NewerTech Voyager Q Hard Drive Dock
Company: Newer Technology
Price: $89.99
http://www.macsales.com

The ever falling price of hard drive storage means that we can now own and manage terabytes and terabytes of space if we wish. But the ongoing increase of capacity and fall in price leads to a new problem – if you are anything like me, you will have a shelf littered with external drives, surrounded by a detritus of data cables and multiple “wall wart” power supplies. Mine act like a series of time capsules – the further back in time you go (based on when I bought each one), the smaller they become and the more disparate the type of data we retain.

Of course, the downside with this approach is that each time you buy one of these devices, you are paying again and again for the overhead cost of the USB or Firewire interface, the cable and the external power supply (needless to say, every drive uses a slightly different output voltage on the power supply, so they are all incompatible) – and a quick scan of any online electronics store reveals that external enclosure drives are substantially more expensive than bare drives themselves. Bare drives do not need to be the exclusive domain of the Mac Pro and its easy access drive bays, however – and I am not proposing to crack open an iMac and change the drive in there either. But use a NewerTech Voyager Q device and you can swap in and out SATA drives to any Mac to your heart’s content without the need for a screwdriver.

Looking like a small digital toaster, the Voyager Q sits on your desk, with 3.5″ and 2.5″ sized dust flap protected slots in the top, and an ejection handle and status LED on the front. Around the back of the device are a full complement of ports – Firewire 400 and 800 ports, USB 2.0 and eSATA. In a refreshing fashion, you will find a matching set of connector cables for all of these ports in the box. You just insert the SATA drive vertically, data port down, into the Voyager Q, and once it is snugly connected it will appear on you Mac’s desktop like any other drive.

These devices will recognize SATA I and II devices up to 2 terabytes in size, and certainly coped with the five or six drives that I used with no problem. Performance was as you would expect from a SATA drive in an enclosure – I wasn’t able to try it on eSATA, but Firewire 800 was very close to the speed of my iMac’s internal drive. I was able to use it for specific tasks – formatting old 3.5″ drives upgraded from a Drobo prior to selling on eBay, migrating data over from an upgraded laptop drive etc. But where it really comes into its own is if you have a stack of SATA drives lying around. With these, you can use them like large capacity ZIP disks of old – swapping them in and out at will, and accessing the data on them at high speed. It’s a beautiful system, and for me works so much better than external housings – and it saves you money, as going for larger capacities will cost much less for bare drives then branded external devices. You can also retain and use your older drivers for longer. OWC can even supply rubber sleeves for the SATA drives for protecting them while they are stored away. If you don’t need the Firewire support, you can get a USB2/eSATA version for a fair bit less, though naturally you are trading some performance with that unit – USB relies on the CPU managing data transfer, so causes slow down when the machine is busy.

You will pay close to the price of a Voyager Q for a bare drive enclosure with four interfaces on it, and obviously an enclosure is much less flexible. This makes the device great value for money, and it is highly functional and well designed. I can’t fault the Voyager Q at all, and I highly recommend it.

MyMac.com rating: 5 out of 5

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Mercury Pro 8x Blu-ray Writer External Optical Drive
Company: Other World Computing
Price: $349.99
http://www.macsales.com

It is always a pleasure to try a brand new technology on the Mac. There is something satisfying that comes with using a computer or gadget in a way that you have never experienced before, and the pace of technological development is such that there is always some new feature or bauble on the latest hardware or software to play with and coo over. Most often, this is something fancy and new that Apple has built in to their products, but in this case it is a Blu-ray writer from Other World Computing that is under consideration.

Blu-ray is the spiritual successor to DVD, and has in fact vanquished the HD-DVD, the true extension to the DVD standard. It is designed to offer full HD movie playback on disc the same size as a regular DVD, and does this by using a blue wavelength laser to read data marks on the disk that are much smaller and packed much closer together than on a DVD. The blue laser gives the format its name, and the closer-packed data marks mean that a typical Blu-ray disc can hold 25Gb of data on a single-layer disc – a little more than five times the capacity of a single layer DVD. Blu-ray was developed by Sony, and is managed by an industry consortium of hardware, software and content producers. Apple is not a member of this group (they backed HD-DVD originally) and Steve Jobs famously declared the licensing of Blu-ray technology as a “bag of hurt”, and so, despite Blu-ray being widely available in Sony consoles and a myriad of ever-cheaper dedicated hardware players, the drives are not offered on any of the Macintosh line by Apple, and support for the technology is not available directly with Mac OS X.There are rumors that this is due to change, with the next round of iMac and Mac Pro updates being touted as the debut for Blu-Ray hardware support. Other World Computing has your back, though, if you are not particularly inclined to wait for Apple to join the high definition revolution, with the Mercury Pro enclosure loaded for bear with a Blu-ray burner.

Let’s get one thing clear up front, though – without direct support for Blu-ray within OS X, you cannot watch Blu-ray movies with this drive, you will need a dedicated Blu-ray player or a Sony Playstation 3 for that. What it does offer is access to up to 50Gb of data storage on an optical disk, and the ability to burn your own movies in Blu-ray format. To do all of this you will have to use Toast Titanium from Roxio, which had the required Blu-ray support – OWC can sell you the drive with that software bundled if you don’t already own it.

This illustrates the comprehensive approach that OWC takes to the complete customer experience. The hardware itself underlines this – the Mercury Pro enclosure is as solidly constructed as any unit from a dedicated storage manufacturer. Every single connectivity option is catered for – Firewire in both the 800 and 400 flavors, USB 2.0 and even eSATA for the pro users, and OWC even provide cables for all of the connectors except for the eSATA port, and a pair of 25Gb Blu-ray disks. The drive I tested was fitted with an LG 8x Blu-ray drive (though OWC also have a Pioneer 8x option) that can cope with dual layer Blu-ray disks, DVDs and CDs of all types. To access the drive as a DVD burner or lower, you can use the built-in burning features of OS X, though as previously mentioned you will need Toast on order to write to Blu-ray media. Performance is good, though naturally the large data capacity of Blu-ray means that moving large volumes will take a while – I burned 25Gb of data to a Blu-ray disk in around 30 minutes, though this will vary depending on what type of media you use.

Having used the drive for a while, I came to really value the ability to archive such a large amount of data to a single optical disk. Despite the prolific availability of terabytes of hard drive space at bargain basement prices, there is something tremendously simple about putting data onto an disk that can be labelled and left on a shelf. Data volumes are such that this is increasingly difficult to do with DVD – even at 8.5Gb for a dual layer DVD disk music or photo collections will typically require multiple DVDs.

The only real downsides of this drive unit are matters currently outside of OWC’s control – blank Blu-ray media are still individually expensive, many times more so than DVD blanks. The reliance on third-party software support for Blu-ray burning is also not ideal. These factors need to be weighed up by any potential purchaser of the Mercury Pro Blu-ray burner – but if you think you need access to Blu-ray technology on the Mac today, I do not think you will be disappointed with the OWC offering.

MyMac Rating: 4 out of 5

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Seagate FreeAgent Pro/Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini hard drives
Company: Seagate
http://www.seagate.com
http://www.maxtor.com
Retail: FreeAgentPro 1Tb $189.99, OneTouch 4 Mini 250Gb $119.99

The twin drivers of mass market economics and corporate consolidation have lead us to a cornucopia of cheap, high performance electronics that would have been unimaginable only ten years ago. Back when you were dropping up to half the price of a small car on a laptop, it was always felt to be worth paying extra for a name brand. Build quality and service meant that Apple hardware commanded a premium price.

Of course, it still does (to a small extent), though the gap between the equivalent HP or Dell is now vanishingly small. Apple now trades on the quality of design and service – the components are the same as everyone else’s.

So what about other parts of the electronics market, such as external hard drives? What differentiates a name brand from the cheap Far East enclosures?I took a look at two drives – the desktop-based 1 terabyte Seagate FreeAgent Pro, and the Maxtor 250 gigabyte One Touch Mini portable drive. Both are actually manufactured by Seagate (due to that corporate consolidation I mentioned earlier!).

The Freeagent Pro is a well-designed piece of kit. Aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I actually love the look of it over a standard Aluminum box. It sits vertically on a flat base, and the enclosure has a tapered design rather than being a rectangular shape. The entire unit is finished in deep brown burnished metallic finish, with an illuminated orange stripe down the middle that pulses with drive access. I found the whole thing pleasingly "retro modern", and a pleasure to have it sat on my desk. It was beautifully packaged as well, and comes with comprehensive instruction manuals and cables. The base has a touch-sensitive power switch that works just like the one on the old Apple cube.

The drive ships with interchangeable modules for the base, offering Firewire, USB or eSATA connectors. I use it with Firewire on my MacBook, and it works flawlessly – and having a 1 terabyte Time Machine volume makes a lot of sense, as you can get a huge amount of historical backup with that large data space.

The smaller Maxtor One Touch Mini was no less satisfying. With this one, a brushed aluminum chassis is used, but again a scooped design, non rectangular swoops and angles and a sturdy rubber bumper belt add interest and style, The drive is also absolutely tiny, has a side-mounted mini-USB port and ships with a quality double-headed USB cable that ensures the drive can get supplementary power if needed. A white LED light on the front pulses with drive access, and also can be used as a button that can be programmed via a utility to kick off backups on demand if required. Again, like the FreeAgent Pro, the Maxtor exudes quality and has worked much more reliably for me than any third-party enclosure I have ever used before (I have a cupboard full of failed Far Eastern kit sourced from eBay!).

The empty enclosure still has a place in my tech armoury – if I upgrade an internal drive, the left over device needs to be put somewhere, after all. But, having used these two drive I am firmly of the opinion if an external drive is needed, going with a quality brand can pay dividends – particularly with the massive 5-year warranty you get with these devices on top of the quality build and design – a feature that tells you all you need to know about how long these disks will protect your data.

We rarely give out a full five out of five for device reviews at MyMac, but for these drives I cannot deduct for any failings in the design, execution or pricing. As such, I unequivocally recommend them.

MyMac Rating: 5 out of 5

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Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Professional
Company: Adobe Systems Inc.
http://www.adobe.com
Retail: USA $449, $159 upgrade from previous version,
UK £499.38, £170.38 upgrade from previous version

Adobe has a long and and proud association with the Macintosh platform. It licensed Postscript to Apple for the original LaserWriter, and so ushered in the DTP age through the Mac. Its first software product was Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh, and Photoshop has long been the choice of creative professionals on Apple hardware.

Of course, Adobe is also responsible for the Portable Document Format – as its name applies, a cross-platform file format that ensures that documents always look as intended. Adobe Reader is the free reader software that enables these documents to be seen, but creating PDF documents has not always been as easy. Acrobat is the Adobe solution to that problem, and in days gone past pure PDF creation was really all it was about. Time has moved on, of course, and any modern Mac running OS X can create PDFs without blinking, and read them using the in-built Preview application. Given this, Adobe’s Acrobat has to offer substantially more than simple PDF creation in order to persuade a Mac user to pay good money for it.

Adobe Acrobat 9.0 is the latest version (I was looking at the Professional variant – Standard is also available), and once you fire it up it is clear that Adobe has embraced the challenge of adding value with relish. A clean interface provides a series of drop-down buttons for the Acrobat workflow – starting with creation of new documents, and ending with commenting of existing PDFs.

PDFs can be created from pretty much any source – files, clipboard images, or web pages/sites. There is a screen capture engine and a TWAIN scanner interface as well, and even a limited word processing system, and a batch/combining tool allows disparate documents to be assembled into a single PDF. PDFs can be tagged, bookmarked and indexed, as well as having security added to the user’s specification. This is all as expected – a refined tool for creating finely crafted PDF documents. And Acrobat has had most of these abilities for some time. New in version 9 are a variety of features aimed at making the PDF format more than just a documenting engine. You could always easily combine multiple PDFs into a single document, or even combine separate documents into a PDF ‘folder’, but with this version you can create a new PDF container called a Portfolio. This allows the separate constituent documents to be presented as a parts of a Flash-based interactive menu structure. It actually looks a lot like the effects you can get with iPhoto galleries on MobileMe, but the included documents can be any format that Acrobat supports for import.

That function leverages the new media features supported now in the PDF format. Any video or audio file can be imported and embedded into a PDF, and it is converted on the fly into a Flash video for presentation within the document. This is a really clever move, as it offers a simpler way to Flash video handling than with Adobe’s other Flash-supporting products.

Adobe now has on online presence with a site at Acrobat.com, and this is used as a central repository for uploading, storing and sharing PDF documents. Acrobat has been able to share PDFs for commenting and amendment for a couple of versions now, but the integration of the online site as a repository for doing this makes a lot of sense. The overall online integration extends to an online collaboration engine with screen sharing, a full meeting space webinar engine, and even integration with Safari such that PDF links clicked on the web are loaded more efficiently and have the PDF toolsets presented from within the browser window.

A point to note about all of these new functions is that users will need Adobe Reader 9 or Acrobat to access them if they get PDFs created in Acrobat 9. Acrobat users can use the program as a super PDF reader, but annoyingly even with Acrobat installed Adobe does not supply Quick View filters or a Preview plug-in for OS X 10.5 Leopard, so without Adobe software to view the documents you will just see a large flag page pointing you to Reader 9.

Further enhancements have been made by Adobe to Acrobat in the areas of form creation and pre-press functions. These are the professional features that, if they fit within the niche profile of your business, make the purchase of Acrobat a no-brainer, and will probably drive you to upgrade to each version as it is released. However, the question of value becomes a real consideration for the rest of us.

The issue is that Acrobat Professional, good as it is (and yes, in my opinion it is very good) is pretty expensive at $449. There are other Mac products that build on the PDF handling within OS X, and offer much of the functionality in Acrobat at a fraction of the price. And, as a user here in the UK, I was dismayed to find that Adobe’s pricing policy bring in the UK price at £499 – a little over $900 at today’s exchange rate. Even allowing for sales tax variations, the UK price is nearly double that of the US, and when I queried it Adobe told me “There are two primary influences on pricing: the cost of doing business, and customer research that assesses the value of the product in the local market.” That second comment about customer research makes me a little uncomfortable, as I can’t really understand in a global market how that should change the pricing so much.

Now, that said there is the cheaper version, Acrobat Standard, that loses some of the pre-press and video functions, so take a look at the features list and the trial versions if you think Acrobat might be for you. As I said, it is an excellent program, but I do have to knock the rating down on the pricing for those who pay the bill themselves.

MyMac rating: 3.5 out of 5

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IRIScan Executive 2
Company: I.R.I.S.
http://www.irislink.com
Retail: $199.99

The advancement of technology is a wonderful thing, particularly in the field of consumer electronics. Not only do devices get cheaper and more functional as time goes on, but they develop wonderful new capabilities.

Today’s item under the MyMac review microscope is a case in point. Whereas in times gone past, scanners were large, desk-bound devices connected via SCSI to your Mac. With the IRIScan Executive 2, you get a portable scanner and a full optical character recognition (OCR) suite, all capable of slipping into your laptop bag next to your MacBook.

I.R.I.S. provides a pretty comprehensive package. You get the scanner (a thin and light, USB-powered single sheet device), a usb cable, a stand so that it can be mounted vertically on your desk when you are not on the move, and a cloth bag for when you are traveling. You also get a full suite of software – Readiris Pro 11 and Cardiris 4. Readiris Pro can be used to scan pages of documents, and convert those pages to editable documents that are saved out as PDFs or text files. Cardiris is used to scan business cards, allowing them to be archived and stored as contacts on your Mac.

So it all sounds good on paper. The execution, unfortunately, is not so slick. Trouble starts with the software installation – despite a weighty manual providing instructions in a variety of languages, the directions given do not match up to the actual software on the CD. Once you have everything installed, all is still not well. The drivers for the scanner are proprietary, rather than complying with the established TWAIN standard, meaning that you cannot use the scanner with iPhoto, Preview or any other Mac OS X application. The scanner sports buttons for initiating scanning, and this relies on an application running to support it – this application starts up with the OS and runs as a a permanent icon in the dock, rather than up in the menu bar where I prefer background applications to sit.

The scanner itself did not produce good results for me. The problem is that, as a portable scanner, you have to feed sheets through one at a time yourself. This is a much slower process than with a more conventional flatbed scanner, and the scanning process itself is also fairly slow. In addition, the scanner requires calibration using a special sheet, and it seemed to ask for this quite regularly. More seriously, however, the resulting scans were pretty poor. The portable scanner admits ambient light through the paper feed slots, which degrades the quality of the scans quite significantly.

So the hardware is a little suspect. Fortunately, the software is a lot better. Readiris Pro is a fine and powerful piece of OCR software, that can produce very good results. The process for each page is that each group of pixels on a scanned page is identified as text or graphics, and is marked with a bounding box. Once you are happy with these zones, the page is recognized and processed, and can be output as an editable PDF formatted in the same way as the original page, or text can be extracted and saved as an RTF document. Suspect characters that the program is unsure of can be displayed during processing, and corrections made, thereby improving future recognition, and there is full support for correcting, deskewing and despeckling scanned images. Cardiris works in a similar way, but is designed to scan and recognize business cards and save the recognized contacts.

Unfortunately, in my experience the deficiencies of the scanner hardware left Readiris with too much work to do. The poor scans resulted in so many recognition errors that it rapidly became unfeasible to try to OCR documents. It wasn’t the fault of the software – the same documents scanned by a flatbed were recognized much more successfully.

Consequently, as a bundle the IRIScan Executive 2 is a mixed bag – great software but disappointing hardware. At $199, the cost of the bundle is $30 cheaper than the combined cost of Readiris Pro and Cardiris separately, and you get the scanner bundled as well, so if the two software packages appeal to you treat the scanner as a free pack-in and you are getting a good deal. However, as a portable scanner I can’t rate the IRIScan particularly highly – the quality of the Readiris software is the only thing that brings the overall rating up.

MyMac rating: 3 out of 5

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For users straddling the Windows PC and Mac worlds, the question of seamless data interchange between the systems can be a challenging one. Of course, with the capabilities of OS X, the rise of USB and the availability of flash drives and external disks it is probably easier than it has ever been to pass data, but nevertheless there are still considerations of disk formats, file formats and application versions to consider.

Even when moving between applications from the same software house, compatibility is not guaranteed. Adobe applications are normally OK – but then you would expect that from the company that brought us the universal PDF format. (Editors note: production houses would tend to disagree) Microsoft, however is another matter – there are a variety of applications that they only offer in the Windows version of Office that are unreadable on the Mac platform – such as Access databases, Visio diagrams or Project files. This is frustrating as Microsoft does make reader applications available for Windows users, but does not give Mac users the same courtesy.

Even among the applications with Mac equivalents, all is not sweetness and light. The most recent version of Office on Windows is Office 2007, which on launch at the end of 2006 introduced new file formats for the core Word, Excel and Powerpoint applications. Microsoft took some time to bring equivalent file compatibility to the Mac with Office 2008 for Macintosh, which was released in January of this year. While Office 2008 has file compatibility with all earlier versions of Office for Windows, it does NOT support Visual Basic for Applications, Microsoft’s Office macro language. This means that many files (particularly Excel spreadsheets generated in a business environment) might not work properly. Microsoft has subsequently announced that the NEXT version of Office for Mac will reinstate VBA support. In the meantime, Office 2008 has other foibles as well – it is buggy (even with the latest Service Pack 1), and runs poorly on non-Intel Macs.

Office 2004 for Mac was a more solid release, and copes well with Office files from Windows versions before 2007. Again, while Microsoft retrofitted the latest file compatibility support to older versions of Office for Windows when Office 2007 for Windows was release, we are still awaiting the equivalent file converter package for Office 2004 for Mac.

Mac developers have stepped into the file format breach where possible – the latest version of iWork will open Office 2007 files, for example. However, this scenario is an objective example of that oft-used phrase ‘your mileage may vary’! As the formats themselves are not completely open, and the capabilities of the program doing the conversion often vary from Office itself, results can be mixed – especially with more complex documents. Ultimately, only you can decide based on your need whether a separate program is ‘good enough’ for this sort of file working.

One effective route for transparently moving data between PCs and Macs is to use web applications and services. Apple themselves have embraced this with their MobileMe service, that will move data between Mac, PC and iPhone and also allow data editing using web apps for data stored on the server – or ‘in the cloud’, as all the cool kids call it. This actually does work really well. I use Evernote, which does the same thing as MobileMe for text notes, web clippings and images. They have clients for all platforms, and also allows data to be added and edited via a web service. The advantage is that you don’t have to worry about syncing between multiple machines – the same data is available everywhere, and is automatically synced from the web service when you fire up the local client. Where the service beats out online systems such as Google’s applications is the offline client aspect – you can work on your data when an Internet connection is not available, and synchronize back once you get in to connectivity again.

This to me is the way of the future, and there are signs that the industry appreciates this. Google themselves are working to extend their Web 2.0 magic to allow offline editing, and Adobe has launched their Air platform, which is another way of merging local clients and web services. Imagine a future where Microsoft Office is the same code base for either Mac or Windows, run off a web server but capable of running in a disconnected mode – but file sharing is enabled via a Microsoft web service. We would then be able to move away from the functionality wrinkles and data exchange uncertainty.

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FastMac 1.4Ghz Processor Upgrade for PowerMac G4 – Review
Company: FastMac
http://www.fastmac.com
Retail: $249.95

One of the great things I found about Macs when I switched from Windows was how long they last. My first Mac was a five year old Titanium PowerBook G4, and yet despite its age it was capable of running OS X 10.3 Panther, which was current at the time. You can try and pull the same trick with a five-year old Windows machine and you will find it a fairly desperate experience, principally because of Windows bloat – Microsoft’s code gets bigger and slower with each service pack, anti-virus package and patch as time goes by.

However, Apple’s latest operating system Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard requires a faster processor than is available on the cheapest machines before it will even install – at least an 867Mhz G4. Capitalizing on the value and utility of the older Macs, I was running a 450Mhz PowerMac G4 machine at work, so clearly Leopard was not going to install on that machine without a hack of some description. Fortunately, FastMac’s processor upgrade line came to the rescue, and I was able to put in a faster processor to my machine and get Leopard installed.

FastMac processors are incredibly easy to install – with one caveat that is really Apple’s fault. You see, for support of these faster processors your PowerMac G4 need the latest firmware upgrade to the motherboard – and the firmware installers provided by Apple will only work under OS 9. If you only have OS X installed, it can be a struggle to meet this requirement, as in my experience the firmware upgrades don’t work properly under Classic from within OS X. I ended up pulling my main hard drive and putting in an old 10Gb drive I had lying around, and installing a fresh OS 9 partition to run the firmware updater.

Once you have overcome that hurdle, however, installation is a breeze. Just pull the handle to open the side of the machine, and unscrew the three processor heat-sink screws, and the original processor and heat-sink will come straight out. Installing the FastMac processor is the reverse of the procedure, and there are dip switches to adjust the processor speed depending on exactly which of the PowerMac G4 models you own.

One reboot later and the machine is up and running with a powerful new heart. Right from boot-up, the faster processor was noticeable, with the machine starting more quickly and OS X responding more snappily. FastMac are proud of the components they use, with the best available variants of the G4 and large processor caches being used to optimize performance. I did run a few benchmarks, but really they are a poor measure of what a change this sort of upgrade can make to your machine – because each user’s actual performance will vary depending on the exact configuration and software load of their system. What I can say that is probably more useful is that the performance of the machine is transformed, to the point that pretty much any normal office or Internet application runs effectively under Leopard. The whizzier aspects of the interface – Spaces, Expose and the Dashboard – all work well, and Microsoft Office 2004 opens large Word and Excel files without breaking a sweat. Fullscreen videos also play back very well, which can traditionally be very taxing for underpowered machines. Only more stretching tasks such as video editing or heavy Photoshop use are less advisable.

The question that naturally comes to mind with a Mac upgrade like this is how does it stack up on the value money front? At what point does upgrading an old machine become less cost effective than buying a new Intel Mac? A base Mac Mini comes in at $600, but with Intel Core 2 Duo processing at its heart is substantially more powerful than any G4 processor ever made. However, the Mac Mini is a single box solution with very limited upgrade potential, so once you want more storage or memory you may find it wanting. A PowerMac is a very different animal, and PC standard parts can be used to upgrade any aspect. Given this, I feel that provided you don’t need a large amount of raw horsepower, you can spend 40% of the price of that new Mac Mini and get a very workable Leopard Mac.

MyMac Magazine Rating: 4 out of 5

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BlackBox Speakers/BluStream Tx Bluetooth Dongle
Company: Gear4
http://www.gear4.com
Retail: BlackBox £99.99, BluStream TX £39.99

The thriving iPod accessory market has delivered pretty much every variation of speaker system that you can think of, so it is fairly rare to see something new. Gear4, a British company that currently sells product to the European market, has come up with a system that is new both in concept and looks.

The BlackBox speaker system, when first unboxed, is exactly that – a black, polished rectangular slab of plastic unmarked except for some touch buttons on the top. Turn it on, though, and the front erupts with a burst of red LED light – there is a large matrix of LEDs behind the front panel. These are configured to beat and pulse to the time of your music in a method that echoes my first stereo system in the early eighties!

To get your music from your iPod through the BlackBox, there is a 3.5mm jack input on the back. But that is not really how the BlackBox is intended to be used – for it contains a Bluetooth radio as well. When it is switched on, it attempts to find a Bluetooth device with an A2DP profile for stereo music, and if it can it will pair with the device and act as its primary sound output. Plenty of mobile phones can do this, but iPods can’t (not even the iPhone) – so Gear4 can sell you a dongle for the iPod’s docking connector called the BluStream TX that is up to the job.

This dongle just plugs straight in to the docking port of your iPod, and requires no configuration, taking power from the iPod. A blue light flashes and it immediately starts looking for something to pair with – if the BlackBox is in range then a large check mark appears on the BlackBox display and the devices pair up. The BluStream TX works fine with the iPhone as well, though as is often the case the iPhone will complain that the device is not approved for use.

Once the BlackBox forms a Bluetooth pairing, it can control the device for volume and simple track selection, and you can do the same with the included remote. Also supplied by Gear4 is a snug-fit carry case, AC adapter and an auxiliary 3.5mm jack cable. The BlackBox will run on four C sized batteries if you don’t want to use the AC adapter. So it looks good, has innovative features and a full set of included accessories. Sounds like a sure thing, yes? Well, I’d agree, but with some reservations… because I haven’t talked about how it sounds yet.

I listen to a broad range of music, from rock to classical with a smattering of modern pop music, and a lot of spoken word stuff (mainly podcasts). I found that with all styles, the BlackBox sounded adequate. The driver arrangement has the sound coming out of the right and left sided of the rectangular tube, and there is a rear port to increase the bass. To my ears, it was perhaps a little bass heavy, and I had to invoke the EQ settings on my iPod to boost the treble somewhat to compensate. The bass was not very tight, either, and my wife commented that when heard from another room the overtones from the bass were somewhat unpleasant. The sound is a little better with a 3.5mm jack connection rather than the Bluetooth radio, but with either it is more suited to casual listening in a bedroom or at a party than to true audiophile entertainment.

It is very convenient, though – you get a feeling of true liberation by not having the iPod tethered to the speakers. I often used my Nano in my pocket while listening the BlackBox, and effectively made the Nano itself a remote rather than using Gear4’s remote. I did find myself frustrated with the lack of an inbuilt rechargeable battery, though – C cells are not the most convenient power source, and they didn’t last more than around eight hours before needing replacing. I used the AC adaptor a couple of times, but it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to tether a wireless speaker system with a wall wart power supply. Overall range is good, dependent on the construction of your house – I was normally able to move one room away in my old thick-walled house without break up. I did notice that if I used the BlackBox in the kitchen and the Microwave oven was active then the Bluetooth signal was corrupted pretty badly.

Overall, then, a mixed bag in terms of performance. However, I have to note that when discussing the system with others that it has tremendous visual appeal – several friends remembered having seen it in stores and on the web and they wanted to know more about it. I would imagine that with its cool looks and novel functionality that teenagers in particular might be attracted to it. The system is somewhat pricey, especially if considered with the Blustream TX dongle, though I was able to find the pair combined for just over £100 with some careful web searching. If you have a discerning ear then a preview listen is advised, but otherwise if the feature set appeals then buyers of the BlackBox are likely to be satisfied.

MyMac rating: 3 out of 5