Category: gadgets and technology

Just caught this via PVRblog and am very disappointed though not surprised…

Ernest over at Corante has a great story on a new Maxtor DVR product: “Crippled External Hard Drive for DVRs.” Turns out that Maxtor is producing a new external USB/firewire backup drive for DVR set-top boxes, but it won’t be sold to customers but instead only to cable and satellite companies. Since you won’t actually own the device, you won’t have any rights to get at the data inside the drives, apart from your set-top box.

[PVRblog]

Just added to my aggregator…

“Techno File” is a new big-media-blog authored by TIME Magazine writer Eric Roston, described as “a daily commentary on the technology that will carry us through tomorrow – and the stuff that keeps us stuck in yesterday.” [Boing Boing]

Portable video is coming it seems whether people feel there is a market or not… This time in the form of a hack to the Gameboy enabling video to play through for kids.

INEXPENSIVE ways to play video on hand-held devices have been promised for at least a couple of years, and there have been tantalizing glimpses of bright-screened, palm-size prototypes at electronics shows. [New York Times: Technology]

Essentially, Majesco has put a typical Game Boy game cartridge to a new use. With its own compression technology, it squeezed about 45 minutes of full-screen, full-sound video into the cartridge’s 256-megabyte solid-state memory.

When the cartridge, called Game Boy Advance Video, is inserted into the console, the 1.6-inch-by-2.4-inch screen becomes a video playback window. Sound is piped through the player’s tiny speaker or can be heard through headphones. Next month Majesco will also release the first headphones made exclusively for Game Boy Advance SP, which cannot accommodate commonly used headphones without an adapter.

The headphones are expected to cost about $10 and the video cartridges about $20, said Liz Buckley, senior product manager for Majesco, which is based in Edison, N.J. She said the first 11 titles would be cartoons or computer-generated animation for children ages 6 to 12.

“It’s the most likely age group to watch things over and over,” Ms. Buckley said, describing all the programs, which include Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “The Fairly Odd Parents” and 4Kids Entertainment’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” as “episodic.”

Yes not exactly news or a new argument, but important nonetheless. We’ve had this BS since the VCR… Unfortunately I don’t think the consumer will win here unless some serious lobbying gets into play.

Hollywood wants to control the connections used in new high-definition TV sets. If it wins, home video recording may never be the same again, critics say. [CNET News.com]

Hollywood studios and TV companies have said they can’t afford to release their best material on new high-definition digital networks if it is likely to be copied and redistributed online or elsewhere. As a result, they have successfully pressed Congress and the FCC to add copy-protection guarantees to several ongoing regulatory proceedings aimed at speeding digital TV to market.

If you’ve been waiting…. it’s almost time.

Verizon’s own website now shows a small teaser that states the Treo 600 smartphone is “coming soon.” [PalmInfocenter]

p>Jim Louderback gets some more detail (aka denial) on Intel reverse-engineering the AMD 64 bit tech…

I got an interesting email today from a guy who worked on the Intel 64-bit project, taking exception to our “clean room” reverse engineering story. [What’s New Now]

We already knew that Sony’s PlayStation Portable is supposed to have built-in WiFi for wireless gaming, but now they’ve revealed that the PlayStation 3 is going to come with WiFi as well, and that you’ll be able to use the PSP to access movies and music stored on the PS3’s hard drive. [Engadget]

Quite the new frontier…

After
investigating the instruction sets used by 64-bit chips from AMD and
Intel, an industry analyst has concluded that Intel reverse-engineered
the AMD64 instruction set to create its own 64-bit microprocessor
architecture. [Extremetech]

Archos’ recently-announced AV500 will combine a Personal Video Player and a handheld computer. [Brighthand]

When will Apple just go for it. Why is Archos the pushing the boundaries of what you can carry in a single multimedia powerhouse device. Perhaps Cupertino is just waiting and watching to make it that much easier (and therefore better) to use… ala iPod.

Multimedia

The AV500 will include a 704-by-480-pixel screen capable of displaying DivX and MPEG4 video at 30 FPS. Of course, it will be able to record in these formats as well. It will also support Microsoft DRM for WMA and WMV9 video. It will include a video-out port so it can be hooked to a TV.

It won’t just be a video player. Users will also be able to play and record MP3s.

All these multimedia files will take up a lot of room, so there will be one version of the AV500 with a built-in 20 GB hard drive, and a second with a 40 GB one.

To make it easy to transfer pictures from a digital camera, this device can act as a USB 2.0 host.

PDA

The Qtopia environment is an icon-based graphical user interface for handhelds. It is used by a good number of Linux models, including Sharp’s Zaurus line. It is bundled with a suite of PIM software that can be synchronized with Microsoft Outlook.

Qtopia usually comes with a Microsoft Office-compatible word processor and spreadsheet, though there has been no word yet if the AV500 will include these. It will definitely come with email software and a web browser.

It is not clear at this point what type of memory card slot this model will have, but PC Card and CompactFlash are strong possibilities, as Archos has said users will be able to add Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, GSM/GPRS to this device via removable cards.

Just in from AudioRevolution…

…the TiVo interface will likely be on store shelves at dealers such as The Good Guys by April 12, 2004. The price will be around $1,000. Rumor has it that there will only be 4,000 to 5,000 units for shipment to launch the component to consumers. Many of the most hardcore HDTV enthusiasts have preordered their units months in advance. The difficulty of use of nearly all current HDTV receivers paired with the lack of being able to easily record the shows you want to see have made HDTV early adopters yearn for the day when they can record what they want from DirecTV in HD.

AV industry executives who are subscribers to the competing Dish Network tell AudioRevolution.com that Dish has begun slowly shipping their 921 DVR for HDTV to consumers after showing it at tradeshows for more than a year before customers could actually order one. Supposedly the highest priority on their shipment list is people who had specific older HDTV receivers that could output non-encrypted (DVI or HDMI) material to a D-VHS machine. Those units were disabled by Dish, says this source, over one month ago leaving ambitious HDTV early adopter no good way to record HDTV for a few months.

Recording HDTV on Digital Cable
Historically, cable providers have been sticklers about controlling which hardware you use to view their television programming. The cable industry is seemingly softening its stance on hardware and have adopted a %u201Cplug and play%u201D concept discussed at the recent ATSC Convergence in Washington DC last week. The idea is for TV manufacturers to make a somewhat open architecture %u201Cslot%u201D on their future sets. Customers will plug in an input card that will come from the cable company and will allow access to HDTV and NTSC programming and right in the set without a tuner. Recording NTSC and HDTV video will still likely be done outside of the set via hard disc recorders. Sony showed two such HDTV recorders at their Los Angeles line launch event. One unit will have 125 hours of standard NTSC recording with 12.5 hours of HDTV storage space. A more expensive unit will have 250 hours of NTSC and 25 hours of HDTV. Prices are expected to be in the $699 to $899 range and should be shipping in June 2004. [HDTV Hard Disc Recorder Update]

Time Warner here in NYC is still claiming we’ll see the HDTV capable DVR (probably the Scientific Atlanta 8000HD) early May. No idea when cable TiVO customers will get an HD box… probably at the end of the year if they are lucky.

While this seems like a very cool phone, The Register finds a few flaws that may get in the way of fully considering this as your next mobile. I actually saw this not too long ago and was surprised at the size… compared to my SE T610, it’s quite a bit wider and thicker – not the end of the world of course as it is packed with additional features after-all.

This is an interesting and low cost device for those who need to do backups of up to 3 SIM Cards. I don’t think I would ever use one as I sync through iSync.

My SIM card goes pretty unused (things are stored on the phone itself) other than network identification for T–Mobile. What would be cool would be a way to write the data out to another SIM card so you would not have to do a SIM swap if you used multiple phones and wanted to maintain the same data and same number.

I’ve only found one service – in the UK of course that lets you have more than one SIM with the same number.

If you don’t have a way of syncing the data on your phone with a PC or PDA, this could be a good option for you. [The Gadgets Weblog]