile and SmartTalk Updates

Updated Earphone & Mic Solutions Now Extend Recording Capabilities

NASHVILLE, TN - November 10, 2008 - Griffin Technology Inc., creator of all things iPod and iPhone, today announced the availability of updated versions of their TuneBuds Mobile and SmartTalk audio solutions for iPhone and iPod. TuneBuds Mobile and SmartTalk are now both equipped with inline microphones compatible with iPhone, iPod nano 4G, iPod touch 2G and iPod classic 120 GB

"We upgraded TuneBuds Mobile and SmartTalk so that both iPod and iPhone users alike can record audio and enjoy a superior listening experience," said Mark Rowan, Director of Product Development at Griffin Technology. "With so many great apps coming out on iTunes such as our recent iTalk Recorder application, we wanted to offer iPod users the ability to enjoy those apps that require an external mic."

TuneBuds Mobile offers great-sounding earphones with crisp, clear highs and powerful, deep bass. The buds fit the ear snugly, with washable ear cushions in a selection of sizes, and conform to the ear for maximum comfort and sound isolation. Built-in is Griffin's ControlMic, a high-sensitivity microphone and control button. Griffin has even given thought to the cord, made of nylon braiding for strength, good looks, tangle-resistance, and durability.

SmartTalk is a headphone adapter solution with the same great microphone and control button features as TuneBuds Mobile, but which allows users to plug in their own favorite earphones. The noise-canceling microphone ensures clean recording and conversations, and the ControlMic button allows convenient Play, Pause and Skip forward controls. SmartTalk features a 30" cable sheathed in nylon braiding.

[Tunebuds and SmartTalk]

Before buying Heart Monitor please make sure you can find your own pulse in your neck (directly below your jaw) or wrist, click arrows below the pictures for pulse locations. If you cannot find your pulse you may have difficultly using Heart Monitor.

If you cannot find your pulse, you may also be dead, but that's another story. It also says that the iPhone Heart Monitor shouldn't be used for medical applications, but it looks good enough for me. I'm planning to use it for resting, after going to the gym, and drinking five pints of Guinness while eating a greasy burger. OK, maybe just the first and third one there. The application looks like a winner for just $4.99. [Heart Monitor]

This will require two cameras, one for video chat and the other for the "hand reading," but it opens a lot of possibilities. To start with, the entire keyboard can become a gesture control pad without even having to touch the surface. In addition to that, it can be combined with actual touch technology to identify single fingers on the surface, with the possibility of assigning specific functions to them.

The system even contemplates combining all this with accelerometers and force sensors, so the touch action can generate secondary data. One example of this may be applying a deformation effect to an image or a sound effect to a music track, giving it more or less strength depending on the force you use in your action. [USPTO via Unwired View]

If this is all foreign to you, try out a few binaural recordings here, including the famous Virtual Haircut. They only work with headphones, but are definitely worth a listen.

[Japantrend via Engadget via BoingBoing]

Idzenga's process uses a microphone attached to perineum, which is fancy pants doctorspeak for the patch of skin we layman and immature Gizmodo writers call "the taint." From there, he listens to changes in the sound of flowing urine—specifically for the tell-tale hissing of BPH. More scientifically, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) reports that the "frequency spectrum of the sound was found to correlate with the narrowing of the urethra. The degree of narrowing can therefore be determined from the recorded urinary sound." Idzenga has since filed a patent for the invention and hopes to have a commercial offering from IQ+ Medical BV out to urologists fairly soon.

So, in the future, if the doctor hears hissing, you have BPH, but you found out without having had a tube shoved into your urethra. Time to pop a few Flowmax for that long distance convertible car ride with your best mates.

The Price: $18

The Verdict: Perfect for journalists, lawyers and students. Comes with different soft earpieces and jack adapters. I love it. Sound quality of the recordings is as you hear it, which is to say as good as your cellphone delivers. If you're recording by cellphone using a native app, that's going to be better, though.

[Amazon]

Before its glorious post war role as a tool for musicians, a Neumann bottle mic was used in 1936 Berlin Olympics as German Chancellor Adolf Hitler opened ceremonies on. Soon the Third Reich used the then groundbreaking clarity of the mikes to "not only transport the words and information, but...emotion." And so often was it used, it gained the nickname Hitlerflasche, or the Hitler Bottle.

Neumann took the old carbon-grain broadcast microphone, which uses bits of carbon sandwiched between two plates, and turned it into a mass-produced "condenser" microphone, which has one fixed plate and another that forms a diaphragm moved by sound waves.

How soon we forget the power of the microphone, in a world where it's been largely perfected for all practical uses. [NPR]