Review Horizon

Amazon just announced their new entry into the world of eBook readers, the Graphite Kindle DX. Available for shipping on July 7th, the new unit features the same 9.7″ E-Ink screen size, but the new E-Ink generation also improves the contrast by 50% (or so they say) while reducing the price to $379. Available for pre-order today.

Compared with the small Kindle, the DX version has a 3500 books capacity versus 1500 for the small version, and similar free global 3G capabilities.

Amazon currently  has monopoly position in the large screen eBook readers, used mostly for technical books in PDF format. I hope BN will soon release a large format Nook…after all, competition is never bad for the consumers.

Popbox issued a statement regarding the ship date: it is now July 23rd, so no luck for the hopeful ones that expected their box to be shipped in time for July 4th. Another dissapointing news is that Netflix will not make it at launch, if ever.

Compared with the initial announcement at CES 2010, the current list is a letdown. Beside the notable lack of Netflix support, several other clients like Facebook didn’t make the cut either. If history taught us something is that customers don’t react in a positive way when a company creates a lot of hype and then fails to deliver. I only hope Syabas will survive this blow, especially when competitor boxes supporting Netflix are popping out all over the place.

Popbox parent company, Syabas made available the following list of supported Web Apps at launch: Read More…

Heavily rumored for the past several weeks and widely expected, Hulu just announced the launching of a new premium tier for $9.99 a month. The new premium plan will allow subscribers access to  an entire TV season. The free tier will also be still available.

Hulu Plus will initially be available on Apple’s iPad and iPhone as well as XBOX 360 (early 2011), Samsung TV and Blu-ray players and Sony PS3, TV and Blu-ray players and Vizio. Initially the service will be rolled out based on invitations.

Check after the break for additional images / video. Read More…

Seagate is again on the first place announcing the first 3TB external hard-drive in the world – Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk External Drive. Featuring USB 3.0 and FireWire 800 connections is sure to make happy every potential user. Just imagine this new toy on your desk and also imagine (or maybe not) what happens if it fails. The base price with USB 2.0 interface is $250, extra $40 for fireware or $30 for USB 3.0. An interesting feature is the illuminated capacity gauge. Seagate includes with every shipped drive from the series software for automatic continuous backup along with 192-bit triple DES encryption.

Western Digital made news with its WD TV Live Plus launch, supporting Netflix for the first time in company’s product line of media streamers / players. Seagate is a direct competitor with its own FreeAgent boxes and recently they launched its new member, Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex TV HD Media Player. A rather long name, accompanied by a similarly long feature list, FreeAgent GoFlex TV HD Media Player also includes clients for YouTube, Paramount, vTuner, Mediafly, Picasa, Flickr, RSS, Finance and Weather widgets and, of course, just like its direct competitor, WD TV Live Plus, it plays close to 100% audio/video codecs available. What differentiates it though from the WD is the ability to connect directly to Seagate’s own GoFlex ultra portable storage devices  altough how much benefit the average user would get remains to be seen, since the unit also features the way more popular USB ports. I’ll never understand why, from a practical perspective companies are still insisting to lock customers in a proprietary format and get a lot of hate in the process.

Hit after the break for additional images and full technical specifications. Read More…

1. Introduction

Everything is now on the Internet and radio is no exception. Gone are the days when we would extend an antenna to catch that far away radio station at night, when the solar activity is reduced. Now, with a fairly cheap radio you can instantly access thousands of radio stations from every country or genres, premium or not with a simple switch of a button. And the quality is usually much better than the airwaves anyway. I own several internet radios (Philips NP1100/37, Aluratek AIRMM01F) and the last to find its place in my ever growing collection is Grace GDI-IR1000, the subject of the present review.

2. Unpacking

The content of the box is fairly limited, including the radio itself, the power adapter and an audio cable. No remote included, but I Read More…

1. Introduction

If you don’t necessarily need Netflix and you want to save some money, ZIN-5005HD is a good alternative to WD TV Live Plus for example (you can still stream Netflix via DLNA if you have PlayOn). I purchased a WD TV Live Plus for our bedroom and a Zinwell for the kitchen where we usually don’t linger long enough to watch full length movies, and our kitchen TV is not that large anyway. I purchased the Zinwell unit for about $69 during an Amazon Gold Box sale, at the time of writing this review, the price is still a very low $74 with free shipping and no taxes in most of the country. It plays media from your network shares, included USB ports or from a DLNA server.

As a side note, there seem to be a “review war” on Amazon’s product page between Brite-View BV-5005HD “CinemaTube” and Zinwell ZIN-5005HD. The products seem to be similar hardware wise, probably from the same Read More…

Amazon has this highly rated hard drive,  Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Hard Drive WD20EARS, on sale for only $119, free shipping and no tax in most of the country. This is the largest available hard drive on the market and features WD’s green technology to reduce power consumption by 40%. Highly rated reviews everywhere on the internet, famous for working quiet and cool. Features 3 years warranty. It will work best in Windows Vista / 7, but in XP, since WD20EARS is an Advanced Format Drive, if you want the most out of them you’ll need to use WD Align System Utility for full write performance.

1. Introduction

I am using a Windows Media Center HTPC in living-room, where my main home theater system resides, but I wanted to be able to access Netflix/home network content in the bedroom as well, and, due to obvious reasons a full featured PC didn’t quite cut it (noise, form factor, etc). I just wanted something simple, low power and fast to boot, something that my wife will also enjoy. I was familiar with Western Digital’s line of media streamers, but they only supported Netflix via DLNA, when combined with something like PlayOn. Not user friendly enough. Then, the big day has come and WD released their WD TV Live Plus media streamer finally including  Netflix. (Netflix is now what mp3 used to be a while ago, a must have for everything that connects to the TV – Blu-ray players, media streamers, etc) Read More…

Well, it didn’t take that long this time, at least that much is sure. Only a day after Apple officially released  iOS 4.0 for iPhone, the crafty guys from Dev-Team released redsn0w version 0.9.5b5-5 (available here for Mac and here for Windows) which will set free your beloved iphone. I made the mistake of upgrading to iOS 4.0 yesterday and I realized I can’t stand my iPhone 3G anymore. No multi-tasking, no SBSettings, no 5-Icon Dock NO NPR while surfing . Enough complaining, I already fixed all that, and I also created a small tutorial published here for your jail-breaking pleasure. Read More…