Vulture Bytes has spent all week at a tech conference, which means that any mention of a start-up only drives us further into visions of a tech dystopia. But maybe these gadgets can save us all. This week: a piece of plastic that makes the iPad’s speaker louder, an Instapaper for video, a gadget that adjusts your guitar knobs, the easiest way to learn piano, and the new Nook.
As always, e-mail us at VultureBytes@gmail.com. We’re friendly.
Vulture Bytes is a sucker for gadgets that aren’t actually gadgets. All these motors, circuit boards, and LED lights are nice, but the best tech is the one that channels an early human’s ingenuity, a tool for the digital age. Which is why we’re enamored with Soundjaw, a piece of plastic that on its own does nothing in particular. But once it’s attached to your iPad, it’ll enhance the tablet’s tinny little speaker to make everything come out louder and richer. We’ve seen a lot of these kinds of things for phones, but not nearly as many for tablets. They’re ideal for when there are so many people gathered around the iPad you need to play something as loud as possible.PRICE: $20
If you’re like Vulture Bytes, you spend most of the day barraged with people telling you that you must read this or must watch that. It’s a symptom of the consumptive web, a culture that’s produced so much content you’re too busy consuming everyone else’s to produce your own. Instapaper is the best way to manage the must-reads. Now there’s Watchlaterapp, the best way to deal with the must-watches. It queues up all of the different videos you stumble across all day and saves them in one organized list. It’s not the only service that does this — Youtube even has a queue — but it’s the only one we’ve seen that downloads the videos so you can watch them offline. Perfect for subway rides home from the office.PRICE: $3
Those of you who actually want to learn how instruments work (or who are generally motivated enough to twist your own guitar knobs) should just skip ahead to the next slide. For the rest of us, there’s Tunermatic, a guitar tuner that will actually grab the knob and turn it for you until it’s perfectly in tune. It’s the kind of gadget that makes old-timers lament about kids today, and what will happen if we raise a generation of musicians who don’t know how to tune their own guitars. But Tunermatic is a symptom of a society that wants to make even purposefully inexact processes as exact as possible. That’s what the future is supposed to be, right? A streamlined vision of possibility. Who cares what that does to the legacy of the past.PRICE: $50
Yet another music hack, but this one doesn’t have much in common with the Tunermatic. Piano Maestro comes with a thin LED bar that has 48 lights that stretch across the keyboard. You load the song you’re trying to learn into a computer and the LEDs will light up in real time as a guide to tell you which keys to press. The software is Windows-only right now, but you Bytesters have surely rigged your Macs to run a different OS by now. Consider it a Rosetta Stone for pianos.PRICE: 140 Australian dollars, which comes to about $150 American
The last time Barnes & Noble released an e-reader it was the Nook Color, and we were told that the future of e-reading was going to be a clone of the iPad. Here we are seven months later, and Barnes & Noble just announced a new Nook … that’s a Kindle clone. It’s different, sure. There’s no keyboard, and the whole thing has a touchscreen to help swipe through menus. But in the end, it’s a really nice Kindle alternative. That’s not a bad thing! We’re approaching a little brand war, where your choice in e-reader says more about your personality than is ideal. How long until the first “I’m a Nook. And I’m a Kindle” commercials?PRICE: $139, but not shipping until June 10
