The week of CES each year is a week that geeks in the industry and geek consumers look forward too with glee. At the same time those of us who have been to the show have to temper the gadget lust we get going into the show with the knowledge that his is one of the most grueling weeks of the year to be a pro geek. Just look at the number of new items announced this week; it was hard to even whittle the list down to some of the coolest gear of the week for our second week in review of 2010.
D-Link would like to point out that Sling Media aren’t the only company who can do place-shifting with interestingly-designed hardware, and to that end the networking specialists have outed the D-Link Pebble Media Player at CES 2010. A curvaceous lump with both HDMI and ethernet connectivity, the Pebble can stream media from across a network or play it from local memory cards or USB sticks.
Slightly less eye-catching than a touchscreen remote and a portable HDTV with integrated WiFi, Sling Media’s two remaining products could be no less useful if your cable or satellite provider does the decent thing and decides to offer them. The Sling Receiver 300 is a slip of a box designed to hook up wirelessly to EchoStar’s SlingLoaded 922 HD DVR and funnel 1080i content to a distant HDTV, similar in principle to the Sling Monitor 150 only without the integrated display. Meanwhile the Slingbox 700U hopes to add place-shifting functionality to existing internet-connected DVRs.
It’s January 1st 2010, and the entire SlashGear team wish all our readers a very Happy New Year. Since it’s a public holiday in the US we’ll be giving you a break from our regular coverage; rest up, though, as we’re facing a tech-packed seven days. CES 2010 and Google’s Android announcement are all fast approaching: read on for what we’re expecting from the first full week of 2010…
The biggest event is undoubtedly CES 2010, and the SlashGear team will be on-site bringing you the latest hardware from the show floor, covering the press conferences and generally picking out the best of new consumer electronics. Netbooks and Smartbooks look set to dominate many of the announcements, pitting Intel’s latest Pine Trail Atom processors against low-power, high-performance mobile chipsets from Qualcomm, Freescale and others. We’re also expecting to see some non-notebook form-factors, perhaps finally delivering to the mainstream the MIDs, UMPCs and Tablets that have so long been promised.
In the past year Sling has released very few updates and even fewer new products. To be exact, just one, an iPhone client which was subsequently neutered by Apple and AT&T. Now the company is promising a new, slimmer range of Slingboxes, together with touchscreens and WiFi TV at CES 2010.
In a world that’s short on all sorts of resources from oil and gas to water, recently we’ve been asked to cut down our use yet more. Last week, Ralph de la Vega said heavy users of music over data on the AT&T wireless network were bandwidth hogs, that 3% of smartphone users were using 40% of his capacity and frankly, we need to all cut back just a bit. Spectrum is among the few things that they’re not making any more of and, with more users than ever, it’s going to be hard to come up with the capacity needed to keep everyone happy. One solution to this is to shift some of the capacity off of current networks and come up with new broadcast models for content distribution. The folks at FloTV have done just that. The service has been around for a bit, mostly on handsets from AT&T that carry support for the service. In a reverse trend the FloTV folks have gone from the phone to creating a dedicated device for the service.
Spawn Labs have announced their HD-720 remote gaming adapter, and from the sound of it they’re trying to do to console games what Slingbox did for TV. The HD-720 hooks up to your console – both Xbox 360 and PS3 are natively supported, with adapters for other versions – and then streams gameplay over WiFi to your PC. While that might not seem much use if you’re at home, it does mean you can keep up with your favorite game while on the road without having to lug your console along with you.
Video overview after the cut
As recently as a five years ago, it was relatively easy to segment the mobile market into business users and consumers. Business users had specific needs, as did consumers, and rarely did those needs intersect. Today, the idea of segmenting users into the classes of business vs. consumer is becoming archaic and to attempt that level of breakdown will lead to erroneous views of the market.
Sling Media’s new version of SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone and iPod touch, version 1.1, has been approved by Apple. That means users of the place-shifting TV streamers can now watch footage in true widescreen, as well having native DISH Network control with a new on-device navigation app. The new version also improves response times, so the whole experience should be snappier.
Unfortunately there’s still no 3G support, so you’re limited to using a WiFi connection to get your remote viewing fix. Sling did submit a version of the SlingPlayer Mobile app to Apple which supports 3G connections, albeit intended only for international markets rather than in the US, but there’s no word on whether that too has been approved or is still mired in the bowels of Cupertino.
We loved SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone but hated AT&T’s 3G network-access limitations when we reviewed the app earlier this week. At the time, we suggested that AT&T were discretely uncertain that their 3G network could hold up to thousands of iPhone users streaming video from their Slingboxes; now, according to a Gizmodo tipster, there’s another reason on the table. AT&T is said to be working on its own, rival system, called i-Verse.
SlashGear JP
