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Comcast and Panasonic are upping their strike capabilities in the consumer entertainment tech wars with the introduction of the AnyPlay portable digital video recorder. With a standard-definition, 60-gigabyte hard drive and DVD/CD player, AnyPlay lets consumers watch their stored TV programming on a...

TECH BLOG

The ‘Connected Lifestyle’ Disconnect

The word "connected" appears no less than 13 times in the press release Microsoft issued to broadcast its DVR Anywhere launch at CES. The software system allows people to view recorded TV content all over the house. What I find astonishing is that this fracturing of the entertainment experience -- t...

There are two mistakes a vendor can make that it may not be able to recover from. One is to build too many products, which stay in inventory and prevent future sales; and the other is to have too few products and lose out of sales as a result. Nintendo did the latter, and that will be a problem for ...

TECH BLOG

Sony Gives a Little, Gets a Little

Sony's had a huge Friday. It's made a smart move by growing out of DRM in its music division -- at least a little, at least reportedly -- and it's scored a decent victory on the Blu-ray side in getting Warner Bros. to commit to its hi-definition DVD format. All on the Friday before CES. Nicely done....

The holiday selling season has come and gone, and the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD war is still on. The HD DVD camp came out strong with a hard jab when Toshiba's HD-A2 DVD players sold for a rock-bottom price of $98.97 at Wal-Mart and other outlets like Best Buy in late October, but since then prices have re...

Tomorrow we start the New Year, and for those of you who aren't still in line to buy a Nintendo Wii, it is looking to be a good one. I'm having my doubts about Apple though, as it would seem success is going to their head as they put Think Secret out of business, and I and a lot of others were trick...

There were some interesting things going on last week and one of them I ran into by accident. First, I was amazed that Dell got into Best Buy, as this would be like Apple suddenly becoming a Windows reseller, and it falls into the "impossible" class of accomplishments. Speaking of impossible, Michae...

I've been looking at the early numbers from the Black Friday sales and -- as expected -- flat screen TVs are flying off the shelves and you can't find a Wii at anywhere close to retail price if you can find it at all. Products that sold through were the Amazon Kindle, the low-end Toshiba HD-DVD play...

Last week was a short week, and while you know the outcome of Black Friday, that is still in my future. We did have two big announcements, though. Amazon made a run at the eBook market with what is the best eBook in the world; in addition, the Dell XPS One, which follows the Gateway One to market, i...

This week ends with one of the most important days of the year. It's called "Black Friday," and it could decide the future of a lot of battles and tell us whether this will be a good or bad season economically. There are two big battles that may actually be decided this week based on initial sales n...

To help combat increasingly complicated home PC and networking environments, Microsoft has released the second major version to its Windows Live OneCare, a subscription service that helps manage security updates and performance of home and small-business PCs. Thirty-five percent of U.S. adults now o...

This holiday season, what do you get for the technophile who already has everything? A handful of analysts ticked off some of the items on their Christmas lists, and it was no surprise that they included the most bleeding-edge, technologically advanced -- and slightly off the wall -- suggestions. He...

Microsoft and HP announced the availability of the HP MediaSmart Server running Windows Home Server. The new class of server enables consumers to protect, connect and share digital media and documents. Aimed at consumers, the MediaSmart Server is the flagship product in what Microsoft said is an ent...

IBM and MediaTek have announced a joint effort to develop ultra-fast chipsets that will be able to blast a full-length high-definition movie faster than most people can read this sentence. For example, IBM says, a consumer could upload a 10 gigabyte file in five seconds with the new technology versu...

Microsoft, along with several partners, has launched a bundle of new methods for connecting household PCs to the living room entertainment center. Collectively called "Extenders for Microsoft Windows Media Center," the solutions are WiFi hardware devices that deliver video, high-definition TV, music...

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