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The Yeti by Blue Microphone is big, heavy and should be a staple for any one who needs a portable recording studio. Listen to the podcast and peruse the gallery for more information.

We recorded the podcast on the Yeti using Garage Band with no effects filters. What you hear is what you get. We edited the podcast in Audacity.

One correction to the podcast. We incorrectly said that the Yeti was over a foot tall. In reality it is exactly a foot tall. It also weighs over 3 lbs with the base. (mic 1.2 lbs, base 2.2 lbs).

If you are looking for a backup portable studio or you need a good beginner microphone for your podcast studio, we don’t think you can do any better than the Yeti for $150 or less. In fact, you can get it for well under $150 by following the Amazon link at the top of the article.

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We saw the Pineapple Rumble K headphones at two booths during our trip to CES 2010. Both times the sound of the crowd was too noisy to really give the headphones a good review.

When Pineapple sent us a pair to review, we were excited. The Rumble K headphones use “bone conduction” technology to create sound using air and vibration. The claim is that this technology creates deep bass and no harm to your ears.

In all honesty, we were less excited to see how they sounded in our ears than against our teeth. Since the sound is generated via vibration, the sound can not only be heard by putting them in your ears, but you can also hear the sound via “bone conduction” when you place the backs of the headphones against your teeth. Yes, it’s weird, but impressive to kids of all ages.

Once the coolness of holding them against our teeth was over, we began to use them in our ears.

Sadly, the $80 Pineapples sounded worse in our ears than a $5 set of Koss headphones we purchased at Wal-Mart. At low levels the Rumble Ks were alright, but at higher volumes (anything over 50 percent) distortion was so bad we couldn’t understand the lyrics of Chris Isaak.

The headphones were better for podcasts, but there was still obvious distortion.

These headphones would be great for someone with sensitive years who lives or works in a very quiet environment, but if the sound needs to play over even moderate ambient noise, these headphones simply won’t work.

We thought that maybe we just received a defective pair so we read several reviews around the web and it appears that this is typical of the Rumble Ks.

For $20 they would be cool simply for the “bone conduction” aspect, but at $80 we were unimpressed. It’s too bad, because we really wanted to like them.

The Novatel Wireless MiFi 2200 has the potential to revolutionize portable computing. I believe it could revive the use of laptops for travel.

I stopped carrying a laptop years ago. It stopped making sense to carry a laptop that weighed over four pounds – just in case I needed to use it in a public hotspot location with an open WiFi signal. When netbooks came out, I rejoiced because it meant I could have less to lug around. However hotspots are rare, and unsecured wireless connections are even more rare. Read the rest of this entry →

Sure, it looks goofy as a person uses it, but it is a great idea and we hope it catches on. The YoGen people seemed to be everywhere at CES. As the above video demonstrates, the user pulls the string repeatedly to charge the battery in their mobile device.

CES 2010 has come to an end. We had a lot of fun and discovered a few diamonds in the rough.

3DTV was as good as can be expected, but still requires glasses. Some versions of 3D irritated our eyes while others required heavy active polarization glasses. Only the Sensio 3DTV technology impressed us by using simple glasses and had no visible flicker or offset images. Of course, we spent the least amount of time with it and it was the first 3DTV we tried so it is possible that it wasn’t really that much better. We left CES hoping that any video released in 3D format will also come with a 2D version. 3D is odd. It can improve an action film, but nobody needs to see Devil Wears Prada in 3D.

Sensio’s website

There were two digital cameras that highly impressed us. The Casio EX-FH100 high-speed camera with 10x zoom and the Kodak Play Sport HD waterproof pocket camcorder.

We were also impressed with the new Blue Microphone Mikey and Yeti products. The Mikey is the latest generation of Blue’s popular iPhone/iPod Touch microphone. It recorded beautiful sound and worked simply by plugging it in. The Yeti was Blue’s new USB microphone. The Yeti was very large and heavy, but it offered the ability to switch between condensers and adjust gain via two simple knobs. It also sounded great and was very heavy. It would make an excellent beginner or spare mid for podcasting.

Yeti by Blue Microphones

Blue Mikey iPod Touch/iPHone microphone

We will be going through our bags of press releases for quite a while. Keep an eye on talkingDigital for a lot more CES information over the coming weeks.