It’s difficult to fashion a laptop capable at dragging attention from Apple’s slender, expensive-looking (and expensive costing!) MacBook and MacBook Pro ranges, but Sony are obviously hoping to do that with a nicely designed cross-section. Their VAIO AR600 line may be big-boned and destined for that catch-all “desktop replacement” label, but it looks pretty sexy from the side.
So, Microsoft, yeah the giants that hide behind Redmond, WA, the very same ones, have finally decided to catch up with everyone else and begin supporting DivX and Xvid in some of their devices. I know, I know, I said “No Wai!” too, but they are really going to do it.
They are partnering with D-Link, Linksys, and Niveus Media to drop some new Media Center Extenders on a new platform called “Extenders for Windows Media Center”. Not only will the new devices finally get Xvid and DivX support, they will also support the new WMV HD and encrypted HD streaming formats as well.
Have lots of money to spare and a new house with no A/V equipment yet? Well then, FUZE are the people you want to talk to about a whole home A/V system.
With this package you get the base HTPC which has multiple CableCARD tuners in it. Then there are FuzeMini HD clients, and audio clients. There is also a wall mountable touchscreen interface and a whole-home remote.
Ever had the problem of your MCE remote not having a line of site with your receiver and you can’t do anything without moving yourself or something else? Well apparently so has someone at Keyspan, and thus spawned the RF Vista MCE remote.
Say what you like about Sony, but some of their design really is the dog’s proverbials. Take, for instance, the L-series of desktop media PCs; it’s a range that has been available for some time now, but it still looks relatively fresh and interesting. Of course, while aesthetics might mature gracefully, innards are less forgiving and the time has come for Sony to refresh what comes inside the range of pastel-coloured computers.
The good news is the feature list for set-top boxes should be increasing. Set-Top boxes should also become consumer electronics devices, sold and marketed to the consumer instead of video service providers.
Essentially the reason for the price hike is the FCC is finally enforcing previous rulings which push for user-marketed boxes, whereas the current market is setup so that the various cable companies select the boxes they want to allow their customers to use and only market those boxes to the consumer. Continued »
Early in June when Alienware announced the Hangar18 HD Entertainment Centre I momentarily wondered whether anyone would be daft enough to buy one. Yes, it’s indecently well specified, but at a minimum of $2k (and then the obvious expense of pairing it with a decent surround sound setup, HDTV screen and all the rest of the gubbins) it all seems to be edging into semi-installed territory when for the price you could probably piece together a reasonably similar system and still have cash left over for a few extra toys. Computer Shopper have shown me the error of my ways, however.
Looking quite a lot like an overgrown Sonos unit, and with a strikingly similar remote control design to boot, the ECS ‘Magic Box’ contains a full Vista Media Center PC rather than any sort of genie. Shown at Computex Taipei 2007, where it won third place at the Intel Core Processor Challenge, it unsurprisingly runs an Intel Conroe CPU with a maximum 2GB RAM. Next to the top-mounted optical drive a docking bay keeps the remote – which is a wireless Windows Sideshow unit – charged and ready.
Here’s another one of those times where I wish I was frightfully rich, as opposed to living in a small hutch with a cellphone made of twigs and only the heat from its power adaptor to heat beans. Alienware have announced a beast of a Media Center PC, the Hanger18, which squeezes some impressive HD hardware into a surprisingly discrete box.
Samsung’s Q1 Ultra might think it has the sexy-stakes all sewn up in the world of portables, but HP’s Pavilion HDX uber-notebook is set to seriously overshadow every other machine out there – it’s 20.1-inch HD screen, full keyboard with numeric pad anddetachable remote as well as Intel Santa Rosa core all add up to a massively powerful, staggeringly large machine. LAPTOP Magazine jumped at the opportunity to review a pre-production sample, and came away wowed.
SlashGear Japan
