HOUR 2:
Tech News & Commentary
Cheryl from Poinciana, Florida listening online asked: “Hi Dave, I have the iPad. No video. Only use with WiFi. Love it, but am hating to share with Hubby. Should I be looking at the Motorola Xoom as a second device? Will the Xoom stream shows from the web to the TV?”
The Xoom will in fact stream shows from the web to the TV. And unlike the iPad, you don’t have to buy a proprietary cable or adapter from the manufacturer. The Xoom has a Mini HDMI connector. If you have a cable that is HDMI on one end and Mini HDMI on the other, just plug it in and go. If you don’t, you can buy an adapter to go from HDMI to Mini HDMI at places like Newegg.com for around $5. Once it’s connected to your TV, you can use any number of video apps, like YouTube, Vevo, or any other video source to download and view content on our HDTV.
If you’re not married to the Xoom, you may also want to check out the 7-inch Galaxy Tab, the device runs Android 2.2, has a 1GHz processor, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, 3.2 megapixel rear facing camera and 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera. Samsung is also announcing a totally revamped Galaxy Tab 10.1, that they’re calling “incredibly thin”. You can connect either of the Galaxy Tabs to your TV with the Samsung AV cable, to watch video or pictures stored on your device. The 7-inch is available for $429 and the new 10.1-inch will be available in june.
If you want to wait til later in the year, Panasonic will release the Viera Tablet, available in 4, 7 and 10-inch screen sizes. Both 10 and 7-inch models have HDMI out and USB ports and offer the majority of features you’d find with an Android OS, like the Android Marketplace but also an app store tailored to Viera specific Applications including Netflix and Facebook. The Panasonic Viera Tablet will be compatible with many of the Panasonic Viera TVs already on the market, using a feature called Viera Connect, tablet owners will have the flexibility to transfer content between tablet and their TV.
Tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast for more details.
“This Week in Tech History” Weekly Feature with Chris Graveline.
Terry from Madison, Wisconsin asked: “What would be the best weather radio with the most nifty hi-tech features?”
A weather radio to consider is the Midland WR-300. Besides the AM/FM and ability to monitor NOAA weather channels, it can use external accessories, such as strobe lights and pillow shakers.
While it may not have “All” the nifty features, one that we actually have in our prize closet is the Weather Alert Clock Radio with Skywarn from Radio Shack. This receives “SkyWarn” reports from in-the-field spotters in your area. It’ll tune all 7 NOAA weather channels. It’ll notify you of an alert by voice or tone and by text message on its screen. That’s just some of the features of this particular unit.
It retails for about $80. But since Chris discovered that we have a couple left in our prize closet and you participated on the show, we’ll get one out to you for FREE!
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Guests in this hour:
Rusty Shaffer, CEO – Optek Music Systems
The game franchise “Guitar Hero” may have called it quits, but Fretlight Guitar offers a new way to learn how to play the guitar, combining fun with education.
Group Discussion: News from Google I/O
This week Google held it’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, In San Francisco. Here are some of the announcements made at Google I/O 2011:
• Music Beta: Google’s new music locker (free for a time, but invitation only for now), allows users to upload their music and access them on any device connected to the internet. On Android devices in particular the songs can be accessed while they’re on Google’s cloud, but not physically on the device or downloaded onto the device though a process Google calls “pinning” (simply clicking on a pin, if the pin is selected the song is downloaded to the device, if it’s not it stays on the cloud, but can be accessed if the device has access to the internet). An interesting middle ground Google employs is “caching” recently played songs on Android devices even if they’re not pinned, so that they can be played when the device cannot access the internet (for example, on a plane). Since they’re these are not pinned songs they can get deleted at any time if they haven’t been played recently or, we suspect, if hard drive space starts running low.
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| Google’s Music Beta |
• Chromebooks: Chromebooks are Google’s take on the netbook, they run ChromeOS (which looks like a full screen window of Chrome browser) and are always connected to the internet. Chromebooks rely on the cloud for all of their services, you can open documents on Google Docs, check your webmail, upload photos to Picassa, it’s a completely Google-centric experience geared not only towards individual users, but also to educational institutions and businesses (which pay a monthly fee per user, but Google claims is a much lower expense than managing a regular network).
Chromebooks don’t need antiviruses and don’t need to be updated, since they don’t have much of an operating system, it mostly consists of a web browser. They are not very powerful though and provide very limited functionality (they don’t even have a desktop), limited enough that they were introduced on a presentation that run on a regular laptop, with only the Chromebook demo run from a Chromebook… in fact, none of the Googlers seemed to be using a Chromebook on stage for any of the presentations. Chromebooks will be available in June from Acer and Samsung.
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| Chromebooks, cloud-only computers. |
• Android news: Google announced an immediate update to Honeycomb, and it called… still Honeycomb, it’s only a minor update, but includes some new features. However, a new version of Android called Ice Cream Sandwich will be released on the last quarter of 2011, it will build on the features Honeycomb introduced.
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| The delicious-looking logo for the latest version of Android, to be released in late 2011 |
• Movie rentals: Google is stepping into the movie rental business, making movies accessible through the Android Market, movie prices range between $0.99 and $3.99, the rental period is 30 days and the user has 24 hours to finish a movie after they start watching it. Movies can also be “pinned” to Android devices and viewed wherever an internet connection is not available.
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| Movie rentals on the Android Market |
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Microsoft: Copies of Street & Trips Software with GPS receiver
Powermat: Several Powermat Power! Dual 1850 & Dual 1200 Portable Battery Packs
Que Publishing: Copies of the book: “My iPad 2” (Covers iOS 4.3)
