A Look At The iPod Nano

Here's some more details about Apple's new player.

Apple's done it again. By virtue of a sweet design backed by decent tech (first 4GB flash player, photo-friendly color screen), Apple will keep its ball rolling swiftly into the holiday season. The Nano's capacity will turn off many experienced MP3 fans, but we have a feeling that newbies will flock to the next big thing and help maintain Apple's 74 percent U.S. market share for all digital audio players.

I personally think that this is too expensive for a flash based player. Apple (or someone else) need to make an inexpensive, large hard drive player to get my cash.

Dual Deck DVD Recorder

The motion picture association is going to love this one....

Samsung has recently released the world’s first sub-$500 twin-tray DVD recorder, the DVD-TR520. Most dual disc recorders on the market cost thousands of dollars, so at $450, the DVD-TR520 is actually affordable. Disc-to-disc copying speeds are 2x for DVD-RAM, 4x for DVD-RW, and 6x for DVD-R. Samsung claims that you could copy a two-hour disc in as little as 20 minutes. Units will be available in stores later this month.

Puh button dual layer DVD recording makes copying a DVD a little too easy.
Read the press release here.

HEAT=High End Audio Theater

This seems at least a little overpriced, and overkill, even to a guy like me!

Krell, already known for their super-expensive high fidelity equipment, is unveiling HEAT, the High End Audio Theater. It’s the most staggering home theater presentation on the Expo show floor in a number of ways. It combines seven of their 450 watt, monaural Evolution One amplifiers with a pair of LAT-1000 tower speakers, an LAT-C1000 center speaker, four LAT-2000 bookshelf/surround speakers and two Master Reference Subwoofers. This monstrous 11,500-watt, 7.2 home theater system has a retail price of $344,500. I’m not kidding.

For that kind of dough, I'd like to be able to sell popcorn to help pay for all this.

Microsoft Branching Out

I wasn't surprised to see an announcement from LG about a digital TV recorder, but one detail caught my eye.

LG Electronics today introduced its first dedicated "digital media recorder" with the Microsoft Program Guide service.

The LG LRM-519 Digital Media Recorder is a combination digital video recorder (DVR) and DVD recorder powered by Windows Media Center Technologies with a 160-gigabyte hard drive.

As I was wondering what the cost of "Microsoft Program Guide" would be, I spotted it at the end.

The Microsoft Program Guide service subscription is available for a $249 one-time fee, $99.99 for a one-year subscription, or for $9.99 for a one-month subscription.

Microsoft doesn't make enough money already? I'll just program my VCR manually before i'll fork over $10 a month for another "service." Between the cellphone family plan, the cable TV, the internet service, and the satellite radio, (not to mention the price of gas) the last thing that myself, or any good taxpaying American needs is another bill!

Ultimate Notebook

Forget about the Acer Ferrari, this is the real portable supercomputer. 6.8 GHz CPU? I'm surprised this thing doesn't melt!

Processor: 6.8GHZ CPU (AtomChip® Quantum® II processor / System Compliance: Two Operating Systems with Voice Command (Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional and Linux®) / Memory: 1TB Quantum-Optical non-volatile RAM (NvIOpSRAM-SODIMM 200-pin) / Storage: 2TB non-volatile Quantum RAM (NvIOpRAM-ATA IDE) / Optical Drive: DVD Super Multi / LCD Display: 12.1” WXGA (1280 x 800, 16:10) TFT Glare Type LCD display with 1.3 Mega pixel CMOS camera

Sony Tries To Crash The iPod Party

I think Sony must have been feeling a little left out of the mobile music market. sony practically invented portable audio with their Walkman devices. They were pushing minidiscs, when Apple's hard drive players stole the market. They made this announcement the same time that Apple was introducing their fall lineup.

The brand new Sony MP3 WALKMAN is the most cutting-edge yet, combining high-end design with ease-of-use and advanced functionality which seriously upgrades your listening experience.

It arrives in two sizes: the NW-A3000 holds 20GB and the NW-A1000, 6GB. Both are made from a futuristic translucent material, sexy to the touch and gorgeous to look at in all its various incarnations: the 20GB comes in violet and silver, the 6GB in violet, silver, pink and blue. And, of course, even the headphones are colour coordinated.

As it comes to life, the luminescent Organic EL display lightens up. The three buttons make operating the player a cinch.

...one drive to unite them all!

DVD recordable discs took longer to adopt because of the two camps: plus and minus. After all, who wants to choose the wrong standard, and own the next Sony Betamax machine.

Samsung Electronics Co. will bring out a DVD machine next year capable of playing both Blu-ray and HD DVD if backers of the rival standards fail to agree on a unified format, a newspaper said.

I think Samsung is smartly positioning itself early on with a dual format drive. Sony made some serious money by coming out with the 1st DVDRW drive that could handle plus and minus DVD discs.

Samsung is a backer of blu-ray, which promises higher capacity than HD DVD and better interactivity and security.

But supporting all standards—as Samsung has done with cellphones and mobile video—could give it an advantage in the multibillion-dollar market for DVD players, PC drivers and optical disks.

I hope Samsung's machine, and perhaps others like it will speed the adoption of the next generation of optical media.

Robots To Save Lives

If you've ever done CPR for a while, it gets quite tiring, quickly. It's hard for a person, even in good physical condition, to do it for more than 10 minutes at a time. The job of pumping on a chest, is one job everyone would be happy to give away.

An Automatic resuscitator that gives life-saving treatment to heart attack victims has been developed. The mechanical device delivers consistent, sustained chest compressions that help restore the blood flow to the heart.
It helps ambulance paramedics by taking over the physical hands-on work of CPR - the Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation familiar to viewers of Casualty and ER - leaving them free to provide other treatments.

Yonah & The Whale

Yonah is the code name for Intel's newest mobile, dual core processor. This will be replacing the current Pentium M's which are part of the current Centrino package. The most inexpensive is less than $250 which is a good sign. They should be out in early 2006.

ROADMAPS SEEN by the INQ show the stock keeping units (SKUs) and the prices Intel will charge for its Yonah single and dual core processors when they're launched early next year.
Aswell as dual and single core Yonahs, Intel will also offer LV (low voltage) and ULV (ultra low voltage) versions of the microprocessors.

The notes to its customers we've seen show that as we've reported before, Intel is confident it can deliver the Yonah family during January, rather than the vaguer first quarter it promised before.

Benq 1640 Review

This is the twin of the Plextor 740A. It's a great drive, with high quality writing, and real fast reading. Check out the review!

The main positive points: The most positive point will probably be that this drive is a very good all-rounder with almost no noticeable issues. The media compatibility is good, the writing quality is good to excellent with most media types and it offers very good reading speeds. QSuite also makes a nice addition to the drive as it offers many extra features. Overall it is one of the best – if not the best drive on the market right now. The drive also have a good cooling solution that seems to work, as it appears to operate a lot cooler than previous BenQ drives. The two new features added by firmware BSKB and later give the final touch. It supports overspeeding and in combination with SolidBurn this seems to make an excellent combination. If a disc is good enough for 16x, it will write at 16x. If not it will try next lower speed, than next speed and so on until it finds a suitable speed or the lowest writing speed is reached. A benefit of having to enable overspeeding and SolidBurn through QSuite is that newbie’s and users that do not need or want to overspeeding don’t need to worry about it as it’s disabled by default. But power users that like to experiment will have no problems enabling these features through QSuite.

The main negative points: But as usual there are some negative points that we will like to mention. First point is not a serious issue, but a surprising issue; the drive creates PIE/PIF error spikes when writing DVD+R media at 16x, as one of the main promoters of the DVD+R format we had expected the DVD+R writing to be perfect. But the error spikes don’t seem to be large enough to cause any reading issues. The OPC feature also seems to be a bit over-sensitive as some media did not write at certified speed. And like many other drives; the CD-RW writing quality is very poor and needs improving. We would also like to see support for Ritek 6x DVD-RW and MKM 8x DVD+RW media. For the MKM 8x DVD+RW media we were informed that it was not supported since it was pre-release media, so we could probably blame that problem on Mitsubishi.

iPod Announcements

In addition to a new iPod phone which has been much anticipated, another new iPod was announced as well.

Jobs announced a new iPod called the iPod nano: "1,000 songs in your pocket and impossibly small," Jobs said. It's "thinner than a No. 2 pencil," he said to oohs and aahs from the audience. "The iPod nano is 80 percent smaller than the original iPod."

The new nano iPod will be available in 2 GB and 4 GB capacities. At least it has a screen. I believe this is the iPod using the Samsung flash memory that was rumored to replace the iPod Mini. Rather, it looks like the family expanded. The nano starts at a pricey $199.

You can see it compared to the size of a pencil (it's thinner) here.

Portable DVD Writer Reviewed

This is a comprehensive look at a portable drive. This drive uses a notebook drive mounted in a case with a USB 2.0 connection. While not the fastest drive, it is far more portable than a lot of stuff out there.

Let us summarize the most important positive and negative points below:

The main positive points: The drive is lightweight and compact for easy mobility. It is bundled with a nice complement of software. Very capable at DAE. Can turn in some good write quality on good DVD+R media. Impressive as a 2 sheep writer.

The main negative points: 8x DVD-R writing speeds would have been nice as 8x media is readily available. The write times for 8x are unbearably slow. CD-R/RW write quality needs improvements. Bitsetting for DVD+R media should be standard.

To sum it all up, this is what we would say: “Overall, this drive with the tested firmware is a capable DVD writer. We would like to see firmware updates to further improve writing quality and to speed up the 8x write time. Limitation of DVD-R to 4x writing speeds detracts from the appeal of this drive. If you are looking for a lightweight and compact portable burner we could recommend this given you do some careful selection of your media“.

Logitech Z-2300 Speaker Review

These speakers were a lot of fun to test out.

The Logitech z-2300 speakers are an outstanding product that raise the bar for computer speakers a few notches. While more expensive than an impulse purchase, they will outlast several computer systems. Also, if you compare the price of the Logitech setup to a set of stereo speakers with a subwoofer, for this quality of sound, it is very competitive, and perhaps inexpensive. If you want full, rich, room filling sound for your audio, DVD’s, and games, look no further. Just wait until your neighbors are out for the evening to test the maximum volume.

Hummer Laptop

Joining the ranks of the Acer Ferrari notebook, is the Hummer notebook. No word yet if it will survive a Hummer driving over it or not.

According to Cnet, "General Motors has signed an exclusive three-year licensing agreement with Itronix to make a semi-ruggedized portable computer styled after the Hummer.
Priced at $2,988, the laptops come with enough padding to survive six separate drops from a height of 30 inches onto two 3/4-inch sheets of plywood placed on top of concrete. Its battery lasts a little more than four hours; a battery extender pushes that to about seven hours. The Hummer laptop will be available at car dealerships that sell Hummer products or online at the GM-approved Web site Hummerstuff.com starting Nov. 1.

It includes a 1.86GHz Intel Centrino Pentium processor, a 12.1-inch color display, 512MB of memory, a DVD/CD-R/W combination drive, 8021.11a/g/b wireless connectivity and Microsoft's XP Professional operating system."

NEC 3540 DVD Writer Reviewed

This drive is one of the better DVD writers out there for now. Very quick with outstanding writing quality, it's easy to see why NEC has quite a following in the optical drive community.

NEC drives have quite a following among enthusiasts and after having the ND-3540A in our 'Labs, it's easy to see why. While affordably priced, their new 16x DVD±RW offers a healthy dose of features and some of the fastest DVD reading and writing speeds available.

It shouldn't be too surprising that what the ND-3540A does best is write DVD's. When writing to DVD+R and DVD-R media at 16x, the drive took about 6 minutes to write an entire 4.7GB DVD. NEC's new DVD writer also performed pretty well in our rewriting tests, turning in some impressive times with both DVD-RW and DVD+RW media. The ND-3540A held its own when writing to DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL media, but due to its Z-CLV writing method, it wasn't as fast as some of the other drives we've tested.