Hasta La Gadget!

This is soon enough to market that it’s hard to blame the iPod nano specifically for its appearance, but either way it seems that the Philips Cam is the newest member to the oh-so-small club of MP3 / camera combos. The new player is joined in its life of crime by the new Muse and Ariaz, which at last offer a higher-end aspect to Philips‘ long-lackluster PMP lineup. The Cam does up a 1.8-inch screen, 8GB of storage and a 2 megapixel camera for $100, but the Muse has a full 3.2-inches of touchscreen, 16GB of flash, SD expansion and HDMI out for a mere $50 more. The Ariaz finds a simpler calling, with a 2.4-inch LCD, HDMI, 8GB and an $80 tag. We’ll have to play with these to see if they’re worth taking home from Walmart, but we’re glad to see Philips is trying to stay in the game — we can’t all be lucky enough to be Zune HD owners.

Philips Cam, Muse and Ariaz mark a renaissance for the boring PMP originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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My love for Blu-ray players grows whenever companies add another feature that has nothing to do with Blu-ray. Now any worthwhile player is a home-entertainment hub, replacing cable box and Apple TV alike. How soon till they handle everything?

We looked at the four newly announced flagship players from the four biggest Blu-ray companies, LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony. Any self-respecting Blu-ray player today has Pandora and Picasa, and of course Netflix subscription streaming video. They also have some form of pay-per-view movie download service, from Vudu, Amazon or Roxio’s CinemaNow and Blockbuster apps.

This year, though, the companies turned up the juice. LG added a built-in hard drive; Sony surprisingly built a remote-control iPhone app. And now all top Blu-ray players will go 3D. Integrated Wi-Fi was a stand-out feature last year; this year it’s par.

These won’t be out till the summer, and there’s no pricing announced yet, but already we’re excited. See, putting everything but the the kitchen sink into a firmware upgradeable $200-to-$300 box is way smarter than jamming it all inside a $1500 TV, where picture quality should be the chief concern.

What Do Blu-ray Players Still Need? Video File Support

If you want to know who will soon be putting HD media players out of business, look no further than these connected Blu-ray players. Samsung and LG won’t let smaller companies steal their spot on the TV stand; my guess is that they will have amazing file compatibility at launch or slightly after. I mean, LG put in a hard drive, for God’s sake. If that isn’t for dumping crazy video files, I don’t know what is.

The hard drive sounds nice, but it’s not even necessary. With Wi-Fi connectivity and DLNA compatibility, these players should technically be able to play all your home videos, wherever they are. But they absolutely need 1080p DivX, H.264 and AVC (TS) compatibility—and the ability to read DVD disc images—in order to be considered viable HD video players.

I don’t list reported file compatibilities here because I have learned that spec sheets can easily lie when it comes to supported video, especially when the combination of codec, wrapper, resolution and file size all affect readability. Until the players are shipping, their true file support is a mystery. Still, I have hope for these.

The $100 Roku is already on the ropes thanks to current Blu-ray players, since they give you what Roku does plus disc playback. The $120 Roku HD-XR hasn’t yet taken advantage of its USB jack, and the company didn’t announce anything at CES. If they wait too long before providing wide HD video file compatibility, that product, too, will be hurting.

If the makers of Blu-ray players get with the program, and address the need for true universal home-video playback, they will easily shove aside Asus O!Play and everything else too.

OK, not everything else. Game consoles, already bestsellers, have been actively converting non-gamers by adding streaming video services, and developing natural interfaces like the Wii’s popular motion controls and the more ambitious forthcoming Xbox 360 Natal project.

Hopefully this will be the year they see the light on video support, too. The PS3 could have been the ultimate set-top box, but Sony’s inability to see the commercial value of openness killed the PS3’s non-gamer appeal. The Xbox is a lot closer to the ideal, but it doesn’t yet support all files, and betting on HD DVD—and then not jumping to Blu despite Ballmer’s frequent (and justifiable) promises—means no HD disc support, also a mistake.

Look, some of these Blu-ray players won’t go all the way with file support, either. Speaking of Sony, can you imagine the king of patent royalties and DRM embrace file formats it doesn’t get cash payoffs from, or could possibly be used in the service of piracy? Still, at least one great Blu-ray player will rise here. Am I dreaming? A year ago I would have thought so, but from what we all now regularly get from our cheap HD media players, my dreams are likely to come true—and soon, too.

We’ve known since August that Toshiba was working to rule the roost when it came to voluminous and speedy SDXC storage, and at CES it took the time to beat its chest again, indicating that its new 64GB SDXC cards have started shipping in samples, putting them on a crash-course with card slots sometime this spring. The 64GB cards offer 60MB/s reads and 35MB/s writes, which should be enough to keep up with the Jonses, and the company’s upcoming 32 and 16GB SDHC should be dropping about the same time. Toshiba is claiming this is the world’s first 64GB model, but we’re only interested in retail releases, and Panasonic and its February-bound offering might have something to say about who gets there first. The race is on.

Toshiba demonstrates 64GB SDXC, pledges spring release originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For those of you hoping that Viliv’s aesthetic excellence will somehow make magic out of the 4.8-inch flip MID form factor, you might want to look away right about now. We too were hoping that Viliv could somehow sprinkle fairy dust on the errors of something like the UMID mBook BZ, but sadly the N5 is no such MID. It’s good looking, to be sure, and might even be better constructed than UMID’s entry, but it has the same squint-inducing 1024 x 600 display and aggravating optical mouse pad holding it back. In reality, both of these little computers are more akin to “observing” what it’s like to have a full computer running on an impossible form factor, instead of anything appropriate for actually using that computer.

Perhaps the CE-based Viliv HD5 PMP will find a truer calling. We saw the slate unit pumping out some HD video at a steady clip, and its hardware is certainly refined — if only just a little chubby. Unfortunately, none of the buttons were working, so we couldn’t hop out of the video and see what the rest of the player has to offer. At least it’s not Windows XP under there, daring us to use it. Videos of both devices are after the break.

Continue reading Viliv N5 MID hands-on, HD5 PMP makes a cameo

Viliv N5 MID hands-on, HD5 PMP makes a cameo originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s our third year visiting with Fulton Innovation and the eCoupled wireless power booth at CES, and once again there’s significant progress to be seen — this time in the form of actual shipping products like the Case-mate Hug and the Dell Latitude Z. Fulton’s really pushing the industry standard angle with eCoupled — it’s a founding member of the Wireless Power Consortium, which is just a few months away from finalizing a standard based on eCoupled called Qi. Qi’s going to be backed by some pretty big names: Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Energizer, Duracell, Samsung, and Philips are all members of the WPC, along with several others, and the goal is for all this stuff to seamlessly play together. Fulton had some pretty hot demos to show off of the standard in action, including a Toyota Avalon interior with functional spots for two phones, a GPS, a Bluetooth headset, and a netbook, a slick first-class airline seat with a charging table, and a hotel room with several power points — including a slick motorized dock built into the desk for the Dell. Our favorite demo, however, was a wall sconce: an eCoupled point in the wall was used to power a light fixture, which was then swapped for a digital photo frame. Nifty stuff, indeed.

Still, the big challenge for Fulton and the WPC is going to be actually shipping a bunch of these products this year — standards are nice, but without gear in hand they’re meaningless, and the rival PowerMat crew has been making a pretty big push of its own. We’ll see what happens in the next few months — and how much has changed at CES 2011. Check a couple videos after the break!

Continue reading Wireless power takes another baby step at CES 2010 with Qi standard

Wireless power takes another baby step at CES 2010 with Qi standard originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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