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February 24, 2004 |
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Hot topics of the week included the product of the year so far: Apple's iPod Mini MP3 player (finally) went on sale. Plus: photography vendors and dealers gather to palaver in Vegas, and a judge says to stop copying those DVDs. |
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iPod Mini
More than 100,000 preorderers can't be wrong: Apple's diminutive, multicolored iPod Mini--which finally went on sale last Friday--is the product of the not-very-old year. If our search and story logs are any indication, CNET users are all over it. Our own MP3 Insider Eliot van Buskirk calls it a "near-perfect" MP3 player. The one question puzzling some observers: why spend $250 on a 4GB iPod Mini when you could pay $50 more for the 15GB iPod? Apple's answer: given its (small) size, you should really be comparing the Mini to flash-based players, in which case, $250 for 4GB seems like a decent deal. Plus, as one shopper put it when asked why she was buying the Mini instead of a regular iPod: "It's pinker!"
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PMA
Cameras have been hot topics hereabouts lately, in large part because of the recently concluded Photo Marketing Association trade show in Vegas. CNET senior editors Lori Grunin and Aimee Baldridge were all over the show, reporting back on product announcements and trends. Among their faves: two of the first 8-megapixel digicams, a 4-megapixel Kyocera Finecam that does away with digital-camera shutter delay, and an affordable 3-megapixel snapshooter from Canon costing just $200.
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DVD X Copy
Copying movies from DVDs is wrong, wrong, wrong...right? That's certainly what a San Francisco judge thinks, recently granting an injunction sought by Hollywood studios barring the sale of 321 Studios' popular DVD-copying apps, DVD X Copy and DVD Copy Plus. 321, which claims to have sold upwards of 1 million copies of the software, says its programs let consumers copy movies they already own for their own personal use--which is perfectly legal. The judge said that studios' rights to put copyright-protection software on their discs trumped users' rights to make digital copies of their movies. Expect this one--or a case much like it--to hit the Supreme Court sometime soon.
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Mozilla Firefox
Sure, the browser wars may be over. But like the soldiers who hid out on Pacific Islands after the end of World War II, some folks just don't know when they're licked. Latest case in point: Mozilla.org has released the latest standalone version of the Mozilla browser. Dubbed Firefox, this lean, mean browsing machine is proving popular with CNET users and anyone else interested in a fast, no-nonsense browsing tool that happens to have built-in pop-up blocking, a handy tabbed interface, and not a whiff of Microsoft about it.
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CD burners dead?
When a DVD drive can do it all--burn CDs and DVDs--is there any reason to bother with a CD-RW drive? That's the question our own Justin Jaffe asks--and to judge from site traffic, many of you have been interested in the answer. It's easy to write off old technologies when speedier, snazzier alternatives are available. CD burners are just the latest case in point. When a DVD writer can crank out both DVDs and CDs, it would seem to be the logical choice. But old-fashioned CD drives are still way cheaper (you can buy low-end internal models for around $40). And they're far
faster, recording at 52X (32X on CD-RW media), while the best DVD drives can do only 40X and 24X. |
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