Motorola’s latest sleek Bluetooth headset

Yes bluetooth headsets are dorky, but there’s always the one that’s small and shiny enough to make it look like it like the Scifi world the 50s envisioned…

We’ve got to admit, this is probably the most comfortable, easy-to-wear Bluetooth headset we’ve used to date. The over-the-ear design guarantees that it’s not going to dislodge or tilt out of your ear at a weird angle (something we’re accustomed to with in-ear units, particularly those that don’t have hoops), and the parts that make contact with your skin are coated in a nice soft-touch material. Moto says that it has a “database of over 500 ears” (not a phrase you hear every day) that it used to help design the Oasis for maximum comfort, and for all intents and purposes, the effort seems to have paid off.

Yours for $80 from a AT&T store near you.

via Engadget.

Apple Magic Trackpad update for Windows

Here’s the first roll up update to add support for the new Apple Magic Trackpad within Windows. The update adds limited support, excluding all the interesting multi touch features, but does at least make the device usable for right and left clicking. From the looks of the update, expanding the file using WinRAR allows you to directly access the contents, from which a manual driver update should be possible for non Mac machines.

I hope to have mine in a couple of weeks to try this out, fingers cross (so to speak) that Apple add multitouch support for Windows to rival the mac, something that is still absent from the Magic Mouse.

via Apple Magic Trackpad Update 1.0 for Windows.

Quick review: Sony Ericsson MW600 stereo bluetooth adaptor

This is my new favourite toy, it’s a serious upgrade on the previously excellent Sony stereo bluetooth headphones I have previously used.

The new generation has developed a OLED screen, which when partnered with a suitable platform (say my Windows 7 laptop) can display the time, track name or phone number).

Controls include a volume slider, track play, pause and forward and backward skip. It includes the ability to switch between two bluetooth devices, and even has a built in FM radio!

Overall, it’s brilliant, only £40, and can use any pair of headphones you want to try (also quite useful for occasionally hooking up to a hifi).

How to pair an Apple Wireless Keyboard with Windows 7


I was having some issues pairing my new Apple Wireless Keyboard with Windows 7, some hunting around came up with a variety of suggestions, from hacking the registry to installing alternative Bluetooth software (neither of which I would recommend, as they are far more likely to break more that it fixes). In the end the procedure was straight forward if unfortunately not as simple as it was for every other Bluetooth keyboard I’ve used.

If you already have Bluetooth setup on your pc of laptop, simply use the windows default bluetooth wizard…

  1. Turn on wireless keys ON and Bluetooth on PC ON (make sure it’s discoverable)
  2. Open the ‘Devices and Printers’ panel
  3. Select ‘Add a device’
  4. Let it scan for your keyboard, which may come up as just ‘keyboard’ or as an ‘Apple Keyboard’
  5. Select use your own Passkeys and type in 1111 using your existing keyboard.
  6. Although it won’t look like it, it will now be waiting for you to enter the same password on your new Apple keyboard (remember to press enter)
  7. If successful it will prompt that the device is installed and ready to use.

Check out the Apple Wireless Keyboard on Amazon US or Amazon UK

How to use an Apple Magic Mouse in Windows (without a Mac & Bootcamp)

I’ve decided to play it brave and try and use the lovely new Apple Magic Mouse on Windows, after some initial research I found that drivers hacked from a previous mac bluetooth update were available for Windows users (not just Mac Bootcamp users).

I did however encounter the issue other mac/bootcamp users have experienced with the mouse locking up for a second or two every few minutes. Obviously this was sufficiently annoying to look for updated drivers which come in the form of a monster Bootcamp update (at around 275mb of drivers alone!)

Buried deep within that download are files for each device driver, but unfortunately it’s wrapped in an application that only likes being run on Mac hardware.

This is where a little app called 7-zip comes in hand, as you can use it to look within large compressed files, including exe’s into their contents, this means you can dig around and pull out the latest 2mb driver file for the magic mouse…

  1. Download and install 7-zip.
  2. Download the Boot Camp Software Update 3.1 for Windows 64 bit (or for the standard 32 bit version)
  3. After you have BootCamp_3.1_64-bit.exe, open it up in 7-zip
  4. Navigate to BootCamp_3.1_64-bit.exe\BootCampUpdate64.msp\BootCamp31ToBootCamp303\
  5. Look for Binary.MultiTouchMouse_Bin and click on extract.
  6. Then rename the file and just add .exe to the end.

Being a kind person, I’ve taken the hard work (and large downloads for what is just a mouse driver) and created a direct download for the Apple Magic Mouse Drivers from Bootcamp Update 3.1 for Windows x64 or for Windows x86

After that it runs as a standalone installed, updating the drivers to support multi touch scrolling and fixing the lockups I had previously experienced.

Purchase the Apple Magic Mouse on Amazon US or Amazon UK

Photo via mathewpacker.com