Last week a peculiarly shaped device appeared on my desk. It was a compact, solid square box with a rather alien aesthetic, by which I mean it looked like something out of a Star Trek episode. The perfectly square cube was dark gray with long diagonal grooves across its entire surface.
WD, a Western Digital company, has just announced their new WD TV Play Media Player. The WD TV Play provides access to movies, TV shows and music from entertainment apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, YouTube, Pandora, Spotify and more. It uses the latest wireless-N technology for fast streaming and no PC is required.
There used to be a time when your appliances were not as smart as you. A time when you told the coffee maker what time you were getting up, the coffee maker didn’t tell you. A time when you, not your smartphone, scheduled lights out. There was a time when we ruled the electronics in our lives, and not the other way around.
The word "app" is short for "application." It's a piece of software that enables you to do a specific thing, such as check the weather, compose music or play a game. In the recent past, if you needed to create a document, you launched Microsoft Word. If you needed to crop a photo, you launched Photoshop, and so on.
2012 was an incredibly busy and prosperous year for Apple. We saw totally new designs for both computers and mobile devices, and updates to nearly every product line.
When Apple decided to license its AirPlay technology to speaker and receiver manufacturers so their components could play audio wirelessly from iTunes on a Windows or Macintosh computer or from such iOS devices as an iPod touch, iPhone or iPad, few realized how many companies would bite.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a stereo system in every room of your house? You could continuously listen to music or the news as you accomplished tasks in each space. The Sonos Wireless Hi-Fi System takes this idea to a whole new level, expanding it to functionality never before possible.
No matter how smart the set, the TV will be challenged to deliver the most effective entertainment experience to you unless it is accompanied by a cadre of accoutrements—some useful, others essential.
The “universal remote” takes on an entirely new meaning as Wi-Fi-enabled touch screen devices proliferate. Thanks to all the free apps, we may no longer need to regularly use the dedicated remotes that came with our TV, Blu-ray player, receiver, home theater system, media player or DVR.
While the new iPad may have been the star of Apple’s event in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 7, 2012, Apple had another surprise product refresh for us, the new AppleTV. Considered more of an upgrade of the previous AppleTV than a completely redesigned model, it still improves on its predecessor in every way possible.
It may seem that MP3 players are being eclipsed by the all-purpose media player, but SanDisk is betting there’s a place for an inexpensive dedicated audio player that also takes voice dictation and receives/records FM radio.
Apple didn’t invent tablet computers, but it sparked the fire that’s now a full-blown inferno, with every major manufacturer offering one or more tablet computers. A tablet computer is all that most people need, especially for entertainment purposes. But they’re also good for being productive. Let’s take a look at some of the latest and most popular units.
Western Digital had it backwards when, three years ago, it promoted the WD TV HD Media Player as an accessory to its Passport hard drives. Users already wanted to do more than copy content from a computer and walk it over to a media player plugged into their TV.
When recordable CD-ROM drives came out, computer users were ecstatic that there was finally a form of removable media that dwarfed floppy disks in capacity. At 650MB (per layer, per side), CD-ROMs held roughly 451 times the data of 1.44MB floppy disks.
The 10-foot interface has always been a challenge for couch potatoes performing computer-like activities on their TVs. Using a conventional remote to navigate a cursor through the matrix of an onscreen keyboard, selecting one character at a time, required too much effort. But stowing a wireless keyboard on the coffee table seemed like an intrusion from the workplace in a room meant for pleasure.
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Last week a peculiarly shaped device appeared on my desk. It was a compact, solid square box with a rather alien aesthetic, by which I mean it looked like something out of a Star Trek episode. The perfectly square cube was dark gray with long diagonal grooves across its entire surface.
WD, a Western Digital company, has just announced their new WD TV Play Media Player. The WD TV Play provides access to movies, TV shows and music from entertainment apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, YouTube, Pandora, Spotify and more. It uses the latest wireless-N technology for fast streaming and no PC is required.
There used to be a time when your appliances were not as smart as you. A time when you told the coffee maker what time you were getting up, the coffee maker didn’t tell you. A time when you, not your smartphone, scheduled lights out. There was a time when we ruled the electronics in our lives, and not the other way around.
The word "app" is short for "application." It's a piece of software that enables you to do a specific thing, such as check the weather, compose music or play a game. In the recent past, if you needed to create a document, you launched Microsoft Word. If you needed to crop a photo, you launched Photoshop, and so on.
2012 was an incredibly busy and prosperous year for Apple. We saw totally new designs for both computers and mobile devices, and updates to nearly every product line.
When Apple decided to license its AirPlay technology to speaker and receiver manufacturers so their components could play audio wirelessly from iTunes on a Windows or Macintosh computer or from such iOS devices as an iPod touch, iPhone or iPad, few realized how many companies would bite.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a stereo system in every room of your house? You could continuously listen to music or the news as you accomplished tasks in each space. The Sonos Wireless Hi-Fi System takes this idea to a whole new level, expanding it to functionality never before possible.
No matter how smart the set, the TV will be challenged to deliver the most effective entertainment experience to you unless it is accompanied by a cadre of accoutrements—some useful, others essential.
The “universal remote” takes on an entirely new meaning as Wi-Fi-enabled touch screen devices proliferate. Thanks to all the free apps, we may no longer need to regularly use the dedicated remotes that came with our TV, Blu-ray player, receiver, home theater system, media player or DVR.
While the new iPad may have been the star of Apple’s event in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 7, 2012, Apple had another surprise product refresh for us, the new AppleTV. Considered more of an upgrade of the previous AppleTV than a completely redesigned model, it still improves on its predecessor in every way possible.
It may seem that MP3 players are being eclipsed by the all-purpose media player, but SanDisk is betting there’s a place for an inexpensive dedicated audio player that also takes voice dictation and receives/records FM radio. 
Apple didn’t invent tablet computers, but it sparked the fire that’s now a full-blown inferno, with every major manufacturer offering one or more tablet computers. A tablet computer is all that most people need, especially for entertainment purposes. But they’re also good for being productive. Let’s take a look at some of the latest and most popular units.
Western Digital had it backwards when, three years ago, it promoted the WD TV HD Media Player as an accessory to its Passport hard drives. Users already wanted to do more than copy content from a computer and walk it over to a media player plugged into their TV.
When recordable CD-ROM drives came out, computer users were ecstatic that there was finally a form of removable media that dwarfed floppy disks in capacity. At 650MB (per layer, per side), CD-ROMs held roughly 451 times the data of 1.44MB floppy disks.
The 10-foot interface has always been a challenge for couch potatoes performing computer-like activities on their TVs. Using a conventional remote to navigate a cursor through the matrix of an onscreen keyboard, selecting one character at a time, required too much effort. But stowing a wireless keyboard on the coffee table seemed like an intrusion from the workplace in a room meant for pleasure.
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