Over the past two years, I’ve had a plethora of headsets come across my desk. I’ve reviewed sets from a lot of the big name peripheral manufacturers, but Turtle Beach always seemed to elude me. At PAX East, I made it a point to stop by the Turtle Beach booth and speak with their PR team just to make sure I got a chance to see their new line of products. Shortly after PAX East, the Turtle Beach PX51 arrived at my house and I’ve never been quite as excited to check out a headset as I was this one. You see, Turtle Beach came out of nowhere and took the gaming world by force, quickly grabbing millions of fans as being the “go-to” headset for Call of Duty and other shooter fans alike. Now that I’ve spent some time with the Turtle Beach PX51, are they really the paramount device of the headphone upper echelon?
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The idea of a controller for your mobile device may seem a little far-fetched, considering it’s nearly impossible to buy a mobile device that doesn’t have a touchscreen these days. Why would you want a controller when you can simply swipe or tilt your device to make turns, right? Because tactile feedback is still a considerably better gaming experience. Ironically, on consoles touch or controller-less experiences seem to be a struggling niche meanwhile on mobile phones or tablets having a dedicated input device seems to be almost unheard of. SteelSeries has come along with a device that hopes to fill that gap that you didn’t even realize you had by providing a controller that not only works with both Android and iOS devices, but also with your PC in the form of the SteelSeries Free Mobile Controller.
There’s no easy to way to say this: Flash drives aren’t terribly exciting. No matter how you slice it, people are only interested in flash drives because they carry files around quickly without the need to carry a big ass external hard drive. As a writer, I’ve got a ton of flash drives lying around so that I can always have a copy of an article I wrote or my resume on hand at pretty much any given time. Mixing business with pleasure, Boston-based Mimoco came up with a way to combine art with technology by offering a unique twist on the flash drive market: They sell flash drives that are made up to look like licensed characters.
Typically the average user doesn’t demand much from a hard drive. They’re only interested in how much space that drive holds, and more often than not, they don’t understand that a hard drive that spins faster can often read and write data faster. I’ve seen it a thousand times over replacing hard drives for consumers who just “ran out of memory”, so explaining to those users the difference between a 5400 RPM drive and a 7200 RPM drive is next to impossible because they just aren’t wired to understand how speed affects data transfer. Needless to say, even fewer consumers understand why solid state hard drives are so popular among tech enthusiasts, nor do they understand the incredible speed that can be attained when they aren’t any moving parts. Selling a solid state drive is difficult because who wants to pay three times as much for a hard drive that doesn’t even hold as much as this cheaper one. Thankfully, Seagate has developed a hard drive that can show people the benefits of solid state technology, without actually being a pure solid state drive.
Apparently the “phablet” gimmick is here to stay because we keep seeing phones with larger and larger screens. Samsung’s Galaxy Note II is certainly no stranger to this phenomenon (being the follow-up to the original Galaxy Note) as it weighs in with a large screen that’s almost six inches wide. Is this getting too big? Does the Galaxy Note II feel more like a phone than previous “phablet” models?