Tech2

Speakers are like karate. Subwoofers are like weightlifting. The quality of a speaker is determined by subtleties: well-chosen drivers, just-right crossover points and slopes, and a perfectly tuned, solidly constructed enclosure. The quality of a subwoofer is determined mostly by its muscle: the size of the enclosure, the displacement of its driver, and the power of its amplifier.

Soundmatters didn't invent the Bluetooth speaker, but it definitely invented the good, compact Bluetooth speaker: the FoxL. The FoxL's guts became the basis for the much cuter and more broadly marketed Jawbone Jambox. The look and general driver layout of the Jambox were then copied-sometimes subtly, sometimes shamelessly-by practically every audio ODM in China.

This is not your typical cell phone review. Mostly because I don’t understand most cell phone reviews. It’s a phone. You get a new one every few years. The fervor and intensity of Internet discussions about what phone is best is beyond my realm of understanding.

So what is this? Well, by most accounts the HTC One is, ahem, one of the top smartphones available right now (the others being the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S IV) and I was curious, how good is it? Not just from the dime-a-dozen subjective point a view, but an actual look at the hardware.

So I guess you could consider this a look at the HTC One mostly as an LCD TV and portable media player, judged as such, plus a bit of the other subjective crap because why not. Plus, we went ahead and did full video and audio measurements on it. Because why not.

This is one of the nerdier posts I've done, but since I'm unabashedly a nerd, and I hope many of you are too, I figured it would work.

You see, I love LEDs. I think they're fascinating in how they work, what they can do, and so on. As you'd expect, I'm slowly replacing the CFL bulbs in my house with LEDs.

The thing is, not all LED bulbs are equal, and one of the biggest drawbacks is that not all offer the "warmth" in color temperature most of us love in incandescents.  So I put a few different LEDs on my test bench, measuring them sort of how I measure TVs, to see how they do.

Curious? Well I was, hopefully you will be too.

I've been travelling a bunch this year, with two big trips to Europe and China. Like my 10 Tips to the Travelling Techy last year, I brought along a bunch of gear, some good, some bad, some invaluable. I guess you could call this 10 Tips to the Travelling Techy 2, except it's eight.

So if you're planning any trips this summer, check out this list of some tech gear to bring.

Most video games, especially the big-name, high-budget ones, are created by a huge team of people. Some are in charge of how the game plays, others design the levels, others still do the sound.

Before the nuts and bytes get tightened, most games start with an idea. To give the entire team a visual representation of what the "look" of the game is going to be, most companies hire a concept artist, just like movies do.

This concept art can give the game a direction, but on their own, they can be fascinating visual adventures in their own right. Here's some brilliant art from some recent games, and some info on the incredibly talented artists behind them.

Tech^2 started the week with an incredibly tiny projector, now we’ll finish with an incredibly huge—and unprecedentedly indulgent—TV set.