Wednesday morning I visited the new Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters of Zonbu, makers of the low-cost, service-supported Linux computer I mentioned last month (here). I met with Zonbu CEO Grégoire Gentil, who gave me an overview of the company's business plan and a demo of the system. He also offered… Read more
(UPDATE: RealNetworks has filed an 8-K form with the SEC that contains some more details about Rhapsody America. Most notable: MTV is contributing a $230 million note to the deal, and RealNetworks will in exchange be required to spend that amount with MTV on advertising. The joint venture is between RealNetworks and MTV, with Verizon as a distribution partner.)
The 2007 Consumer Electronics Show must've held some awkward moments for Microsoft.
The previous year, the company had trumpeted MTV's Urge music store as the showcase for the Windows Media Player 11 that was due to ship with Vista. … Read more
If there's one buzz topic that has laptop fans excited right now, it's the transition from traditional platter-based hard drives to solid state drives (like the one in your iPod Nano). These drives, like that flash memory stick hanging off your keychain, have no moving parts, give off less heat, and require less power to run--all good things if you're packing a few thousand dollars worth of battery-powered technology into your carry on bag.
The ultramobile Latitude D420 and semi-rugged D620 ATG laptops are the first systems in the Dell line to get these 32GB 1.8-inch … Read more
This week, the National Association of Broadcasters converges in Las Vegas for its annual convention, a show we here at CNET usually ignore; after all, while the typical CNET reader may have a room dedicated to the worship of the moving image, we don't expect to see a TV studio in an adjacent shrine. And no, producing YouTube videos doesn't count. However, interesting prosumer news floats down every now and then, and Sony's announcement of its flash-memory-based XDCAM EX camcorder landed gently on my keyboard this morning, via Engadget.
In fact, I usually ignore Sony's XDCAM … Read more
We were sure, at first glance, that these were MP3 travel mugs. But that explains why these items aren't marketed at consumers of our advanced age bracket.
The SanDisk "Sansa Shaker" is aimed at younger types with its bright pink and blue hues, as Engadget points out, as well as more conventional specs such as 512MB of storage, an SD flash card slot and a built-in speaker. But the most curious attribute is an cryptic "interactive 'Shake' feature" that remains to be disclosed, along with pricing and availability. We're not too concerned: Whatever it … Read more
Yep, that's right: Yahoo Music Unlimited To Go is available completely sans wires for Sansa Connect owners. That means you never have to connect your player to refresh your music selection, and that is pretty freakin' sweet. And unlike with the Zune, the music you receive wirelessly does not have to come from another (scarce) Zune user, nor does it expire after three plays. Of course, the Sansa isn't exactly alone in this regard: the recently announced Slacker Portable Player and accompanying Web service will offer a similar experience--and at half the price (YMU To Go is $14.… Read more
Just when you thought that SD memory cards, with their fancy new SDHC spec, were pulling ahead of Sony's Memory Stick Pro format in terms of capacity and data transfer rates, here come Sony and SanDisk with an upgrade. The two companies have teamed up to keep Sony's proprietary memory card format up-to-date by increasing the maximum capacity to 32GB and bumping the top theoretical data transfer rate to 60 megabytes per second. That makes this new format three times as fast as current Memory Stick Pro media, according to the companies, though the new cards will be … Read more
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CNET's Galaxy S4 giveaway spectacular!
CNET's publishing another supercharged e-book. "Mastering the Galaxy S4" is almost here, so we're celebrating with a huge S4-related giveaway.
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