Product Reviews

Friday, 4 November 2016

Review: Bang & Olufsen BeoSound 1

As an enthusiast-driven brand, Bang & Olufsen has exceedingly high design standards. Any product that comes off the line has to have that polished, modern B&O look—sleek aluminum, polished black control screens, striking shapes. Maintaining such standards is difficult, but it has benefits. You get to charge a premium, for one (and B&O very much does). Also, strong design creates the perception that the care given to the visual aspect of the product extends into everything else about it. In the case of speakers for example, people see something amazing and automatically think, well, that must sound amazing too.

Which brings us to Bang & Olufsen’s new, $1,495 BeoSound 1 portable wireless speaker. The speaker’s conical, aluminum design jumps out from across the room. From certain angles, the top fifth or so of the speaker appears to float above its base. The BeoSound 1 looks nothing like a speaker, which is a benefit if you want to make a modern visual statement in your home. It’s wireless and battery powered, so you can move it around the room, place on the patio, or even schlep it to your Swiss chalet for slope-side serenades. Music streaming over AirPlay, Bluetooth, and Google Cast is supported, so you can pump tunes in from your phone in whatever way makes sense. Support for Spotify, Deezer, TuneIn, and QPlay (for China) is built in as well.

WIRED

The distinctive design of the BeoSound 1 really is a showstopper. And its engineers’ attention to design does transfer into the speaker’s usability and functionality. The BeoSound 1 does a lot, and it’s all easy enough to do.

Setup is simple, and afterward, the speaker is easily controlled from B&O’s BeoSound mobile app. Volume can also be manually controlled by rotating the top of the speaker, which is just a big knob. You can also skip songs with a quick finger swipe of the speaker itself. There’s a 40-watt amp for the midrange speaker and a 20-watt amp for the woofer, both powered by a built-in battery that lasts 16 hours if you listen at a normal level (4 hours if you crank it).

TIRED

While the build and usability of the BeoSound 1 are impressive, the audio quality of the speaker leaves a bit to be desired. The BeoSound 1 can be played loudly—louder than expected. One sign of a truly great speaker is that it retains clarity at high volumes. The BeoSound 1 distorts pretty significantly up the volume curve. This is compounded by the fact that it’s easy to accidentally crank the volume to eleven when using the manual knob control. Even at lower volumes, the sound is simply good enough, with the high end in particular showing signs of the distortion that becomes more apparent as the volume gets louder.

RATING

6/10 – If visual design and usability are important to you, the BeoSound 1 can get the job done. Just be careful not to crank it up too loud.

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Unlawful immigration curfews under government review – BBC News

Thursday, 3 November 2016

The Reviews Are In: Google’s Pixel Phone Takes On The Iphone 7

Tyler Perrys Boo! A Madea Halloween review more tricks than treats

Black Mirror review this nightmare sterile world is only five minutes away

Fire at Sea review masterly and moving look at the migrant crisis

German comedy tackles refugee crisis but reviews are mixed

Willkommen bei den Hartmanns takes humorous look at how Germans deal with the new arrivals – but critics say refugee protagonist is little more than plot device

The refugee crisis may have divided Germany and sown discord in family households, but it could ultimately help the country be more at ease with its new-found liberal identity. That is the optimistic thesis proposed by the countrys first refugee-themed comedy.

Willkommen bei den Hartmanns (Welcome to the Hartmanns), which features some of Germanys biggest stars and opens in cinemas on Thursday, tells the story of Diallo, a Nigerian asylum seeker who is taken in by a family in a posh district of Munich after mother Angelika, a retired headteacher played by Senta Berger, visits a local refugee shelter.

The newcomers arrival triggers a series of domestic dramas father Richards late-life crisis, daughter Sophies failed love life, workaholic son Philips burnout and grandson Bastis poor grades which are eventually resolved in a rollicking finale involving clashes between Pegida-style patriotic citizens and leftwing activists outside the Hartmanns home.

The arrival of over a million migrants and refugees in Germany since the start of 2015 has until now mainly inspired films of a darker nature. In February, long-running German TV crime franchise Tatort ran an episode with a plot line that evolved around the death of a group of migrants who had suffocated in the back of a lorry, echoing a real-life tragedy on a motorway in Austria in 2015.

At the start of this year, Gianfranco Rosis documentary Fire at Sea, observing the refugee crisis through the eyes of Lampedusa locals, also won the top prize at the Berlinale film festival.

But Willkommen bei den Hartmanns is the first to try to gain some comic mileage out of recent events. Director Simon Verhoeven does so by directly incorporating some of the stories that have dominated the news in Germany and around Europe over the last year.

A taxi driver begins stalking Sophie after rescuing her from what he believes to be a sexual assault of the kinds perpetrated in Cologne on New Years Eve, while the Hartmanns tensions with their crucifix-wearing, Polish-surnamed neighbour come across as a direct nod to recent diplomatic standoffs between western and eastern European countries.

Its enough for Frau Merkel to invite the entire third world into our country were not going to do the same in our home as well, says Richard, initially dismissing his wifes desire to take in a refugee as borne of a helpers syndrome. Better than an asshole syndrome, his daughter Sophie quips back.

Verhoefen, who started developing the films screenplay before Angela Merkels decision to keep open Germanys borders to thousands of refugees stranded in Budapest last September, however tries to be even-handed when drawing up caricatures.

Pensioners at Munichs refugee shelter engage in absurd one-upmanship over their volunteering with my refugees. One of the asylum seekers auditioning for a bed at the Hartmann residency is a man in his 40s, claiming to be an unattended minor. And at the end of the film, one of Diallos former roommates at the shelter turns out to be an Isis sympathiser after all.

We Germans are still so inhibited about our own identity even though we are a free, tolerant and great country, Sophies love interest, played by Austrian-Tunisian actor Elyas MBarek, complains at one point in the film. Weve got to stand up and defend those values.

Reviews of the film have been mixed. While praising the films intentions, Moritz von Uslar in weekly Die Zeit bemoaned a lack of classic punchlines: Shouldnt material like this, which catches our society at its most vulnerable, nervous and insecure, have produced a film that is not just OK, but brilliant, wild, provocative and incorrect in the best sense of the word? Others have pointed out that the refugee character, supposedly the films protagonist, ends up as little more than a plot device to solve Germanys own domestic dramas.

Played by Belgian actor Eric Kabongo who is pictured but not named on the posters promoting the film asylum seeker Diallo eventually manages to gain a residence permit.

Its an optimistic ending to an optimistic film: two weeks before the films release, Merkel met Nigerias president, Muhammadu Buhari, to discuss how the countrys asylum seekers who have had their application rejected could be returned more swiftly to their home country. The approval rating for Nigerians applying for asylum in Germany currently lies at about 8%.

The post German comedy tackles refugee crisis but reviews are mixed appeared first on Safer Reviews, Unbiased & Independent Reviews..

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