Home Entertainment

The holiday shopping season is upon us once again and that means it’s time for our Gadget Gift Guide, the only resource you’ll need to find the perfect presents for your tech-loving friends and family. Or, just shop for yourself (everyone does).

This is the time of year when family members clamor for pictures and videos plus better ways to display and cherish them. Indulge their whims or enable a budding shutterbug or filmmaker with a gadget from our lists:

Cameras — Know someone looking to up their photography game? The Pentax K-x is on the pricey side but is one of the least expensive DSLRs to shoot 720p video and includes HDR processing for more detailed pictures.

Read on for more cameras, camcorders and accessories

If streaming media is in your blood, Roku has announced two new products that may grab your interest: The Roku SD and Roku HD-XR. Both players deliver content from Amazon, MLB.TV, and Netflix, but contain subtle differentiators.

The Roku SD player ($79.99) connects to your TV using composite cables for enjoying DVD-quality visuals. The box also includes 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and an Ethernet port.

The Roku HD-XR ($129) has a dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi radio that enables it to stream high-definition content, as well as HDMI, component, composite, and S-Video connections. It also includes a USB port (Roku hasn’t stated the port’s exact purpose, but we suspect that it will eventually allow you to plug in an external drive so you can playback your own media).

The original Roku player ($99.99) still lives on, and it’s virtually identical to the Roku HD-XR except that it has 802.11g Wi-Fi, and lacks the USB port. Roku also announced that it will launch the Roku Channel Store this fall, which will allow customers to add new content channels.

With so many options available for receiving streaming video content, do you think it’s time to cut the cord?

This was truly an exciting week in San Francisco, as Intel and its partners showed a number of innovative new technologies at IDF 2009.  We expected to here a lot about processors and we did, but we were just amazed at how many products we saw that have the potential to really change the way we work and play. Here are the top trends we saw this week:

• Intel is entering the smart phone space. Google and Apple beware!  Intel showed a smart phone running version 2.1 of its Moblin OS at Tuesday’s keynote address. The clean touch UI, with tabs for keeping track of contacts, social networking updates, and media really impressed us. While Intel has yet to announce any partnerships with device manufacturers or carriers, it intends to be a player.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today at IDF 2009, Intel Digital Home Group GM Eric Kim demonstrated some new technologies that promise to revolutionize the home viewing experience sometime in the not-too-distant future.  For the past few years, the biggest development in TV has probably been the continued development of placeshifting technologies that let you view programming from a variety of devices and location. But today, Intel spent a lot of time showing interactive tools which its new media processors — including the just announced Atom CE4100 processor for embedded devices — will make possible in the living room.

Cool New UIs

At the start of the keynote, Kim performed a fun little skit in which he sat on a couch on stage and pretended to watch TV with a friend who was sitting on another couch in front of him, facing the TV. The two of them used a really attractive spinning program guide application to choose something to watch. Later on, we learned that though this programming guide is just a prototype, it is based on Macromedia Flash technology. The neat thing about the guide is that every square on it is moving, meaning that it is previewing thousands of channels at once.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before the official announcement last week about HP’s new DreamScreen I had a chance to play around with the device for a little while. I was initially impressed — the screen has a decent interface for a non-touch device, plays music and video as well as picture slideshows, includes apps for SnapFish, Pandora and Facebook, and has the ability to acquire more, should developers approach HP. But never once did I feel that the DreamScreen was akin to any kind of tablet or tablet-like device. Thus I was surprised to see it described as such in other announcements across the web.

Perhaps the press releases and marketing materials led people to believe that the device did much more, or perhaps imaginations just ran wild, as Michael Arrington points out on TechCrunch today. Either way, the expectation that the DreamScreen is something more than a fairly advanced digital picture frame will probably make for a lot of disappointed people. Arrington is amongst them, calling the DreamScreen a “piece of crap.”

If you’re expecting a tablet and get the DreamScreen, then yes, I can understand that view. If you’re expecting a digital frame with benefits, then the device isn’t too bad. It’s not the best wireless frame I’ve ever seen by far. It also isn’t the worst.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once digital picture frames reach a certain level of complexity do they belong in a completely different category? HP thinks so. That’s why they’re eschewing the digital frame moniker for their new DreamScreens and labeling them “connected screens” instead. The distinction is fair as the DreamScreen does a lot more than a basic digital frame.

Obviously it will display images dragged from your PC or loaded onto a memory card, plus it will also play videos. Connect the DreamScreen to the Internet via Ethernet or Wi-Fi and you can access additional content via the included apps: Pandora, SnapFish, and Facebook.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is cable TV about to go the way of UHF? Data culled by the Pew Research Center estimates that 22 percent of American adults have cut back or canceled cable within the past year, and within that group, 32 percent have connected their computers to their TVs to view Web video. Not surprisingly, cable TV providers such as Cablevision and Comcast have begun to take notice, and are rolling out their own online video services in response.

“I no longer pick between the TV screen or my laptop screen—my computer serves double duty,” said Twanna Hines, a 34-year-old, New York City-based relationship writer and blogger, who traded in cable television for online video this past spring. “I don’t even own a television anymore.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Adobe has already been aggressive in making Flash the standard for viewing videos: it claims that Flash is installed on 98 percent of computers and 40 percent of all phones, and that 80 percent of Web videos, including those from YouTube and Hulu, require it.

Now, the company is pushing to export Flash to TV sets and set-top boxes as well, making it easier to view Web videos on a big screen. Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, said in a statement that he expects such TVs to begin shipping later this year. So far, Adobe’ s partners in this endeavor include Intel, Comcast, Netflix, and Broadcom, which makes components for set-top boxes.

Read the rest of this entry »

After Google’s aquisition of YouTube a few years ago, the site’s video repository was stripped of all user-upload content viewed as infringing on copyrights, leaving those that sought movies and television programming to seek greener pastures–pastures such as Hulu. But YouTube has made moves to legally re-up on Hollywood content by partnering with Sony Pictures and other entertainment bigwigs to bring a wide array of content back to its catalog.

Late Thursday, Youtube.com/shows went live and with it came content from BBC Worldwide, CBS, Discovery Networks, Lionsgate, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, National Geographic, PBS, Sony’s Crackle, Starz, and more.  Youtube.com/movies features flicks from Lionsgate, MGM, Starz, and others.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Aiken, director of the Author’s Guild, seems to think that the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech function is a fancy new technology that turns all books into audio books.  Mr. Aiken, I submit, doesn’t know much about technology.

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

Mr. Aiken, I assume, hasn’t used a Mac since 1984 when Apple first integrated text-to-speech into its OS.  Nor has he apparently used a PC since Windows 95 came out.  He’s also probably never met any vision-impaired people who regularly use screen readers when browsing the web.

The Kindle 2 isn’t introducing some new, really super awesome text-to-speech function that brings the dulcet tones of Morgan Freeman to every book you buy.  It’s really the equivalent of having someone read you the book — someone who has a speech synthesizer pressed to their neck.

Is the Author’s Guild is going to start coming after anyone who reads bedtime stories to kids, now?

Source: WSJ
Hat Tip: Crunch Gear