Pinnacle Tiny picoStick USB TV Brings Channels While You're Surfing
The PCTV picoStick is a tiny, almost nano-sized DVB-T TV tuner launched today. DVB is growing in its adoption throughout the world, but DVB-T is only widely used in Western Europe. For signal reception, the picoStick comes with an MCX connector and an a small telescoping flip antenna, which can be attached to the device itself or by cable to a free standing antenna stand. Pinnacle's TVCenter 6 adds DVR and time-shifting software for recording shows for later watching. Recordings can be saved in MPEG-2, DivX (off-line transcoding) or H.264 formats for permanent collections or transfer to other devices. They also included some additional software for video editing.
Although only available for Windows XP, Vista and 7, special attention has been paid to making this a low-power CPU, netbook friendly nano device. This is reflected in their hardware requirements minimum being listed as Intel 1.6GHZ Atom and 256MB of RAM. This tiny unit will go on sale next week but only in Europe for around $80. No hint of an ASTC version is mentioned so we are still stuck with these USB TV dongles for the time being.
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OperaUSB Browser Turns 10.0 Still Flash Drive Friendly
Opera, gaining rapidly on the big dogs, is the favorite internet browser of more and more people. Highly configurable, skinnable and portable, Opera has just released version 10 of its able browser, adding a Turbo mode and a handful of other new features to an already extensive list of well polished functions. The new Turbo mode targets netbook users compressing requested images on the way down to the browser greatly decreasing tethered bandwidth delays and data plan usage. The USB variant Opera@USB contains all the features of the original but can run off of a flash drive keeping all your settings and temporary files private and in your possession.
These new features join a huge list of bonus features already present in Opera. While many of the features are available as user generated plugins for FireFox, the most popular Firefox plug-ins are polished and included natively in Opera. Ad-Blocking, Windows 7-like tab preview thumbnails, fast Javascript engine, email, password management, mouse gestures, torrent downloads, skins, and customized searching are all built in and easily customizable. On top of all that, the Opera Link function let's you synchronize your favorites, searches, notes and other settings from your PC or flash drive or smartphone version of Opera. It's available for free download here.
Another popular USB friendly variant is maintained and developed here. It contains all of the same features but is able to run off of a CD or read-only media and uses an alternate method to erase or store personal data.
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Belkin Home Base Puts a Whole Lotta Network in a Tiny Box
Belkin's Home Base has just shown up on the scene to bring a whole lot of network to your network. If you need to play catch-up with Jones' this tiny wonder can leap frog you all the way up to today with style. The slick little white box has WPS, a push button for wireless joining to your home network with 802.11b/g/n, or you can opt for old school Ethernet. The four USB ports in the back are for printer and USB storage compatibility, and it's most simple ability is to allow wireless sharing of USB devices. It essentially combines the wireless capability, network USB sharing and streaming media serving.
Stepping past the ordinary, the Home Base can take your pedestrian USB-only printers, and turn them into wireless printers. Hook up a USB hard drive, and it's a NAS serving up storage for your network. Attached storage also enables the backup software. Now any device on your network can use Belkin's backup software, and start automated backups protecting your precious files. The Home Base will also take any media files you have, and can enable DLNA media streaming. DLNA is the preferred protocol for the XBox 360 and the PS3. Now you can really take advantage of your game console's media capabilities, and have downloaded music and movies anywhere you like. The Home base should be available soon for about $129 where Belkin devices are found.
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Sony A840 Flagship Walkman - DAP Without Compromise
One thing obvious about new 2009 Sony tactile-control Walkmans is that they all share a similar three circle button design whether it's S-or the E-series. Now that Sony has debuted this razor-thin A-series sharing the same characteristic, consumers might have even a more difficult time telling them apart. Of course, after another look into the specs, you know what you are paying for.
For starter, Sony A840 has a 2.8" 240x400 OLED versus 2.4" 240x320 LCD of the S540. Note the extra amount of pixels which is for movies and slideshows. Additionally, swapping out the LCD in favor of OLED gives better color reproduction and improves battery life, which in the case of A840, boasts 29 hours and 9 hours of music and video playback respectively. Excess thickness is trimmed down to a mere 0.28", and weight reduced to 2.1 oz. The case looks like it's plastic, but the shiny controls are more like made of aluminum.
Also unique to the Sony A840 are S-master amplifier; noise-cancelling feature (must be used with the bundled headphones); content transfer compatibility with Sony Blu-ray recorders; and lyrics-audio sync (works more like Karaoke); and high bit-rate support for videos (10Mbps for AVC, 6Mbps for MPEG-4 / WMV). Lastly, you can get it with 64GB, but the price tag is a staggering $442 USD. The 16GB and 32GB will also be available at $265 and $331.
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Seagate DockStar Transforms FreeAgent Go into a Cloud Server
Wondering how you can share your FreeAgent Go with everyone else on your LAN? Seagate has the answer, and it's called the DockStar cradle. Slide a FreeAgent Go into the cradle's slot, and DockStar's Gigabit Ethernet will magically make drive's content available for network access. The DockStar conveniently provides three additional ports for those who have other brands of external USB drives.
The underlying technology behind DockStar is same as Pogoplug. Unlike the PogoPlug, however, the Seagate needs a AC adapter so it isn't as minimalist as the former. The DockStar does offer the same web access to the shared files from any browsers and even iPhone provided you subscribe to the paid service for $29.99 a year. The service also has an additional benefit of making a selected list of files visible on various social sites through RSS feeds. The alternative is to install Pogoplug's software which makes the FreeAgent and other drives whether they are in NTFS, FAT32, EXT3, HFS+ visible to Windows, Mac and Linux. The Seagate DockStar is priced the same as Pogoplug at $99.
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