Dec 16

Pocket Projector Packs Wi-Fi for Computer-Free YouTube

Posted in: Displays, LED, Today's Chili, wi-fi

Pocket projectors are fast heading towards impulse-buy status, and Chinavision’s Mini Projector with Wi-Fi and Wireless Remote $200 price-tag is as impulse as it gets right now. And as you may have guessed, it has some fancy extras.

The projector itself uses a 3-watt LED lamp, unlike the increasingly common focus-free laser models, which puts out 10-lumens of light. That isn’t bad, but you won’t be watching anything bigger than a sheet of legal paper unless you turn out the lights. Resolution is a non-HD 640 x 480 pixels. It also has a small speaker (and an audio-out jack), plus USB and SD slots for playing back media directly, an IR remote and it hooks up to a video-source via RCA cable.

Not bad, but the pizazz comes from the Wi-Fi, which lets you hook it directly to the internet and watch YouTube videos, Flickr slideshows and so on. It can do this because inside the projector is a tiny Linux computer, which is controlled by the little wireless keyboard.

I have no hopes for the quality of this kit, but you certainly get a lot for your money: There’s even a mini-tripod included in the bundle. Available now.

Mini Projector with Wi-Fi and Wireless Remote [Chinavision via Oh Gizmo!]

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Dec 03

Thanks Google, For the Free, Unusable Wi-Fi on Planes This Holiday [Rant]

Posted in: free, Google, Today's Chili, top, wi-fi

Did you know Virgin, Delta and AirTran has free Wi-Fi on their planes this holiday season? If you didn’t, the flight attendants will tell you when you board—which is bad for those who actually need to use the Wi-Fi. More »

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Nov 24

LG BD690 is the first Blu-ray player certified for Wi-Fi Direct, keeps Bluetooth paranoid

Posted in: blu-ray, LG, media streamer, MediaStreamer, netflix, Today's Chili, wi-fi, wifi, Wireless

The possibilities teased in 2009 by Wi-Fi Direct have probably kept Bluetooth up at night, and we’re sure the commencement of device certification last month hasn’t helped, either. Now the LG BD960 has emerged as the first Blu-ray player on the Wi-Fi Direct certification list, hinting direct P2P communication in our home theaters among WiFi devices (without the need for a routing middleman) could soon go from fiction to fact. Unfortunately, mum’s still the word on shipping and pricing. The mere chance however that the player could stream content to any other WiFi-equipped device — Direct certified or not — is a big enough deal to give our dedicated media streamers Defarge-like glances already. Particularly, if the BD960 comes packed with features similar its suspected predecessor the LG-BD390, which can stream both Netflix, Vudu, and DLNA network content, as well as play DivX HD 1080p content. Until more details surface though, we’ll simply have to keep reminding our poor Galaxy S that it isn’t destined to be alone in this cold, cruel world forever.

LG BD690 is the first Blu-ray player certified for Wi-Fi Direct, keeps Bluetooth paranoid originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Nov 2010 02:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nov 08

A Gift from Google: Free In-flight Wi-Fi this Holiday Season

Posted in: Google, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili, wi-fi
chrome_logo.jpg

It’s almost time for the holidays, and that means we’ll be packing our bags and heading home for some good food and some cheer. But that also means, many of us will be taking to the skies to get there. Well, today Google announced that is providing a gift to help you keep in touch with your friends and family while flying. 

Google Chrome has teamed up with Delta, Virgin America, and AirTran Airways to offer free in-flight Wi-Fi for the holidays. This service will be available from November 20, 2010 through January 2, 2011on all domestic flights. Google offered a similar free Wi-Fi program last year, but has now extended it to more than just the Virgin America airline and also will not be offering free Wi-Fi in the airports, only in-flight.  
While providing a helpful holiday service, Google is promoting Google Chrome, it’s Web browser, by using it as the sponsor and encouraging passengers to download the browser before flying. So if your flying on one of these airlines this holiday season, you’ll still be connected at 30,000 feet. Thank you, Google Santa.
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Nov 08

How To Get Free In-flight Wi-Fi From Google [Free]

Posted in: free, Google, Today's Chili, top, Travel, wi-fi

Just like last year, Google is paying the Wi-Fi for people flying to meet their relatives—or run away from them—during the holidays. You just need to fly the right airline. More »

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Nov 05

Google Instant Speeds Mobile Search — If You’ve Got the Bandwidth

Posted in: Android, Google, ios, Phones, search, Today's Chili, wi-fi

Google Instant on a PC browser has always been a clever idea in search of a use case. With the new mobile beta for Android and iOS, the search giant has found its first.

“Wouldn’t it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just a moment to find the information you need?” writes Google engineer Steve Kanefsky.

Indeed. With fast hands and a full QWERTY keyboard, the time between typing “Google Instant” and “Google Ins” is minimal. On a non-PC keyboard like a phone, e-reader or remote control, it’s considerable.

To activate the beta, you need to be running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or iOS. Then go to google.com in your mobile browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box.

The only trouble with Google Instant on mobile devices is the net connection. Google Instant works by making server calls with each stroke. To even make it work in a mobile browser, google had to create a new AJAX and HTML5 implementation to dynamically update the page with new results.

On a good Wi-Fi network, that’s no big deal. On 3G, it’s not a major problem. On (gasp) EDGE, it can actually make search much, much slower.

“With Google Instant on mobile, we’re pushing the limits of mobile browsers and wireless networks,” Kanefsky writes. “Since the quality of any wireless connection can fluctuate, we’ve made it easy to enable or disable Google Instant without ever leaving the page. Just tap the ‘Turn on’ or ‘Turn off’ link.”

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Nov 03

Tizi Brings Live TV to iPad

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, apps, ipad, iPhone, Today's Chili, TV, wi-fi

Switch on the pocket-sized Tizi, pull out the antenna and fire up the companion app on your iPad or iPhone. Congratulations. You are now watching live TV.

Elgato’s EyeTV already lets you watch TV on your iDevice, but you need a computer to be switched on, near an antenna and running server software to do it. The Tizi is a tiny, standalone box that does all this for you. It is battery powered, for use both at home and on the move, and gives 3.5-hours of use on one charge. You can also hook it to any USB power-source to charge and power it.

How does it work? The Tizi pulls in local DVB-T/DT signals, decodes them using its ARM 9 processor and then sends them to your iPhone or iPad via Wi-Fi (802.11b/g). Yes, you’ll have to tune your iPad to this Wi-Fi network, but you can still stay connected to the internet via 3G if you have it.

A channel-guide helps you find what to watch, and during ads you can switch away to other apps but keep the audio running in the background so you know when to tune back in.

This looks like a great product. I don’t watch much TV, but I could hang this in the living room, which has a clear view of the sky, and beam signals to anywhere I like in the apartment. Neat.

The Tizi is available now for $150, and the companion app is in the App Store for free.

Tizi product page [Tizi. Thanks, anonymous Equinux mailing-list people!]

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Oct 28

Wired Explains: Wireless Tech to Connect Your TV and PC

Posted in: intel, Media Players, Today's Chili, wi-fi

Netflix and Hulu make great alternatives to cable TV. The downside: You’ve got to tether a computer to your TV with some kind of cable.

Fortunately, if you’re getting tired of the cord snaking from your laptop to your entertainment center, there’s an alphabet soup of technologies angling to help you out.

Not so fortunately, these technologies are varied and largely incompatible.

Consumers today can choose from WHDI, wireless HD, WiDi, wireless USB and Wi-Fi Direct. Confused? Check out our guide to these emerging wireless streaming-media technologies.

WHDI

Wireless Home Digital Interface, or WHDI, was finalized in 2009 to give consumers a way to link the PC to the TV. Think of it as the wireless equivalent of HDMI. The technology has a latency of less than 1 millisecond, which means it’s good enough not just for watching movies but should also work well to stream games from your browser to the TV.

WHDI can stream 1080p video at up to 3 Gbps (gigabits per second). All you need is a wireless HDI dongle that can plug into your laptop and a little receiver that goes behind the TV. That set will cost about $150 and will be available early next year.

Meanwhile, TV makers such as Sharp and LG are rolling out TVs with built-in support for WHDI standard.

Slowly, the WHDI consortium hopes to convince PC makers integrate WHDI chips into laptops, similar to the way Wi-Fi chips are built in today.

WirelessHD

While other wireless technologies focus on streaming content from the PC to the TV, WirelessHD targets the most common electronic eyesore in homes: the black HDMI cables that snake out from behind the TV towards the set-top box, PC or the DVD player.

If built into TV sets, WirelessHD can offer fast data transfers of up to 10 GBps to 28 Gbps. That makes it the fastest of the lot for point-to-point data transfer.

So far, TV makers such as Panasonic, LG and Vizio have said they will offer wireless-HD–enabled sets by the end of the year.

Wireless USB

When the familiar USB port decides to go wireless, it means steaming-media companies can piggyback on to a powerful, widely understood technology.

Wireless USB is based on the Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radio platform. It can send data at speeds of 480 Mbps at distances of up to 10 feet and 110 Mpbs at up to 32 feet. Companies such as Logitech already offer UWB-based kits that can be used to connect your PC to the TV.

A startup called Veebeam launched a box that uses wireless USB to stream internet video from your laptop to the TV.

Wireless USB is more powerful for point-to-point connectivity than traditional Wi-Fi, because it offers more bandwidth and less interference, says Veebeam. It estimates 420 Mbps bandwidth for its wireless USB implementation.

WiGig

Picture yourself downloading a 25-GB Blu-ray disc in less than a minute. That’s what WiGig can do for you, says the Wireless Gigabit Alliance. The Alliance is a consortium of electronics companies that has established a specification for a wireless technology. WiGig could offer users data-transfer speeds ranging from 1 Gbps to 6 Gbps — or at least 10 times faster than today’s Wi-Fi.

The alliance had hoped to make WiGig commonplace by the end of the year, but it has been slow going for the standard, which has not been implemented in any consumer products.


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Oct 25

Wi-Fi Will Help You Cut the Cord — No Router Required

Posted in: Today's Chili, wi-fi, Wireless

Add Wi-Fi to the list of technologies that the electronics industry wants to use to help eliminate cable clutter.

A new standard called Wi-Fi Direct made an important step towards becoming product reality Monday when the Wi-Fi Alliance announced it would begin certifying products that comply with the standard.

The Wi-Fi Alliance is the industry consortium that oversees the family of wireless technology standards known as Wi-Fi.

With Wi-Fi Direct, devices will be able to connect to one another easily for permanent or temporary connections, without requiring them to join the network of a nearby wireless router.

Instead, you’ll just push a button or tap the “OK” button in an on-screen dialog box, and your devices will link up to each other.

Think of it as the wireless alternative to a USB cable. Wi-Fi Direct joins a host of other wireless technologies, such as WiDi, Wireless USB and W-HDI, all aimed at replacing desktop and entertainment-center cables with skeins of wireless data wending their ethereal way through your house.

Wi-Fi Direct connections could be used to show images from your camera on a friend’s HDTV, display PowerPoint slides from your smartphone on a client’s video projector, send web pages from your tablet to a printer, or even stream HD video from your laptop to your TV. A cutesy animation from the Wi-Fi Alliance (above) shows how this could work.

Devices could support any number of connections, limited primarily by the computing power of the devices themselves and their programming.

“Since you’re not going through a router, there’s no single point of constraint,” says Edgar Figueroa, CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance.

The technology will support bandwidth and ranges comparable to what regular Wi-Fi offers: Figueroa claims about 200 meters of maximum range and about 250-300 megabits/second of real throughput. Of course, in the real world, where walls and electronic interference abound, you’ll probably see somewhat less than that.

It should be enough to support a single HD video stream, however, which would be plenty for most home users. And if someone is simultaneously downloading another HD video stream via your Wi-Fi router, the two streams wouldn’t interfere with each other.

The certification program means that manufacturers can begin building compatible products, then get them tested by the Wi-Fi Alliance so they can slap a “Wi-Fi Direct” logo on their packaging. That process starts with the makers of chipsets and plug-in cards, such as Broadcom, which announced a Wi-Fi Direct-certified card Monday.

Within the “near future,” says Figueroa, such capabilities will trickle down to consumer products that incorporate the chipsets and cards now hitting the market. In practice, it could be months before consumer products are on sale, and it may be a year or more before it’s widespread.

But then the tricky part begins, because not all Wi-Fi Direct devices will be able to connect with one another. Devices will only be able to connect with devices that have compatible Wi-Fi Direct support. For instance, a smartphone might support Wi-Fi Direct printing, but not Wi-Fi Direct for an external display — meaning you wouldn’t be able to connect it with your TV, even if your TV supported the standard.

Explaining all that to non-technical consumers is going to be the industry’s next big wireless challenge.

Wi-Fi® gets personal: Groundbreaking Wi-Fi Direct™ launches today (press release)

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Oct 25

Wi-Fi Direct certification begins today, device-to-device transmission starting soon

Posted in: bluetooth, intel, Today's Chili, video, wi-fi, wifi, Wireless

So, Bluetooth — last fall didn’t end up being as frightful as you had probably imagined, but this fall is bound to be different. Or so the Wi-Fi Alliance says. If you’ll recall, Wi-Fi Direct promised to do what Bluetooth had been doing for years, but with far less fuss and on a protocol that’s much more widespread. A solid year has come and gone, and we’ve heard nary a word from any company who plans on implementing it. Thankfully for us all, that changes today. Starting in mere moments, Wi-Fi Direct devices will begin the certification process, and while we couldn’t extract exact product details or a release time frame for future wares on a media call regarding the announcement, we did get the impression that at least a few partners were trying to get Wi-Fi Direct wares onto shelves before Christmas.

As for functionality, the claims are fairly impressive. In order to make a direct device-to-device connection over WiFi, just one of the two need to be Wi-Fi Direct certified. In other words, a Wi-Fi Direct printer can recognize and interface with your Latitude D410 laptop from 1999, as all Wi-Fi Direct certified devices have to be able to control the one-to-one relationship. The goal here is pretty simple — it’s to create a protected connection between two devices over WiFi with as little hassle as possible. Think Bluetooth, but using WiFi. We also learned that “most” products certified will also support “one-to-many” connections, enabling a Wi-Fi Direct laptop to be in contact with a printer, connected HDTV and a tablet simultaneously, with no router in-between at any point. We should also point out that while 802.11a/g/n is supported over 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, there’s no requirement for Wi-Fi Direct products to support 802.11b, so legacy users may want to pay attention to that quirk.

There’s also no new hardware requirements here, so in theory, any existing WiFi chipset could be upgraded via firmware to handle Wi-Fi Direct — whether or not that’ll happen on a large scale was a question the Wi-Fi Alliance couldn’t answer for us. Finally, they noted that the app ecosystem is likely to make this whole rollout a lot more interesting, particularly considering that Direct is simply a pipe that software can dictate as it sees fit. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the developments here; we’ve waited way too long for this to blossom, but we’re pretty jazzed about the possibilities. Head on past the break for a video overview of how Wi-Fi Direct works.

Continue reading Wi-Fi Direct certification begins today, device-to-device transmission starting soon

Wi-Fi Direct certification begins today, device-to-device transmission starting soon originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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