This year the Apple store is participating in the day after Thanksgiving holiday Black Friday specials. It’s a one day sale, most likely with small discounts on most of their products. Be sure to check the Apple store on Friday the 23rd to see what you can scrounge up.

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Written by Ken Allen on November 22nd, 2007 with no comments.
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A common complaint about the iPhone is that it has no physical buttons for playback control; you’re forced to use the phone’s touchscreen, which presents challenges when carrying the iPhone in a bag or pocket. Another complaint is that the iPhone’s recessed headphone jack prevents you from using many third-party headphones that offer better performance than the stock earbuds.
Apple provides a workaround for the first issue via the special earbuds included with the iPhone: the right-hand cable provides a small, inline module that includes a microphone and a control module. Squeeze the module once to pause or resume iPod playback, or to answer or end a call; squeeze it twice in succession to skip to the next track. The functionality is limited–you can’t skip back, skim, or perform any other action, but it’s a welcome way to get at least some degree of playback and call control.
Third-party vendors have provided workarounds for the second issue through small adapters that let you connect other headphones to the iPhone’s headphone jack. (We’ve reviewed two, and we have a few more to cover.) Unfortunately, when you use most third-party headphones, you lose the stock earbuds’ control module and microphone. Shure makes an adapter that includes such functionality, but it’s $40 and somewhat bulky.
For those who want better audio quality without losing the additional features of Apple’s earbuds, an appealing alternative is provided by Ultimate Buds. The company takes a set of quality in-ear-canal headphones–either the Etymotics ER-6i (MSRP $149) or the Future Sonics/XtremeMac FS1 (MSRP $150)–and a set of Apple’s iPhone earbuds, and then performs electronics surgery, grafting the iPhone-headset’s cable and controller onto the in-ear-canal headphones. The result is the Ultimate Buds UB7 (pictured above) or UB7EB, each $150 (at the time of this writing, the UB7EB is on sale for $120). You get the sound quality and noise isolation of the ER-6i (UB7) or FS1 (UB7EB) with the playback-control and phone-making convenience of Apple’s own iPhone earbuds. (Ultimate Buds will instead modify your favorite set of headphones for $40; we didn’t test this service.)
See the rest of the review after the jump.
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Written by Dan Frakes on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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Gadget screens that double up as vanity mirrors seemed a pretty silly idea at first, but having seen numerous people - male and female - use their cellphone to check for stray mascara or spinach in teeth, I suppose it has some degree of merit. If you’ve been disappointed at not being able to harness your iPhone to suss out whether your nose-hair needs trimming, then perhaps the Artwizz MirrorFilm screen protector will cheer you up.
 
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Written by Chris Davies on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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There are still many people with iPhones and iPods who don’t use their PMP in the car because they lack the necessary hardware to link it up to the installed sound system; they’re the market Alpine is going after with their latest iPod/iPhone/Bluetooth combination device. Consisting of an installation-free 2.4-inch colour TFT, remote control and iPod/iPhone interface for dragging out your music, the eX-10 can be connected to your ICE either via a built-in FM transmitter or install-friendly stereo cable.
 
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Written by Chris Davies on November 14th, 2007 with no comments.
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Every time I listen to something on my iPhone, I have to decide whether to use Apple’s stock headphones (which include a microphone and track controls but make music almost inaudible when I’m walking down the street or on the train) or my fancy, custom-molded ear pieces (which seal out background noise and sound great, but don’t give me any control over the iPhone — and require an adapter to even work with the iPhone’s recessed jack to boot).
So I was excited to see that Fastmac today announced its Universal Headphone Adapter for the iPhone. The adapter lets you use any 3.5 mm headphones, and comes in three models: an in-line audio adapter with flexible cable & gold plated connector port ($5); one that adds a shirt clip, built-in microphone and a music playback and phone control button ($10); and finally one that adds to that an adjustable volume slider and noise suppression microphone ($20).
Now I’m not sure how the volume slider will work (can you even control the volume through the headphone port?), but that top-of-the-line adapter is half the price of Shure’s $40 Music Phone Adapter, so I’m definitely going to give it a try.
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Written by Jonathan Seff on November 2nd, 2007 with no comments.
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