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Pictured above: Dave chats with one of America’s greatest inventors: Dean Kamen, Inventor of the Segway & Founder of FIRST, at the CEA Industry Forum.
Dave and Rob report from the CEA Industry Forum this week in San Francisco, CA. Stay tuned to learn about the “5 Technologies to Watch” and what you’ll be buying this holiday season. Meantime, Chris and Mark answer more of your questions in our Miami studios via the Ask Dave Hotline. Call us … toll-free 1-800-899-INTO (4686) … with any consumer electronics question, opinion, help another listener or tell us what your favorite app is and why. You can also participate via our FREE “Into Tomorrow” App (iOS/Android/Intel AppUp). Thank you for your participation!
Tech News & Commentary
Wesley in Nashville, Tennessee listening on WTN 99.7 asked: “I need help in HDMI areas, the cable specifically. If you can tell me if the more expensive cables are better than the cheap ones or of they have the same thing. I gotta make a decision here soon.”
Unless you’re going to run a very long cable (and we’re talking over 50 feet), get the cheap one.
HDMI is a digital standard, and unlike analog standards there is no picture or audio degradation until you try to carry the signal far enough that it can’t build the image anymore. So, you’ll have perfect picture and audio until you don’t anymore, and when you don’t it won’t look or sound worse, it will just be gone. There is no middle ground, either it’s perfect, or it’s not there.
Since that is only a problem over very long distances, if what you’re looking for is 6 foot cable to connect a TV to a Blu-ray player, for example, then get the cheap one. It will make no difference at all in terms of picture or audio quality.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Consumer Reports
with Donna Tapellini
Along with Barnes & Noble, Amazon has emerged as one the industry leaders in the e-book reader category. One of their latest models is Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. Consumer Reports Senior Editor Donna Tapellini is here to tell us how it did in their lab tests and how it stacks up against competition.
Marly in Erie, Pennsylvania listening on WPSE 1450 asked: “I’m interested in cloud services that can only be accessed by a password for a large company that has a lot of data transfer going between two different cities. I wonder how secure cloud services can be in such cases.”
They can be as safe as they are in any other case, really. The authentication methods don’t really change.
Cloud services can be extremely secure, for example, when you get on a plane, the airline has offices all over the world that can access the details about your flight. Now think about every single cargo and passenger flight that airline operates everywhere on the planet, that’s only a fraction of the information that company handles, and it handles it in an extremely secure way. The same goes for banks, or the stock market, or the government, they all share information over highly secure computer networks.
If you if you’re looking to use a third part to transfer your date, something like Dropbox, then your most likely security hole will be a user choosing “123456” or “password” as their password.
There is always the chance that someone will hack into their servers and get users credentials from it, it has happened with several big companies recently, but those cases are rare compared to the amount of data transfer that goes on online these days.
There’s another, realistic, thing to consider: do you really have a choice?
Can you pay a courier to deliver all your data between cities? can they do it fast enough? would they really be any safer? After all, you’d be handing your data over to someone you don’t know…
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Lisa in Fairbanks, Alaska listening n KFBX 970 asked: “I lost everything on my iPhone trying to “sync” it to my laptop. Now I want a tablet, primarily for a bigger screen. Should I just take it to a technician with the phone and laptop to get it set up and all synced together correctly?”
Not really… syncing a tablet should be pretty simple, if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself after what happened with your phone, maybe you can find a tech savvy friend or relative, but it’s really not something that would merit paying an expert to do.
Normally, assuming your tablet is an iPad, plugging it in and following on screen prompts should do, the easiest way to make sure you don’t lose anything is to not put anything on it before you sync it, if you do that, you really don’t have much to worry about.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Genevieve in Greenwich, Connecticut listening on WGCH asked: “I have a cell phone that is so old from Radio shack. I plug it in. It’s very heavy. Is there any chance I could use it?”
It depends on how old it is, but the odds aren’t great.
Different cell phones run on different systems and the systems change fairly quickly, so a phone from five years ago may not be compatible with the network that’s currently in place.
There’s even the chance that, if your phone had been in service all along, it would still work, but that the company providing that service will just refuse to activate new phones to the old system. It seems silly, but it’s actually a big deal, no company wants to have to maintain an expensive, obsolete network for a handful of users, so instead they force them to transition to newer technologies.
So, Genevieve, we can’t tell you whether or not your phone will work, because we don’t even really know what “type” of cell phone you’re referring to, it could be a very old phone from the time your phone came tethered to a briefcase, and those would not work, or you could be talking about a large phone from 5 years ago that doesn’t do 3G, but works very nicely on EDGE, which is still around.
If you can give us more specific information, we’ll look into it for you.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
| HOUR 1 GUESTS | ||
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| Christian Gunning, VP of Corporate Communications – Boingo | Jeff Joseph, Senior VP of Communications & Strategic Partnerships – CEA | |
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This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Dane-Elec: Several 8GB USB Flash Drives from Marvel’s The Avengers Collection
Ergotron: A Universal Tablet Cradle — This accessory converts a monitor mount to hold a tablet or eReader. Works with most popular tablets and eReaders, including Apple iPad, Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle.
iolo Technologies: Copies of System Mechanic 11 – PC Tune-up Software