Chill Pill mobile speakers

I’ve lamented many times over the lack of truly portable speakers for travel.  By definition, truly portable means they need to fit into my laptop bag easily without taking up too much space and can be powered by my computer or an adapter I already carry.  I’ve tried several different variations, but none established a permanent residence in my gear bag until I was introduced to the Small Dog manufactured Chill Pill.

The Chill Pill is an egg-shaped object about the size of a small fist.  Within this egg-shaped device is everything you need to play portable sound via a standard headphone jack.  The Chill Pill separated into two parts, which when combined are held together magnetically to achieve that aerodynamic compact egg-shape.  Once separated, you pull out a retractible USB caple which wires the two speakers together.  Another retractible cable contains a mini-headphone jack which can be connected to your audio source.  Power the Chill Pill on and you have a nice compact speaker system.  Turn the tops of the individual speakers counter-clockwise and they expand to provide better sound quality and bass.  When down, retract the cables, collapse the speakers, and connect them back together magnetically.  To charge, simply connect the USB cable to your computer or an external USB power source.  Since the Chill Pill uses mini-USB, you will need an adapter (included) to charge via most computers.

The chill pill is a nicely engineered solution for those that want truly portable speakers as part of their road warrior kit.

The Chill Pill is available at Small Dog stores and also via Amazon.

G1 initial review

I’ve been using the new T-Mobile/Google T1 Android phone for a week and have a few initial observations.

First, this is a decent phone with a nice feature set.  It is able to make calls, browse the web, get email, and has some basic GPS functions.  However, the phone comes off as lacking a certain sense of polish.  In fact, the best analogy I can think of is that it is what I would expect a next generation Palm OS to look like if they hadn’t fallen off the face of the earth.  In a week of use, here is what I have found:

1)  Phone works well.  No real complaints on making and receiving calls.

2) Browser works well, but has some very annoying quirks.  For example, every time I touch the screen to scroll, it brings up a zoom button which obscures part of what I am reading.  Very annoying.

3)  Media playback is abhorent.  I know that many say it is tolerable, but I’ve found it really lacking.  The fact that no video application was provided shows that Google does not consider this to be a media device.

4) Market place is well done, but I’d like a way to browse the market from my desktop, not just the phone.  As the number of apps increases, browsing via the phone will be increasingly difficult.

5) Keyboard works great.  No complaints.  Same with the trackball.

6) Data speeds are fine over Edge and 3G (which turned on in my market yesterday)

7)  Having two email apps is annoying.  In addition, there seems to be an auto-complete bug in the non-Gmail mail application which makes the feature non-functioning.  Additionally, even though my email provider is G-mail on my secondary account, the mail application does not include any features like starring a message that are present in the primary email application.

Overall, the marketplace will really define whether I carry this phone in addition to my iPhone.  If the market delivers applications for Sling, Qik, Skype, and other critical apps missing on my iPhone it will be worth having the G1 around.  If no innovative applications arrive, I’d have a hard time committing to carrying this phone, even as a backup.