Headphones are quite possibly the most difficult accessories to shop for. Some sound like crap but fit great, some sound great but hurt your ears. Ranging from in-ear headphones to over-the-ear headphones, your choices number in the thousands. V-MODA has some of the best in-ear headphones, and their Vibe II headphones continue their legacy.With the wires wrapped in material and the earbuds shaped like diamonds, the Vibe II headphones scream expensive. At $128, they aren’t cheap, but they are definitely not the most expensive. The earbuds have a great feel to them as does all the materials on the headphones.

The Vibe II package comes with a eight sets of interchangeable earbud sizes, ear grips, a leather case, and a V-MODA VIP card with access to exclusive content on a V-MODA site, but it has just started so there is not much content as of now.

One common complaint about the original Vibe Duo headphones was that the headphone jack would commonly break because it stuck out straight. In the Vibe II, the changed this by making the headphone jack at a 45 degree angle, causing less bending and thus less chance of breaking.

Now, the main part of the headphones are the sound quality, both in and out seeing as these headphones double as a headset for your iPhone or other phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack. The headphones are filled with bass and definitely show on techno tracks and rock tracks. The bass does not drown out other highs and midrange sounds, especially during movies. There are aspects of songs and movies I have never heard before until I got the Vibe II headphones. Music quality of AAC files from 128k to 256k sounded great and had a noticeable difference.

The secondary duty of the headphones is to perform as a headset for phones. All phone tests were performed on a BlackBerry Pearl 8130 on Verizon Wireless.

With a big button to answer or hang up on calls (also able to pause music on certain devices), the process is easy. On the right earbud cable is the microphone which is in a diamond shape. Unfortunately, this is one of the Vibe II’s main downfalls. Unless you use the included shirt clip, the headphones are weighted down by the microphone and the remote. Once you have the clip on, however, the weight issue is gone.

Once a call was started, callers sounded clear and loud. People on the other end complimented on how our sound was and said we were coming in loud and clear. The only thing that is slightly concerning is that if the microphone were to be smothered by your shirt, the callers may not be able to hear you clearly.

With just a couple shortfalls (design issues only), the V-MODA Vibe II headphones are a great solution to iPhone users (or other phone users) who want to have a great set of headphones and a good headset. For those who want a great set of headphones for their MP3 player, DVD, or laptops, they work wonderfully. At $128, they aren’t cheap, but they are well worth the price.

The app offers a wide variety of stations ranging from talk to rock to country. 102.1 The Edge, 99.3 The Fox, Q107, CKOI, CHMP 98.5 FM, 630 CHED, CJOB 68, and Country 105 are just a few of the stations which are available. Corus insures that you can find the station that you are looking for by offering 3 different options to view the lineup of stations. You can look at the stations in order of their call letters, use the iPhone’s location to sort in order of distance, or sort by city. In the event that you can’t make up your mind, just shake your iPhone. Corus Radio features “Shake to Shuffle” to deliver a random radio station.

Photos after the break.

All radio stations take advantage of AAC+ to allow for high quality audio while using minimal data consumption (which means less battery usage). However, don’t get your hopes up. While the quality is livable, it is no where near the level I would expect from a radio app. Also, I would like Corus to use higher quality (bitrate) streams when you are listening via WiFi versus the cellular network. Aside from that, I applaud Corus on the stream continuing when the iPhone/iPod Touch is locked. It seems that it would be common sense for all radio apps to at least have an option to do this.

I would like to request two features. First, a favorite stations tab would reduce the hassle of finding your favorite stations in the mix of the 52 stations. Second, including at least the song title, artist, and album information while listening to a station is an essential. Album art and the ability to bookmark song information would be nice, but I would start with what’s playing first.

Overall, the Corus Radio app is good but has the potential to be great. The current iTunes reviews seems to feel the same with an overall rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars. I personally give the app 3.5 out of 5 stars.

The Corus Radio iphone app is available for download now from the iTunes App Store for free. You can also find out more information by viewing the Corus Entertainment press release.

Click to enlarge picture.

On the 24th of March, the mysterious and elusive MacHeist, a Mac-themed alternate reality game which we’ve covered since its third incarnation, has released its annual software bundle of Mac goodies for purchase. To kick off the launch, MacHeist organized a live video show (which you can still watch online in case you missed it!) via video-streaming site Ustream.tv with a star-studded cast to emcee the entire event. Described as the “bundle bailout” by show co-host and Internet personality Chris Pirillo, this is the third bundle that the creative software marketer has released since starting up in 2006. Accompanying Pirillo were his two other co-hosts, Veronica Belmont of Tekzilla fame, and Lisa Bettany, who shouldn’t be unfamilar to MacHeist agents, as her doppelgänger plays the mysterious and foreign Sophia who provides the agents with briefings and clues.

After the hosts announced that applications that would be included in the bundle, screencasts of the program in action were shown to intice buyers. After all the apps were announced, there are nine total applications that are available from the start of the bundle, and three other applications that will be gradually unlocked when sales reach certain goals. The applications currently in the bundle are the following, in order of reveal: iSale, Picturesque, Sous Chef, World of Goo, PhoneView, LittleSnapper, Acorn, Kinemac, and WireTap Studio. The applications that have the potential to be unlocked with strong sales are BoinxTV, which will be unlocked after $400,000 is raised for charity, along with The Hit List and Espresso, for which unlock amounts have not been disclosed. Also, the first 25,000 people to purchase the bundle received a bonus application, Big Bang Board Games. Additionally, agents who watched the bundle unveiling live were given to chance to download a complementary copy of EventBox. The bundle is currently worth over $600, and has the potencial to be worth over $900 with unlocked applications, but is currently being sold for $39.

As a special promotion for the bundle, the three hosts offered free bundles to those who could answer trivia questions about Apple’s history, such as identifying a phony original iMac color or finding a little-known Apple slogan. In order to submit answers, viewers needed to have a Twitter account and follow the official MacHeist Twitter page. Once following, viewers would at-reply to MacHeist with their answer when the question was announced on the show. After a short amount of time, five winners would be picked at random via Twitter search to receive a free bundle code via direct message.

Also, it is important to note that 25% of all sales go towards charitable causes, MacHeist allows the buyer to pick which MacHeist-suggested charity they would like their contribution to be sent. To date, MacHeist managed to raise over $750,000 for charitable causes, and the ambitious group’s goal for this year is raising $1,000,000. The other 75% goes to the amazing application developers who worked incredibly hard to make the wonderful programs that are a part of the MacHeist bundle. As of writing, nearly 26,000 bundles have bee sold, and over $240,000 has been raised for charity. However, there are only 11 days left to purchase the bundle, so grab yours today! As Lisa Bettany famously said during the bundle unveiling, “Buy fast and hard.”

U-Verse being AT&T’s “competitor” to Verizon’s FiOS (far from it), it has TV and internet all in one. The integration between the U-Verse set top boxes and the iPhone is right now just control of the box like play, pause, and scheduling shows. I’m going to assume you could be streaming your U-Verse programming to your iPhone. Of course, this could mean that AT&T is going to force this on the next iPhone which would upset many users.

The next set of rumors says that there will be a netbook enabled with 3G for $99 on AT&T and “the first one won’t be a Windows OS.” Not exactly thinking Apple would sell a netbook for $99 even with a contract, but I’ve been proven wrong before. Not many other details to go along with that, except it has a keyboard. Shocking.

Via [Apple Insider]

Step 1: Go on www.interfacelift.com and look at icons. Once you see some you like, download them. They have a ton, so it may take a little while.

Step 2:  Now the rest is very easy. Open up Finder and go to your Application’s Folder. Let’s say you got a black icon of iChat, then you would go over to the iChat icon. Right click and then click on Get Info.

Step 3: Now you go to your download’s folder and find the icon you want to change. So let’s say you downloaded a black iChat icon, go over to it and right click and press Get Info.

Step 4: Okay, now you have both Get Info window’s open. Now at the top of the black iChat icon you should see a little picture of it. Click on it and wait for a little blue glowing border then hit Command+C. Now go over to the regular iChat and click on the blue icon. Then press Command+V and voila!

Step 5: This is the easiest step. Quit iChat (if it’s open) and drag it out of your dock. Then you can now quit the Get Info windows and drag the new iChat into your dock. Ta Da!

It’s very simple to change the icons in your dock, and very fun to customize it. See what you can  do with your dock!

After a December update being the last status report, MacBU felt that they had not shown the community enough, and because of this, the community might think they are slacking on the job, especially when it comes to the must promised A/V chat. They decided to show off the latest build of Messenger at Macworld with emphasize on the A/V chat.

Photos after the break.

The build at Macworld was unstable, as noted by one of the developers when I asked if I could take it for a test drive. She noted that, basically, the only thing new in between the current version of Messenger and this build was the A/V chat. Also, you may ask how I know the version number. Upon being granted permission to “look around,” I immediately clicked “About Messenger for Mac” to take a screen pic. The developer closed the window and prevented me from taking a picture. She snapped at me that she did not want the version number in the public in the event that the number changed; she cited a previous story as a testament. Despite this, I was able to look at the window long enough to see the version number was 8.0.0 and a build number that I did not have time to memorize. I share this fact just to keep an open flow of information.

The developer told me that there is talk of a beta but no indication of when it would begin. She noted that the new version should be released within the year.

Click to enlarge picture.

Apple has seem to really hit a bad nerve with many consumers lately when it comes to the iPhone and iPod touch. They disabled DFU mode in 10.5.6, the mode that is required to Jailbreak your iPhone/iPod touch, yet people came up with a workaround. Apple has done numerous updates that stopped Jailbreaking for about all of 30 minutes, and it was circumvented yet again. Now the consumers have struck a nerve on Apple and is declaring Jailbreaking illegal. Not only that, but they want to make it a felony punishable by fines and jail time.

We learned on Valentine’s Day (isn’t it supposed to be a day about love?) that Apple declared Jailbreaking illegal. What may have gone under the radar a bit is brought up by The Consumerist: Apple wants you to pay up to $2,500 “per act of circumvention” and also be “subject to criminal penalties of as long as five years, if they circumvented copyright for a financial gain.”

Seriously, Apple? You can’t be serious. The very fact that you’d even consider doing this is stupidity at its highest. Who paid for the phone? Consumers. Who pays for the service? Consumers. Who doesn’t own the iPhone anymore? You, Apple. If you wanted this kind of control, perhaps you should have them rent the phone (there’s a scheme waiting to be done).

If consumers spend their money on the product, whether it’s $200 for an iPhone (more like $2,000+ after two years) or $2,800 for a MacBook Pro, they should be able to do what they want with it however they want, no questions asked. If I want to install Ubuntu natively on my MacBook Pro without hacking it, I should be able to do it. Yet, I can’t because you don’t “support” anything besides Windows, which you barely support at that.

Here’s an idea to go along with the idea of support: don’t support things you don’t want to. Let us jailbreak at our own risk, let us install other OSes than Windows at our own risk. You don’t have to hold our hand the entire journey; there’s an entire community of Mac users out there that would be more than willing to help each other make their Mac theirs again if you would let them.

Remember this ad, Apple? You want us to break from the norm, right? Oh, that’s right, a lot changes in 25 years. People should do as you’d like them to do. That video still speaks for many Mac users as they’d love to break free, yet you aren’t letting them. Instead, we are all forced to march in line, sit down, and watch the same thing everybody else is watching.

What happened to you, Apple? You were the company that everybody wanted to work at: A rebellious company that Thinks Different. Now as you are getting more and more mainstream, you’re losing sight of what mattered to you the most: your loyal fanbase. You need to change your ways right here, right now, or else you will lose your way completely.

In the latest “War on Jailbreak,” Apple has officially declared that jailbreaking your iPhone (and most likely, iPod touch) is, in fact, illegal. As a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other copyright infringements, if you jailbreak, you’re breaking the law.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted on their blog the news and is also backing up Apple on the legality issue, even though last year they declared that hacking your phone for personal use is perfectly legal under the DMCA. Recognizing their own declarations, the EFF is asking for an exception to the ruling and stating that jailbreaking the iPhone is illegal because jailbreaking provides a new level of access that Apple doesn’t provide, so thus it is declared illegal.

Whether this amendment will be added (and it most likely will) has yet to be seen, but this is turning into a hot topic. What do you think? Should jailbreaking be legal? Is the EFF and Apple right by saying that you shouldn’t access levels of the software they don’t give you rights to? Sound off in the comment section.

Via [TUAW]

The video above is what can only be described as cool. Axiotron released a video of their process of converting (in this case) an ordinary MacBook into their ModBook tablet. Seems a little childish, but it just screams cool. Want your MacBook (Pro) to undergo the same process? You just have to pony up $1300.

Via [Gizmodo]

When you’re a citizen of the world of Mac, you know there’s bound to be some interesting stories floating around that will be sure to make you think twice about what you download and from whom. This latest over-the-top happening involves a fatal flaw in stolen copies of Apple’s hotly-anticipated new version of their office suite, iWork. Apparently, some bad apples who decided that they didn’t want to pay or wait for the newest version of the acclaimed software suite, iWork ‘09, got what was coming to them. Reports claim that certain versions of the application trio, which contains new versions of software to aid in the creation of presentations, documents, and spreadsheets, contain a dangerous piece of software known as a Trojan horse.

This Trojan horse, christened OSX.Trojan.iServices.A by its discoverer, antivirus company Intego, contains malicious code which can allow a rogue hacker to connect remotely to an infected machine and perform various potentially-dangerous functions, not to mention download additional unwanted software onto the machine. The pirated software was offered on various sites which are notoriously known for hosting possibly illegal and suspicious material. If you have a pirated copy of iWork installed on your machine (shame on you!), you can download a free tool from MacScan which will search your system for the offensive file.

Finally, remember that the folks at Apple, or any other software company for that matter, work really hard to make iWork as cool as it is. It’s simply not ethical to download and use the software they created and not pay for it. Sure, it may seem easier to steal the product than to actually buy the product, or it may seem like a victimless crime, but you have to consider the programmers and codewriters who created the software which you happened to nonchalantly steal.

[Via MacRumors]

Sprint is going to be the exclusive carrier partner for the Palm Pre, and retail availability is expected “as soon as possible” within the first half of 2009. No mention has been made of pricing or additional carrier partners, but according to the spec list below, GSM/HSDPA radio hardware is listed, so a GSM version will presumably be available once Sprint’s period of exclusivity has lapsed.

[Via PalmInfoCenter]

“You have just seen images of the Macintosh.” One of the most revolutionary devices in the age of computers. The first computer with typography and not just pixels made to look like letters. The first computer with a mouse. The first computer that was actually fun to use. How about this, what didn’t the original Macintosh do that was revolutionary at the time?

Fast forward twenty-five years and and we have arguably one of the best computing platforms available to the public: OS X. OS X keeps some of the heritage of its ancestor, but it’s much more functional and useful, as are all of today’s computers. Apple has seen its ups and downs (mainly before the dawn of the Macintosh), and most of its success is due to this little guy in the video… And the Macintosh.

We wish you a happy birthday, Macintosh.

However, I would like to point out one of the unique aspects of the company, including their origin. The idea for the viewbase came along during a 12 hour trip where Hans Kohte, the CEO, co-founder, and dad, decided to watch a movie. After the movie, two hours have past and Hans is left with some fairly sore arms. He decided that something was needed to hold the device if he was to continue enjoying any future movies. He looked to the current products on the market, but almost all of the products were missing an aspect that makes the experience complete. From that point, Hans began contacting professional design engineers (including one from American Inventor, the TV show) and started a quest to build the perfect viewing/holding device, and the In Your Face Viewbase was born.

A few months later, the company – comprised of the family – is now exhibiting at Macworld. Marion Kohte, CCO, co-founder, and wife, told me that shipments had barely arrived days before Macworld making this a very key event. Because of the very unique situation, we wish the family the best with their product.

Jobs opened the letter by very briefly addressing the time he has gained over the holiday season to spend with his family, but it didn’t take long for him to move into the rumors about his health. Indeed, Steve Jobs has been losing weight over the past few months with little known cause which triggered a change of his priorities. Find what is wrong and fix it.

His team of doctors now think that they have found the problem, a hormonal imbalance, that is easy to cure. The reason he chose not to give the keynote was the fact that it will take time to gain the weight back.

I do believe that Steve Jobs is entitled to privacy, and his health is his personal business unless it directly interferes with Apple. However, if he would have released a statement along the lines of this when the rumors started to effect Apple shares, we all would have been better off, including Apple. It’s as simple as that; I’ll save the rest of that rant for later.

With that in mind, I sincerely wish Steve the best as he returns to normal health. Now, we can have a little more rest when Phil takes the stage that it is not all as bad as it seemed.

Note: MacFocus Magazine will be providing live coverage of the keynote. You can find it on our Twitter stream (@macfocus) and on our live page.

January 15th: The MacBook Air

The MacBook Air, commonly described as the “world’s thinnest notebook”, was first released during the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo. Features included a measurement of 0.76 inches thin at its thickest point, which was unprecidented for any notebook computer at the time. Many saw the release as revolutionary, mainly because most people could not comprehend ever seeing a notebook computer that was this thin. However, many steered away from the nano-sized notebook, as it was claimed that the omission of many standard notebook features, such a compact disc drive, FireWire, and a target disk mode, was a deal-killer. Also, a starting price of $1,799 causes many to state that a premium is being payed for the computer being thin. As of today, the MacBook Air has sold decently, but not to the hyped expectations that Apple had hoped to achieve.

July 9th: MobileMe

When Apple announced that .Mac was getting a makeover during WWDC 2008, many expected that the upgrade would launch flawlessly and the new MobileMe would be success. Oh, how wrong they would be. The launch of MobileMe, .Mac’s successor, was plagued by severe downtime, accidental charging of trial account holders, and massive amounts of data lost by current .Mac subscribers. Thankfully, Apple has gotten their act together regarding MobileMe, and have made their formally-shakey syncing service stable for most, if not all, of its users.

July 11th: iPhone 3G, iPhone OS 2.0, and the App Store

Well, this just shows that you can’t do too many things at one. Apple decided to do just that, and it cost them big. The over-ambitious company decided to release the new iPhone 3G, the next version of the iPhone software, dubbed as iPhone OS 2.0, and one of the most anticipated additions to the iPhone since its initial launch, the Apps Store, all on one day. What followed could be described by many as total chaos, as nearly all three of the releases on that day, plus the lauch of MobileMe two days prior, had a large quantity of bugs and problems. Even Steve Jobs himself sent an internal email to those at Apple explaining what happened.

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store.  We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

-Steve Jobs

Now that 2009 is on the horizon, let’s hope that Apple not only learns from their mistakes, but also learns to replicate their past successes. From all of us at MacFocus Magazine, we wish you all very happy and healthy new year. Here’s to hoping that 2009 will be just as insanely great to Apple, and the die-hard Apple fanatics, as 2008!

Note: I just wanted to say that my name is Jon Scheiber, and I’m new on the MacFocus Magazine staff. I’d love to get know all of our readers, so let me know what you thought of my first article by dropping me a line at jon[dot]scheiber[at]macfocusmagazine[dot]com or use the comment form below. I’d love to hear what everyone has to say!

Fring is completely free and comes in at a somewhat-light 3.0MB download and is available now from the iTunes App Store.