Nate's Best Buys

Modern Muscle

A GT500CR surveys its less-lucky friends at Plakos Scrap Processing in Brooklyn, NY. Photo by Anthony Barbato

I sat staring at Carroll Shelby’s signature on the passenger-side dashboard of my GT500CR tester.

It was just days before the legendary Texan left us for that big racetrack in the sky. Shelby rocked automotive culture more times than most folks move apartments in his 89 years on earth — from winning Sports Illustrated‘s “Driver of the Year” award in 1956 and 1957 to building the Ford-powered AC roadster that defeated the then six-time champion Ferrari team at the 24 Hours of Le Mans two years straight.

And there I was, getting ready to drive a replica of his souped-up 1967 Mustang many have come to affectionately know as “Eleanor.” Reflecting on my experience now, a week after his passing, I can’t help but feel as if I were fated to drive the car.

Shelby raced, designed and collaborated on countless track and street machines during his illustrious campaign, but among his more widely known works are the snarling GT350 and GT500 Mustang mash-ups manufactured between 1965 and 1970.

Eleanor was one of these beasts. But of course, I wasn’t driving the real thing. My tester was a “restomod,” a version of the original metal that’s been restored accurately, but also upgraded with modern components.

According to Jason Engel, founder of Classic Recreations, the Oklahoma-based company officially licensed to build the Shelby GT500CR, a restomod is often better than the real thing. Technology and auto design have advanced considerably since the muscle cars’ heyday of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and such a machine shows its age today.

“The steering, suspension, skinny tires, heavy motor and dated cooling system mean it’s great for car shows or a quick cruise around the neighborhood, but not much fun to drive on a regular basis,” Engel says.

Restomod shops keep the vintage look, but update the suspension, the steering and the brakes, and also add things like fuel injection and A/C. The finished product has all the charm and appeal of a vintage ride, but with the reliability and driving experience of a modern vehicle. There’s certainly no denying that the restomod GT500CR possesses the soul of original, but I still wouldn’t recommend one of these babies for daily grinds to work in rush-hour traffic.

“Restomod buyers want something representative of history that actually works,” says Tom DuPont, founder of DuPont Registry, a marketplace for fancy, expensive cars, ‘bots and other luxury lifestyle accoutrements. “You want to satisfy that nostalgic urge with a current version of the real thing. Think of it as a practical car you don’t mind leaving out in the rain at the country club.”

Classic Recreations is licensed by Shelby American to build ’66 and ’67 Shelby continuation vehicles. Each one is fitted with an official Shelby serial number that’s included in in the Shelby Registry. CR has been building these cars for only a few years — it picked up the business after the previous licensee, Texas-based Unique Performance, had its door busted in by the police during a fraud investigation for VIN irregularities in 2007.

CR starts with a real ’67 steel Mustang body (not a GT500 body), stripping it down to its skivvies and stuffing it with all manner of modern upgrades: coil-over-shock suspension in the front and rear, cross-drilled and zinc-washed brakes, a Mass Flo fuel-injected 7-liter engine with 545 hp and 5-speed Tremec transmission. Any sheet metal that’s been damaged or allowed to rust over the last 45 years is replaced, and the overall structure is reinforced to handle the extra power. (The engines in ’67 Mustangs varied dramatically, running either 6 or 8 cylinders and starting as low as 115hp.) Shelby-licensed body panels — listed in the brochure as “authentic Carroll Shelby Exterior Fiberglass enhancements” — and signature accessories and gauges complete the look. And, boy, does it look real.

In all, a dozen skilled craftsmen spend some 2,500 hours — about four months — building each one.

Safety cables keep the hood closed so it doesn’t blow off at 110 mph. Photo by Anthony Barbato

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The Champ Is Here

Our new fave in the Android realm. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The HTC One X is one of the best smartphones on the market, and the best Android phone you can buy right now, period.

It’s fast, it’s gorgeous, it’s lightweight and it has a stellar battery that lasts all day. The camera is also outstanding. It’s the best I’ve seen on an Android phone, though it falls just short of the camera on the iPhone 4S.

It’s not just the hardware — the One X runs version 4.0 of Android, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, which is overlaid by HTC’s own Sense skin. It’s fast and easy to use. Combine that with the excellent hardware and you’ve got a handset worthy of being a flagship device for both HTC and AT&T (even though you might have to wait a bit to get one).

In fact, the one thing I really don’t like about the One X is its exclusivity to AT&T, the only carrier that sells the phone in the U.S. It’s a shame this phone isn’t available on T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon.

Android handset makers don’t have the same leverage as Apple when it comes to dealing with telecommunications companies, so they continue to pump out a few slightly different versions of every phone, each one exclusive to a different carrier. It’s unnecessary and insane — HTC produced more than 50 different handsets last year alone.

The One X, being a stellar phone, serves as a testament that Android handset makers should go the iPhone route and make fewer phones of higher quality available through multiple carriers. The hardware companies would of course gain from this, but the payoff for the consumer would be huge as well.

To wit: Nearly every quibble I had with the T-Mobile-exclusive One S — a fine mid-range handset being sold at a flagship price — was fixed in the One X.

My biggest complaint with the One S was its display, and the feature I enjoyed most on the One X was — you guessed it — the display.

The One X has a 4.7-inch, 1280×720 IPS LCD touchscreen, covered in Corning’s durable, crystal-clear Gorilla Glass. The viewing angles on the screen are some of the best I’ve seen on a smartphone. Colors are bright and accurate, producing consistently true-to-life images across websites and apps. Pixel edges are indistinguishable with the display’s density of 316 pixels per inch.

Let me put it this way: The One X’s screen is on the same level as the iPhone’s Retina display. I love looking at it, and it blows away the PenTile displays found on the One S and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (my former favorite Android handset).

Beneath the fantastic touchscreen, the One X is a beast, with a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage (the same set-up found in the One S). Performance is blazing-fast, and though the AT&T handset doesn’t pack the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor found in Europe and Asia’s One X, it doesn’t feel any less capable. The U.S. model is just as good and just as impressive as what HTC is offering overseas.

The U.S. version of the One X, unlike its overseas counterpart, runs on AT&T’s 4G LTE network, which is only available in a small number of cities right now. In San Francisco, the One X downloaded and uploaded data quickly, whether connected to AT&T’s 4G LTE, 4G HSPA+ or 3G service.

But despite performing like a beast, the One X is also a beauty.

The 0.36-inch chassis is made of a single piece of polycarbonate, giving the handset a sophisticated look free of seams or gaps, as seen on past HTC hardware. Given its size, the phone is also surprisingly light, weighing in at 4.6 ounces.

The One X is a handsome, well-designed phone. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

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A Bow to Heritage, With a Hot Rod Under the Hood

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 micro four-thirds camera is available as a body only, or with a kit (shown) that includes a 12-50mm f3.5-6.3 lens and a flash. Photo by Jackson Lynch/Wired

The latest micro four-thirds camera from Olympus is clearly designed to appeal to all those hoary, wizened photographers who long for the good ol’ days.

Olympus’ new digital OM series is modeled after the company’s original, beloved OM film cameras from the 1970s. But the new OM-D line is not just some tossed-off homage — the first camera in the line, the E-M5, is a fantastic picture-making tool.

It makes excellent RAW and JPEG images, and it is certainly the most customizable compact today. And the thoroughly modern design — a magnesium-clad, weather-sealed body — is so masterfully executed that I bet a lot of the “if it’s not curvy, it’s crap” cognoscenti will be wooed by it.

At the heart of the E-M5 is a collection of core features that makes it quite possibly the best-performing micro four-thirds camera on the market today: a new 16-megapixel TruPic VI image sensor, a speedy processor, the five-axis mechanical image stabilization system, an articulated OLED touchscreen and a high-speed lens drive control.

Both RAW and JPEG images can fly into the E-M5 at a 9fps burst rate with awfully impressive results up to ISO 6,400. Olympus’ default algorithms tend to over-sharpen JPEGs (this can be dialed down in-camera), but they are still on par with the tops in the mirrorless realm. RAW images are equally pleasing, with lots of highlight and shadow latitude for creative control once they’re downloaded.

Using the E-M5′s controls and dialing in custom settings is deceptively easy. The two wheels at the top of the body are the hub of the control center, and they can be set to operate different functions in a host of combinations to suit your shooting preferences. The Movie Record, Fn1 and Fn2 buttons are also configurable to 50 different settings. Once you get it set up to your taste, you won’t be missing great shots while fumbling through menus.

Photo by Jackson Lynch/Wired

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Cans With a Kick

Can something as delicate and complicated as brewed coffee really succeed as a mass-produced canned beverage? Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

On a hot day, a cup of ice-cold brew from the local coffee shop is a thing of eternal beauty.

But the typical artisanal iced coffee isn’t an option when you’re at the Safeway, hoarding snacks for a bargain matinee showing of Cabin in the Woods.

It’s 80 degrees out, and the heat is making you sleepy. As you gaze bleary-eyed at the “Cold Drinks” section, you spy a beautiful silver cylinder of something called illy Cappuccino. You pay your $3 for it, and, once nestled in the darkened theater, you pop the tab and tilt the can to your mouth just as the movie’s protagonists get to someone’s cousin’s cabin, which is obviously the most haunted place on Earth, when — Blegh! What is this I’m drinking?

If they’re going to call this terribly sweet substance with strong notes of Swiss Miss and metal a “cappuccino,” then they’d better call you Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because words are meaningless.

While ruining a good thing for the sake of convenience seems uniquely American, canned coffee was actually invented by the Japanese. According to Hidetaka Hayashi, president of the Hayashi Coffee Institute in Tokyo, pre-made coffee in cans may have been introduced to Japan as early as 1958, although it wasn’t until 1973, when Pokka Lemon Corp debuted the hot/cold canned coffee vending machine, that the drinks really took off.

Canned or RTD (ready-to-drink) coffee is now a $16 billion business (.pdf), and the U.S. is the second largest consumer of the stuff thanks to offerings from Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Trader Joe’s and even Wolfgang Puck.

It’s safe to say that canned coffee is having a moment. There’s just one problem: It doesn’t taste very good.

When I mentioned to a friend — an Italian who considers herself a coffee expert — that I was writing an article about the problems with canned coffee drinks, she looked at me like I’d said I was writing an article about how to make cats more like bananas. This dismissive (and dare I say, snotty) attitude was shared by all of the coffee connoisseurs to whom I so much as mentioned the words “canned coffee.” All except for one.

Peter Giuliano is the owner of North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee. He’s the guru of baristas everywhere and a cold-coffee expert. He is also a man intrigued by the possibilities of a good canned coffee. According to Giuliano — who even copped to wanting to create his own canned coffee — the main problem isn’t that pre-made coffee can’t be good. It’s that the way it’s currently made, with an emphasis on low cost, will never allow for a quality beverage.

“They’re not crafted. They’re manufactured,” he says. While this might be fine for something like Coca-Cola, it’s much harder to pull off with a highly unstable substance like coffee. There are thousands of chemical compounds in every cup, and according to Giuliano, more chemical reactions happen during the preparation of coffee than anything else we normally eat or drink.

So what makes the current crop of mass-market canned coffee so bad? In a word, heat. Because pre-made coffee must be able to sit unrefrigerated on a store shelf, it has to be sterilized, which in the case of canned coffee involves heating the ingredients to 250 degrees for about 15 minutes. Heating coffee for that long not only kills microorganisms, but also causes the naturally present acids to break down, making the coffee bitter.

Enter milk. As Giuliano tells me, the high concentration of milk and sugar in most canned coffees is likely an attempt by the manufacturers to counteract the bitterness. Unfortunately, the addition of milk brings on a whole other set of problems, namely that cooked milk acquires rancid notes like those found in condensed milk or tapioca. This cloyingly sweet smell is off-putting for many would-be canned coffee consumers.

The result of all this cooking is that canned coffee comes in two varieties: extra-sweet, with lots of milk and sugar, or stomach-achingly bitter, with minimal flavor additives. Often, the former will be marketed as “Latte,” “Mocha” or “Cappuccino,” but as far as I can tell, these titles are applied at random and can be ignored. Just know it has milk and sugar in it.

I chose four coffees for my taste tests. The choices were partly based on an attempt at diversity (milky, black, foreign, domestic) and partly based on availability, since, as it turns out, canned coffee is pretty difficult to find. If a store carries it at all, they typically only have one brand. I bounced all over Manhattan trying to locate an appropriate selection of beverages.

The first coffee I tried, and the only Japanese brand, was Boss Black, which I found in a Japanese convenience store near the East Village. It came in a cool black can emblazoned with the words “BOSS” and “BLACK” and a picture of a dude smoking a pipe.

But that was where its positive attributes ended. The coffee — if you want to call it that — was so stomach-achingly bitter that I, a person who always drinks black coffee and is typically not a sissy baby, couldn’t even finish the small can.

Next, I visited Trader Joe’s to get my hands on a can of the company’s “Latte.” The cutesy blue cylinder looked like something that might contain baby formula, and at just 75 cents per can, it was suspiciously cheap. So I wasn’t shocked when this “Latte” turned out to be aggressively sweet and milky, yet somehow watery at the same time and almost completely lacking in coffee flavor.

Surprisingly, the only palatable offering came not from venerable Italian coffee maker illy, whose issimo Cappuccino revolted me at the movie theater, but from Starbucks. The Doubleshot struck a good balance between coffee and milk and sugar, and had less of the metallic aftertaste that seems unavoidable in canned coffee. It was the only canned coffee I tasted that I would willingly drink again.

According to Peter Giuliano, canned coffee could be a whole lot better, and possibly even good, if companies used high quality beans and a pasteurization method like micro-filtration or flash pasteurization, neither of which require the coffee to be exposed to high heat for long periods of time.

In fact, good pre-made coffee already exists, albeit not in a mass market form. Brooklyn-based coffee roaster Kickstand makes a liquid coffee concentrate that can be shipped to consumers around the country. The coffee is made via cold extraction — the grounds sit in water for a minimum of 12 hours before being filtered. Because no heat is applied, this type of cold-brewed coffee is low in acidity and delicious without milk or sugar. Not adding milk has another benefit, which is that the coffee doesn’t have to be sterilized. Since cold-brewed coffee is essentially flavored water, the air-tight bottles stay fresh for around three months if kept in a cool environment.

Kickstand’s product is expensive, must be diluted before being consumed and can’t be bought at the store. So it isn’t exactly the answer to canned coffee’s problems. But it does demonstrate that, if made with quality in mind, pre-brewed cold coffee doesn’t have to suck.

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Axe-Shaped AirPlay Speaker Sounds Decent, But Lacks Killer Chops

The design of Altec Lansing’s inAir 5000 speaker is rather cutting-edge. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Freed of the 30-pin connectors, buttons and recessed charging ports required on traditional smartphone speaker docks, AirPlay device manufacturers are given the liberty to pursue more creative designs. We’ve seen some oddball shapes as the result.

This AirPlay speaker, the Altec Lansing inAir 5000, is one of the more striking specimens — it’s shaped like a giant axe head, with the “blade” pointing toward the sky.

The iOS-friendly music streamer doesn’t just look cool, it also happens to sound great as long as you keep it at moderate volumes. But it underperforms at higher volumes, and it suffers from the same network connectivity problems common in other AirPlay devices, making an otherwise solid product a bit of a disappointment.

The $500 inAir is some high-end hardware: The plain mesh-over-grill exterior hides two 3-inch Kevlar drivers, two 1-inch tweeters, and a 4-inch subwoofer. Volume controls are tucked away on one side, with AUX and headphone jacks on the opposite side. Two ports — an Ethernet port for wired networking and a USB port for setup/iOS devices — are located on the back, along with power, reset, and Wi-Fi syncing buttons. Since the streamlined inAir doesn’t have any kind of display, your only status indicator is a multicolored LED that flashes from the bottom of the unit.

There’s a handsome remote included, too. But since your iOS device controls it just fine, the ridiculously stylish brushed-aluminum clicker is one of the best-looking accessories you’ll never need.

Connecting the inAir to a Wi-Fi network is easy if you have an iOS device. I plugged an iPod Touch into the USB port, downloaded Altec’s free app, and then hopped straight into the setup. This app-driven express lane saves a great deal of time and eliminates the tedium of setting up wireless networking. Old-school browser-based setup is also an option too, but it’s really more of a backstop — more AirPlay manufacturers are turning to app-based setup, which is a good thing, as the early days of AirPlay were messy in that department.

I breezed through the essentials, (network passwords, device names) in just a few minutes, and then started streaming from iTunes immediately.

At its core, the inAir is an iOS companion device. Even though it pairs with a Windows PC running iTunes just fine, most of the wireless DJing perks are reserved for an iOS experience.

The inAir is a small step forward in terms of AirPlay connectivity. My review unit only dropped its connection a couple times a day while testing in my RF quagmire of an apartment. (Believe it or not, this is actually an improvement, given the relatively poor AirPlay experiences we’ve been dealing with over the past year.) But after a week of use, I noticed the inAir’s status LED had started flashing purple — it had dropped the network connection entirely. A hard reset and a quick re-run through the setup app got things cooking again. It’s a small hassle, but given the stability I enjoy with other wireless speakers, even one weekly instance like this is more than I’d prefer.

It’s too difficult to say whether these hiccups are due to the inAir device or the AirPlay platform, but it definitely has a negative impact on the convenience of wireless streaming.

So how does it sound? At mid-to-moderate volume level, the 8.5-pound speaker can deliver neighbor-waking bass. Thanks to some baked-in signal processing, the inAir produces that booming bass with virtually no distortion. The catch is that the DSP wizardry gets a little heavy-handed once you really pump up the volume.

Although the inAir gives you even more distortion-free volume once you crank it from “moderate” to “loud,” it does so at the cost of a lot of dynamic range. Basshounds will feel cheated with this duality, and hardcore audiophiles will undoubtedly take issue when the pleasantly sharp-edged highs, fully present at moderate volumes, grow flat and dull at higher volumes.

Warm mids across the board help sweeten an otherwise uneven package, but the issue is less about power and more about sophistication. At even moderate volume the inAir is great for blasting a room with the sounds of Hollywood explosions, bassy Skrillex warbles, or electric organ solos from The Black Keys. Concertos and Buddy Rich drum solos just sound loud and lack presence.

Good-but-not-great audio and wireless chops aren’t that uncommon these days, so it’s hard to say whether the inAir is a progression in the overall speaker space. However, as an AirPlay device it’s undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

The inAir doesn’t absolve AirPlay of its “work in progress” feel, but it does offer more in the way of stability than some of its first-gen competitors. If you don’t mind the occasional mid-playlist hiccup, aren’t too picky about EQing and are itching to burn $500, the inAir is a good investment. If you crave absolute wireless stability or a truly transparent audio experience, skip it.

WIRED Room rockin’ volume and bass. Great mid-range performance. Digital signal processing quashes distortion. Fast and nimble wireless music streaming. AUX port offers non-iOS versatility in a pinch.

TIRED Good sound at a not-so-good price. Randomly dropped connections are instant party-killers. Aggressive signal processing at high volumes. No battery = stationary tunes. No iOS cable included.

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No, Officer, I Don’t Know How Fast I Was Going

The 2012 Porsche Cayman R is a proven attention-getter. Photo by Basem Wasef/Wired

In this unprecedented age of obscene horsepower and affordable performance, the Porsche Cayman R is the Jenyne Butterfly of the sports car world.

Who is Jenyne Butterfly? Look her up, preferably not at work.

Ms. Butterfly’s sinewy muscles are cut on gracile bone, and articulate her long limbs with purposeful flexibility. She’s graced with the sort of physique you’d associate with an Olympic swimmer or an extreme yogi. She also possesses a preternatural ability to fling herself across a pole with fluid undulations that appear to disobey the laws of physics.

Extracting 330 horses from a mid-mounted 3.4-liter flat-six, Porsche’s compact two-seater is outpowered by $24,000 Hyundais. It’s also in no danger of winning any luxury accolades, and its superstar big brother, the 911, is undeniably more glamorous. And yet, this low-slung pipsqueak is also a punchy performer, an aggro animal that’s been pruned like a bonsai, resembling a sort of scaled-down supercar.

At 2,855 pounds (or 2,910 pounds with a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission), the Cayman R is the lightest road car built by Porsche. Luxuries like door grabs and sound insulation are swapped for nylon straps and road noise, and aluminum door panels save 33 pounds of mass. Stiffer bucket seats lighten the load by 26 pounds, while 19-inch wheels do their part by ditching 11 pounds of unsprung mass.

So serious is this car’s commitment to the art of asphalt acrobatics that air conditioning is a no-cost option, even though A/C comes standard on lesser Caymans. The same mass-o-phobes who probably don’t mind their musky stench polluting the non-air-conditioned cabin are likely to order the optional lightweight lithium battery for a $1,700 premium — it sheds 22 pounds, and, with its shorter profile, ever-so-slightly lowers the vehicle’s center of gravity.

Photo by Basem Wasef/Wired

Those who are not fanatical about purebred sports cars won’t “get” the Cayman R. More than a few car geeks won’t, either. Many will likely cite that oft-recalled American metric, the Chevy Corvette, a potent but sometimes cloying jack-of-all-trades with a bigger, burlier personality. The Cayman R is, on the other hand, a heavy dose of mechanical minimalism wrapped in the deceptively familiar skin of status-symbol sheet metal — for better, or for worse.

If you climb in expecting the stark, carbon and Alcantara-slathered racecar aesthetic of, say, a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera, the Cayman R’s elephant hide surfaces disappoint. Its glossy plastic trim color-matched to the car’s exterior won’t do it any favors, either (though it does enliven the otherwise stark cabin.) Even twisting the ignition key with your left hand in that age-old Le Mans tradition won’t betray this car’s brilliant but obfuscated soul. Its exhaust note lacks the gut-punching immediacy of a solid American V8 or a silky smooth German inline-6, but throw the shifter into first and let out the heavyish clutch, and instant comprehension of this car’s pugilistic personality shoots directly to the seat of your pants. In a good way.

Resting .78 inches lower than more pedestrian Caymans, the R bucks with every surface irregularity, conveying the nooks and crannies of the road like your tongue on a toasted English muffin. The steering wheel pulls right or left like it’s directly linked to the tie-rod mounts by cables, and thanks to the aforementioned weight savings and mid-mounted engine, the car’s low polar moment of inertia facilitates slalom course slithers like an anxious eel.

Transitional handling (i.e., what happens when steering input initiates weight transfer, triggering the kinetic chain of events that result in direction shifts) is so direct, the Cayman begs for swervy lane changes if only for the sheer adolescent thrill of it. Credit a taut chassis, stiffer bushings, and more aggressive suspension geometry for the dynamic gains. And if you complain about the washboard ride or vaguely unrefined engine intake sounds emanating from behind the firewall, you’re missing the point. Yep, this car is just like rock ‘n roll: if it’s too loud, you’re too old.

Photo by Basem Wasef/Wired

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Biking to Work? Here’s Some Loot for Your Commute

Photos by Jon Snyder and Ariel Zambelich/Wired

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Got the Radio On

Livio’s Bluetooth dongle plugs into your cigarette lighter, giving your older car the powers of the internets. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The Bluetooth-enabled Livio Radio car kit attempts to be the Holy Grail of dashboard connectivity devices, marrying smartphones with older cars that lack the hardware to fully support them.

The main idea behind the device ($120 from Livio, cheaper elsewhere) is that you can wirelessly play music from your iPhone or Android phone via your car’s speakers using an FM radio connection, so whatever’s playing on your phone gets piped through the car’s radio.

The phone and the Livio dongle (which plugs into the cigarette lighter and is about the size of a small stack of credit cards) communicate using Bluetooth. It easily syncs with your car’s radio and your phone, and has a USB port on the side to keep your handset juiced up.

Like other devices in this category, it also works as a hands-free telephone. You can answer calls with the press of a button, but dialing out must be done on the phone. The caller’s voice comes through your car’s speakers and sounds nice and clear. Of course, anybody else in the car can hear the conversation — a plus or minus depending upon one’s viewpoint.

But Livio isn’t only intent on connecting your MP3s and your phone, it’s tackling apps, as well. The company recently opened up an API for the device, allowing developers to code their apps so they can be controlled via the buttons on the unit. Some of the partners already using the API are streaming services like Rdio, NPR, Live365 and AirKast, which is a streaming platform for small radio stations, so it’s useful for listening to sports broadcasts outside your local market. In addition to the apps the are enabled through the API, Livio makes its own phone app that can access some 45,000 internet stations, which is pretty cool.

In theory, the device is the perfect accessory for vehicles without built-in smartphone capabilities, such as my 2002 Volkswagen Eurovan camper. It does work as advertised, mostly without hassle. But in my months of testing it, I encountered a few annoyances that nearly prompted me to toss it out the window several times.

There were some things I liked. After years of suffering through touchscreen menus while driving, this device let me just cue up some Beatles without ever losing sight of the road. On family trips, my 11-year-old son, sitting in the back seat, could take control of the device with his iPhone and stream from his iTunes library or his Rdio app, keeping him busy and entertained. That was pretty awesome, except when I had to bark at him to turn off the latest profanity-ridden rap song.

But the biggest travesty of the Livio is how it nearly made my ears bleed on multiple occasions, not to mention those of my black Labrador and two juvenile-delinquent sons. If you turn the device off while leaving your radio on, you’ll be greeted with an ear-frying pop. If my dog could talk, she would have yelped “WTF!” every time.

When all goes well, the device just pushes your music through a vacant FM station on your radio. However, the same maddening popping sound (sometimes accompanied by static) happens whenever the vacant slice of spectrum you are dialed into starts to get edged out by radio stations as they come into range. If you’re driving long distances, or if the radio dial is already crowded in your city, this happens quite a bit. And if you’re an audiophile, you can forget about being pleased with the sound quality. The Livio leaves a tiny hissing sound in the background, however slight. But it was a nuisance enough that it turned my session with the Discovery box set of Pink Floyd remasters into a bummer.

But don’t get me wrong; all of the Bluetooth and app connectivity functions work very well, and the audio-quality problems I experienced are par for the course with most of these devices that rely on an FM transmitter. But I have yet to see something that clears these hurdles elegantly.

So despite the damage to my family’s eardrums, the Livio has promise.

WIRED Wireless music streaming through your car’s speakers. Some apps can be controlled using the buttons on the Livio, so you can stash your phone and reduce distractions. Setup is a breeze. It doubles as a USB charger.

TIRED Mind-blowing for the wrong reasons. Is an injustice to Pink Floyd. Pricey — the budget-minded are better off using a Bluetooth earpiece for telephone calls and wiring up a stereo input connection for music.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

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All Together Now

Asus’ 27-inch dekstop PC is a solid all-in-one Windows machine. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Driven mostly by Apple’s iMac, the all-in-one PC market has seen a boom lately. And why not? You can cram an entire computer behind a big, floating display and control it with a couple of wireless peripherals. The minimal, clutter-free design of an all-in-one PC works in every room of the house, and the big screen can comfortably double as an HDTV for watching videos. They tend to be more difficult to upgrade, but they’re very convenient.

This 27-inch all-in-one from Asus is no iMac, but it holds its ground as a great choice for a desktop workstation — it’s a powerful Windows 7 machine with a big, bright screen, an attractive design, and a wide array of features that give it a high level of versatility. The bundled keyboard and mouse are sub-standard, but there are enough positives here for me to recommend it.

The PC’s big, crisp display is one of its best features. The 16:9 widescreen HD panel sports a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. It has LED backlighting and a 178-degree wide viewing angle, and colors appear bright and vivid. With its edge-to-edge glass display, surrounding black bezel, silver front-facing speaker bar and silver metal stand, the entire hardware package is attractive. You won’t see any buttons cluttering the front display — the menu icons are visible on the bezel, but the buttons are hidden underneath the panel. An understated camera eye peers from the center-top.

It’s not all about looks. Inside is a quad-core Intel Core i7 2600S processor, an Nvidia GT 540M graphics processor, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. A read/write Blu-ray drive is standard on this model. You also get plenty of ports on the Asus, which is another strong point. Our loaner came with two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA/USB 2.0 combo port, VGA-out, HDMI-in, Ethernet, an SD card reader, and all the standard audio ports you’d expect.

If you’re cramped for space — like if you live in a San Francisco studio, for instance — then the Asus ET2700INKS could easily double as an HDTV. Using the HDMI-in port, you can connect the PC to a set-top box like the Roku or your DVR. You can even mount it on a wall, as the back of the computer has a VESA-compatible mounting bracket. This is a choice that more and more manufacturers are going with these days, and we like it — when the computer inside becomes obsolete in however many years, you can just repurpose the thing as an HDTV by mounting it on a wall or on a stand.

Asus is marketing the ET2700 as the “centerpiece of your family’s entertainment,” so I’d expected the computer’s internal speakers to produce some decent audio. With the help of an external subwoofer — a squat, black obelisk tethered to the back of the PC by a cord that’s about a foot too short — music came out sounding better than what most computer speakers produce. But the sound didn’t fill a large room. I turned the volume all the way up, and it still couldn’t compete with the droning traffic noise outside the Wired office.

The subwoofer. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Like almost every all-in-one PC, the ASUS comes with a keyboard and mouse. But in this case, the computer would have been better off without them. The keyboard, in particular, was an ergonomic nightmare — just imagine a Mac keyboard made out of super-cheap plastic and with a mushy, pillowed typing experience. The included wireless mouse was too small for comfort, even for my dainty lady hands. If you plan on using the ET2700 as your daily computer, expect to drop some extra cash on a keyboard and mouse that are actually usable.

That issue gives me some pause, because with a $1,500 price tag, the Asus sits in the high end of all-in-one PCs. Still, it’s cheaper than a similarly spec’d iMac, plenty powerful, and stuffed with nice-to-haves. And especially if you’re looking for a computer to double as a home entertainment display, the Asus will more than suffice.

WIRED Bright, sharp display. Classy chassis with edge-to-edge glass panel and front-facing silver speaker bar. Packed with every port and feature you’d want in a PC. Blu-ray combo drive and HDMI-in makes it a great home entertainment device.

TIRED The included keyboard and mouse are maddening. Speakers are only so-so — if you’re using this as a TV replacement, you’ll want to upgrade the audio. Glass screen doesn’t handle glare well.

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Slightly Off-Target

The new Impreza 5-door hatchback. Photo courtesy of Subaru of America, Inc.

Subaru has always been a bit of a niche player in the U.S. market. Building no-nonsense cars with all-wheel drive gets you a loyal following of snowbound northerners, weekend rally drivers, triathletes and Yankee cranks. Outside of those demographics, Subaru is a non-entity: Only those with dissociative identity disorder have ever cross-shopped a Legacy and a Lexus, and the Arkansas Subaru Dealers’ Association could have their annual meeting in a single booth at Shoney’s.

Once you fall down the Subaru rabbit hole, however, the cars on offer are quite diverse. In election-year parlance, that’s called “microtargeting” — tailoring a particular combination of a candidate’s attributes to appeal to extremely specific audiences, which is why you’ll undoubtedly see the Romney campaign aim TV ads specifically at gun-owning dressage competitors who live in Ohio.

It’s also why Subaru’s all-new 2012 Impreza evolved separately from the performance-oriented WRX lineup, to appeal to a wider group of consumers. The cars got a new look inside and out, a stiffer chassis and lighter curb weight. A new 2.0-liter all-aluminum engine lost horsepower and displacement from the previous generation’s 2.5-liter mill, but Subaru claims the new, lighter engine is actually more sprightly than its predecessor. Most importantly, the Impreza can now be ordered with a new continuously variable transmission (CVT) that helps to boost fuel economy by a whopping 36 percent, up to 27 mpg city and 36 mpg highway.

To reflect that repositioning, the Impreza’s advertising campaign got a slight tweak, too. There are still the usual spots with bearded thirty-somethings, dogs and bicycles, but there are also ads targeted at those first-time new car buyers who might find the other small, affordable, high-mpg offerings a little too ubiquitous. In other words, the new Impreza is a hipster Corolla.

I got two weeks with two Imprezas — one an entry-level Premium hatchback, the other a fully loaded Limited sedan, both equipped with CVTs — and came away from the experience with mixed impressions. Everything that makes a Subaru a Subaru — the all-wheel drive, the hose-it-off interior, the boxer engine — still shines, but some of the changes that cater to new fans may end up making some enemies.

Style-wise, the smallest Subie has come a long way from its bug-eyed youth, and flared fenders make the family resemblance to the larger Legacy more clear. Bonus: Windows you can actually see out of. In both sedan and hatch form, the Impreza has a tall greenhouse with plenty of glass, negating any need for blind spot sensors and back-up cameras. It’s an intentional improvement, and a welcome one among the embrasures that pass for auto glass these days. Just set your mirrors and go. On the hatch, you can even see your tail lamps in the rear-view mirror.

Inside, no-nonsense Luddites will find plenty to love. The center stack is made up of knobs and dials — just like Dad’s Heathkit! — and acres of hard, textured plastic. Cars equipped with navigation also use a touch screen to control the radio, but virtual “buttons” are big and easy to see. There’s plenty of legroom in the back, but the front seats lack support for long drives. Both our testers also featured noticeably loud blower motors, as if Fuji Heavy Industries had pulled parts from some Swedish junkyard.

The new Impreza 5-door hatchback. Photo courtesy of Subaru of America, Inc.

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