Artist of the Moment: Uffie is another one of the artists on Ed Banger Records (mentioned several times previous). She’s definately one of my absolute favorites on the label. If I have my facts straight she’s an American chick who went to France and hooked up with DJ Feadz (who I will need to speak more of later) at a party she organized and the two began to make music together. Her style is the closest thing to “electro crunk” that I’ve heard so far because she raps with hard, crude, and harsh lyrics over punky electro beats provided by Feadz creating a truly unique fusion of sounds that is sorta crunk, sorta electro, sorta punky, and just plain pretty awesome. I always find her funny because she’s got this sex appeal to her, yet she looks pretty young. I would probably guess her to be 16-17, maybe, if I didn’t know her actual age, but I think she’s closer to early 20’s. So she’s got this raging attitude and raps about fucking and being a bad ass bitch, which just seems really funny considering how small she is and how young she looks. She has some awesome talent, though, and I love her music and style. I can’t wait for her to get more popular since she really doesn’t have that many tracks or a full album or anything. I’d love to see her live too but I think she mostly travels around Europe, so I guess I’ll have to wait. *sigh* Anyways, check her out!
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So I haven’t blogged in a long time because of my busy work schedule, but there have been a lot of things I’ve wanted to mention such as the Justice show I went to on the 17th of March (AMAZING!), and a related art show in Toronto from SO ME, the creative director for all of Ed Banger’s promotional artwork (amazing artist!!). I’ll leave that stuff for later and for now I’ll start with The Energizer iPod chargers that the focus group marketing people sent me. I don’t really have any obligation to review the product or recommend it to my friends/audience but according the honour system, they sent me free stuff so I should probably reciprocate in some form.
So the package looks like the one pictured to the right of this text and the product is called Energi To Go. Now the reason for such a product as a portable iPod charger is mainly about convenience. The ability to lose your ipod’s charge and then regain it quickly enough to blast out some more tunes on the way to your current destination without completely losing function of the device due to it’s low power. I suppose the secondary reason for a portable charger would be if you ever decided to take your gadget on a camping trip or somewhere where an immediate energy supply isn’t available.
For me, the main time I would need to use a product like this would be if I forget to charge my iPod one night and need to rush out the door in the morning with a dead battery on my device. This rarely occurs with me but did, in fact, occur quite recently in which I found the charger to be super useful. However, once I hooked up the charger to my iPod it made my iPod significantly clunkier (not by that much though) but the saving grace to this charger is that it doesn’t block the headphone jack. So for this reason I was able to plug my headphones in and play tunes while it charged which was really awesome. I’ve never had the problem of being without a computer for more then 24 hours (my iPod only came with a USB chord to charge/connect) so it would be possible but extremely rare that I would be without a means of charging the device such as a camping trip. However, for those who do frequently take these kinds of outings I would recommend the product.
Now I guess the other downfall is that the device relies on AA batteries. I had a hard time jamming the batteries into the slim slide-out cartridge and once I got the batteries in I realized that eventually they would indeed run out and I would have to spend more money on getting new batteries. It would be nice if there was a model of this charger that comes with a rechargeable battery pack. It would save money in the long run I think. I liked the size and form factor of the charger which is essentially just a plastic bar that fits in your palm. It fits easily into pockets or bags, or whatnot. I thought it was strange that the charger has 3 settings that you can set with a dial. The settings were “nano, 8gig, and 80 gig” I think, I can’t remember off the top of my head to be honest. But I remember noticing there was no iTouch setting which kind of threw me because I have an iTouch so I just picked the 80gig setting and it seemed to work fine. I think the settings are mostly just for the physical size of the iPod and not so much about the charging levels anyway, however, the dial didn’t have any grip on it which meant that I had to use a coin to change it. A little annoying but sort of a minor thing since it only needs to be set once unless you have multiple iPods of different sizes.
So that’s about it really. The thing has some minor quirks, comes in handy once in a blue moon, but I wouldn’t spend a boatload of money for one unless I was a frequent traveler with little chance to charge by conventional methods. So that being said, the device does what it’s supposed to do and the downsides are all pretty minor provided you fit the demographic for this thing so I’ll give it a 3.5/5 rating.
