Hasta La Gadget!

What if your media streamer was as small as your media card reader? What if your list of “what ifs” shrunk by one this evening? And what if, by chance, said media streamer shipped with a remote nearly double the size of the product itself? We’ll confess, it’d be a weird, weird situation, but it’s one that you can actually experience for yourself if you’re cool with handing over £49.99 ($82). The bantam PicoHD5.1 packs a lot of oomph into a pocket-sized device; on one side, there’s room for a USB hard drive, thumb drive or SD card. On the reverse, you’ll find HDMI / component outputs capable of piping whatever media you just plugged in onto your television or monitor. There’s even support for 5.1 channel surround sound, and we’re told that it’s encased in aluminum — you know, for those inevitable bumps and bruises. Is the “smallest HD multichannel media player” truly as spectacular as it sounds? Hard to say from afar, but hey, that’s what 60 day money-back guarantees are for… right?

Minuscule PicoHD5.1 media player looks like a card reader, acts like a media streamer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Are you familiar with the HBO Go online streaming service that lets subscribers catch up on HBO’s award-winning and ass-kicking TV content? Well, ‘appy news for you, dear reader, for it’s about to hit smartphones and tablets early next month. Android and iOS HBO Go apps have been teased by a new video on HBO’s YouTube channel, with promises of “instant and unlimited access” to “every episode of every season” of your favorite shows, garnished with a selection of hit movies. The apps and streaming will be free to HBO subscribers, who’ll be able to get their Sopranos nostalgia on over 3G as well as WiFi. May 2nd is the date on which the teaser video ends, though it doesn’t explicitly say that the service will be enlivened then. We’ll just have to wait and see.

[Thanks, Joe]

Continue reading HBO Go app set to stream its way to iPhones, iPads and Android devices

HBO Go app set to stream its way to iPhones, iPads and Android devices originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 05:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is it really the end of March? That’s debatable, but if you’ve been wondering where Sonos’ Controller for Android app is, well… wonder no more. Rather than cutting it loose within the next week (as promised earlier in the year), the outfit’s vice president of quality has informed the world that it won’t be available until next month. The exact quote?

“We know you’re anxiously awaiting the Sonos Controller for Android. Unfortunately, testing the app is taking a bit longer than we anticipated. The latest addition to our free controller line-up won’t arrive until April, but when it does, it is going to rock.”

But will it rock as much as the image above? Time will tell, friends.

Sonos Controller for Android delayed until April, heartbreak available now originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you can’t fix it, buy someone who can. That must be Google’s rationale behind this latest acquisition, as the proprietor of YouTube has just bought Green Parrot Pictures, a company concerned solely with enhancing and improving the quality of video content. Through the use of some fancy motion prediction algorithms, the Irish startup has been able to build a name for itself over the past few years, and now it’s been snapped up by the biggest fish in the online video ocean. The removal of flicker, noise and blotches from poorly executed recordings sounds nice, but we’re most excited by Green Parrot’s video stabilization feature. With all the cameraphone video being uploaded nowadays, there’s plenty of camera shake populating YouTube’s archives, and the addition of such a potent post-production technique seems like a veritable boon to us. Check out video demos of the stabilization algorithm and Green Parrot’s other technologies below.

Continue reading Google buys Green Parrot Pictures, looking to make YouTube vids easier on the eye

Google buys Green Parrot Pictures, looking to make YouTube vids easier on the eye originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Mar 2011 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Those who are familiar with Android Honeycomb might have already come across its music player’s cloud syncing feature, though previous attempts to port said app to phones hadn’t been successful. Whatever it was that kept crashing the app back then, it seems to have fixed itself — after xda-developers member WhiteWidows slapped the leaked app onto his rooted EVO 4G, the phone started to automagically sync his tunes to his Google account. The modder then swapped in an empty SD card, but he was still able to stream music straight from the cloud after checking the “Stream music” option in the app. Pretty neat, eh? That said, we do wonder if Google will be able to handle the exabytes worth of high-quality Justin Bieber and Spice Girl tracks.

Android Honeycomb’s music app extracted, brings cloud sync and streaming to phones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Mar 2011 22:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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