Great speakers for your laptop

The Bose Computer MusicMonitor delivers great sound, compactness and ease of operation, but it is a tad expensive.

Listening to music on your laptop or PC can be a drag if you’re connecting crappy speakers to your machine. Most cheap to reasonably-priced add-on speakers tend to be crappy—either laden with tinny-ness or phony sounding bass, or, on occasion, both.

The only recourse that is often left is to listen to your music via good earphones but that is not always possible or socially desirable. Of course, you can invest in a three-way (two speakers and a sub-woofer) system but I find that cumbersome, particularly, if you sometimes want to cart your laptop and music along with you. Bose’s Computer Music-Monitor changes all that. The compact two-speaker system delivers everything—great sound, compactness and ease of operation.

Hooking up the two-speaker system (the right speaker houses the amp) is easy and the card remote controller that comes with it is convenient. The sound is clear and crisp with satisfactory bass and nary a tinny sound. At very high volumes, the sound does tend to get a bit unsharp and gamers may not like the overall neutrality of the aural experience but these are undoubtedly great speakers. Try them and you’ll certainly want to buy them. Till you see the price tag: Rs 21,263 for the pair. Yes, but they’re Bose, remember?

—SN

LG’s new phone is good, but…

Slick, yes; innovative, yes; but LG still needs to fix a few glitches.

LG has been making some really nice mobile devices of late. Its KF510 is another innovation and features a touchsensitive LED touchpad below the screen. The device is very slick, and has some nice design touches, not least of which is its slim design and the ridge that separates the screen from the touchpad.

The touchpad itself is innovative, but the only problem is that it takes a while to get used to the way the device functions, and the touchpad is usually best used along with the numeric keypad. What we did not like about the device was the computer software required to sync it with your Address Book, which did not seem to function well at all.

And trying to transfer an entire address book over Bluetooth is a logistics nightmare. Then, there is the problem of LG’s nonstandard connectors. There’s a reason other manufacturers are moving to micro-USB ports and standard headphone jacks—ease of use. But with a bit of work on connectors and a lot of it on the PC-interface, LG could give the top players a run for their money. The phone costs a shade over Rs 12,000.

—Kushan Mitra