Home Improvement Tool and Toy Reviews

The Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle Set has now officially been released. You can purchase them directly from Amazon by clicking the link to the right.

What the laser battle set is are 2 of the Air Hogs Havoc Heli’s with infared lasers attached to the front that you can dog fight with. When one Havoc Heli shoots and “hits” the one the engine cuts and the heli spins out of control.

These babies are really fun. How do I know? I have a set! I just got them today and they are really fun. They fly as well if not better then the original Havoc Heli from Air Hogs but have a slightly different body.

Here are some pictures of the heli’s:

Here is the packaging the that Laser Tag Set comes in:

This Laser Tag set from Air Hogs are going to be all the rage this Christmas so you should get yours while they are still in stock.

You can buy them from Amazon.com and ships FREE with Super Saver Shipping.

Get your Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle set today!

Technorati: Air Hogs Havoc Heli, Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle, Dog Fight, Battle, Games, RC, RC Airplanes, RC Helicopters

Having been an avid Air Hogs Havoc Heli pilot I did crave a little more excitement in my life so I set my sites on the Air Hogs Reflex. Air Hogs advertised that it had the ability to go forward, backwards, left and right. This was accomplished with the two sets of vertical propellers that were near the main rotor.

I had noticed that the price had recently dropped for the Reflex about a month ago from $79 to $59 so it was now in a more realistic price range for me. While at Toys-R-Us this past weekend I picked one up.

Visual Differences

There are three major differences between the Air Hogs Havoc Heli and the Reflex. The first is that the Reflex is a little larger then the Havoc. The second is that the Reflex comes with a wall charger instead of being charged from the controller. The final major difference is on the controller. On the Reflex you have right/left and forward/back controls on the right joystick as opposed to just the right/left on the Havoc’s controller.

After discovering all of these differences I plugged in the charger and waited to fly my new toy.

Flight Differences

The first thing that I noticed about the Reflex was that it hovers in place instead of wanting to go forward and to the right (after trimming it of course). Right and left rudder movements on the Reflex are much more precise then the Havoc Heli and can be done while hovering also. The biggest difference is that the Reflex only goes forward when you want it to - the Havoc Heli is always going forward.

Pushing the stick forward gives you forward movement while releasing the stick will cause the Reflex to go back to hovering. Pushing back on the stick gives you reverse movement while again releasing it goes back to hover. The default is to hover straight as long as it has enough throttle applied.

With these types of controls it is much easier to get the Reflex to go where you want it to in comparison to the Havoc. With the Havoc it is always moving so any little mistake can send you into a wall or a light fixture. The Reflex stays put until you tell it to go somewhere.

Cost Differences

At time of writing the the going price for the Reflex is about $49 while the Havoc Heli has recently been dropped to around $24. While the Reflex costs more you the batteries in the controller are only used to control the Heli, with the Havoc they are used to charge the Heli as well as control it.

Conclusion

The Havoc Heli is a great beginning helicopter that is durable and inexpensive. The Reflex is a more advanced heli and gives you more control and longer battery life.

Which is better? They are both good and will provide hours of fun. Pick up one of each and make your own determination .

Technorati tags: Air Hogs, Havoc Heli, PiccoZ, PicooZ, PicoZ, Helicopter, RC Helicopter, Micro X Copter, Air Hogs Reflex

UPDATE: Amazon sells these direct for $29.99 but there are other vendors that cell the Air Hogs Havoc Heli for $24.95 on the Amazon site. Just click on the link to the right that says ‘Best Price $22.95″ and you will see the other vendors. Happy flying!

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I have been in the “toy” mood ever since Christmas and the Air Hogs Havoc Heli is the latest cool toy to be added to my collection.I stumbled upon it while walking through the toy department at Walmart (I was looking for the kids ). Anyway, there it was, sitting all buy itself on the shelf asking me take it home - and I did for a cool $29.95. Amazon has the same one under a different name for the same price. It is also know as the PiccoZ, PicooZ, or PicoZ (don’t ask).Out of the book the Havoc Heli felt solid. It seems to be made up of the same type of Styrofoam that my Super cub is and that thing is literally indestructible. The package came with the Helicopter, Controller, and some weights to add to the nose for forward propulsion, and an extra tail rotor.

I popped in the required 6 AA batteries and let my new toy charge up. As soon as the charge light went out I had the copter in the air for the next 10 minutes of pure fun.

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The Air Hogs Havoc Heli is so easy to fly that my 3 year old can do it!

I made the video below of both him and I flying it (he is at about the 3 minute mark).

The Havoc Heli can be pretty difficult to find but I found a few different people on Amazon.com that sell them. You can click their link to the right.

Enjoy the video!

Note: The music in the video is Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus and Never Let me Down Again mixes from their “Remixes 81-04″ album.

Technorati tags: Air Hogs, Havoc Heli, PiccoZ, PicooZ, PicoZ, Helicopter, RC Helicopter, Micro X Copter, Video

As mentioned before I got a SanDisk Sansa e250r MP3 player for Christmas. I was replacing a 512mb MP3 player that I had gotten free from my Napster subscription.

The main reason for wanting to get rid of the 512mb MP3 player was that I could only get about 5 full albums on it. The e250r had 2GB of space so I expected to get about 20 albums on there.

To my disappointment I was only able to get about twice as much on the e250r. The reason for this was that it was preloaded with almost a gigabyte of music that they wanted you to subscribe to Rhapsody music service to continue to listen to. Some of the music was cool but not 1GBs cool.

Unfortunately it took a little digging but I found where all the preloaded music was hiding out and was able to delete it.

This is where it was hiding - \system\music\

There are 275 .rax files in this locationby default from the factory.

UPDATE: You will also need to delete the PP500.DAT file under the System\data directory. This will delete the entries from your database. I had deleted the songs but they wee still showing up in my Album, Artist, and Song lists.

Now that I have more space I have some ripping to do to fill my Sansa back up again.

Technorati: MP3, MP3 Player, Sansa e250r, iPod

As mentioned before Cingular hooked my wife and I up with 2 new Samsung C417 phones since the LG C2000’s that we had were not cutting it.

The C417 is an awesome phone and the camera on it is actually usable to take pictures. My wife and I are snapping photos of our kids all the time now which I think is great.

I had a belt clip pouch that I had left over from the LG phone that I tried using for the Samsung. Unfortunately the elastic on the sides was stretched out so the phone kept on falling out. Because of this I decided to get one that had a magnetic cover to keep the phone in place (picture on the left).

This case did a great job of keeping the phone in place but after a while I started to notice some weird things happening.

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I have always been hard on cell phone companies. IMO cell phone companies have always been screwing the end user and laughing all the way to the bank.

I have been with them all, Verizon, Nextel (before it was with Sprint), Sprint (before it was with Nextel), and now Cingular. Up until this week I had elected Cingular the worst cell company out of them all.

The main reason was even though I would have full bar on my phone the reception was terrible and I could hardly hear. Also, their customer service did not seem to be that great. I had vowed that once my Cingular contract was over that I was going back to Sprint.

That all changed yesterday though when I received the the Samsung C417 replacement phones that Cingular had sent out to replace my LG C2000s.

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Well I have an update to the issues that my wife and I have been having with our LG C2000 phones (you can see my original post on this here - Socking it to Cingular and LG).

Last night I tried having a conversation with the second replacement C2000 phone that I had gotten from Cingular. It was terrible. This phone was the worst out of all 3. After getting off the phone I called up Cingular again.

I got a girl in their call center in Phoenix, AZ who wanted to “troubleshoot” the phone. This pissed me off since neither of the two previous people I had worked with wanted to “troubleshoot” anything. I proceeded to ask for a supervisor.

Once I had the supervisor on the line I proceeded to explain to her that this was the second replacement that both my wife and I had received in a week and that these phones where worse then our original. I told here that not only had they not fixed the original problem that I was having (not being able to hear people on the phone) that they were actually adding issues (fading in and out and static).

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Well the weather was finally good enough for me to go out and fly this morning before work. This is the first flight that I have had since I applied my battery box fix for the Super Cub.

The fix works awesome!

Not only was it cheap, it was simple. I was able to fly until my battery ran out and even crashed it into my fence while trying to land and broke my propeller. With all of that the straps around the fuselage help up. The only thing that I noticed was that the wire that I used is now digging into the Styrofoam a little now. What I am going to do to make sure that it does not cut all the way into the Styrofoam is find a couple of pieces of plastic to put on the corners.

I will post pics when I put the plastic strips on.

Technorati: HobbyZone Super Cub, RC Airplane, Flying, Hobbies

I am pissed off.

I got an LG C2000 cell phone when I signed up with Cingular last June and have to say that the phone is a piece of crap.

The biggest reason why it sucks is that you can barely hear the person on the other end of the phone. The other thing is the camera on it is practically useless due to the fact that it cannot take a decent picture and the fact that the phone only has enough memory to hold about 10 pictures max.

Why don’t I get another one?

I did and it sucks just as much as the first one. You still cannot hear any better on it then the one that I turned in under warranty. Also, the camera still takes awful pictures.

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