In a recent Building Windows 8 blog post, Microsoft announced the new product editions for Windows 8. For HTPC-enthusiasts, the announcement turned out to be a good news/bad news proposition. The good news was that Microsoft plans to streamline their offerings, reducing the number of product editions that they plan on offering for x86/x64 PCs to just Windows 8 and Windows […]
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Video phones have been a staple of science fiction for decades. Most of us have come to understand that video phones will never become the norm, simply because there are far too many circumstances in which we answer the phone but would never want anyone to actually see what we look like at the moment, or where we are. That […]
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In the build-up to Netflix’s launch in the UK and Ireland, Roku announced that they had their eye on expanding in Netflix’s wake. Roku managed to follow close on Netflix’s heels into the UK, but today Roku has announced that they have also followed up on their plans to come to Canada. Roku will be launching their assault on the […]
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TP Vision wasn’t the only company on hand at the IFA Global Press Conference in Croatia this week. Samsung was also there to outline its plans to continue to dominate TV sales. Like TP Vision, Samsung had a lot of praise to share for the growth of smart TVs, but Samsung was also sharing some less than encouraging news about […]
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Few things can take the shine off a new HTPC faster than a noisy fan, and few components are more likely to be the source of that noisy fan than the power supply. There are many ways to hide the sound of a CPU cooler and eliminate case fans, but for most folks, there is little remedy for a PSU […]
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I missed the announcement, but evidently Philips no longer makes TVs. Philips has spun off their television manufacturing arm into a joint venture with Hong Kong-based TPV Technology to form a new company called TP Vision. The announcement came early this month, leaving time for Maarten de Vries, the CEO of the new company, to take the stage at the […]
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It has been about a year since Pulse-Eight announced that they would be selling the Motorola NYXboard Hybrid remote control. It was a pretty exciting announcement if only because we so rarely see a company so unabashedly targeting the HTPC market. The NYXboard is an interesting universal remote control for HTPC users for a number of reasons. For one thing, […]
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I was a bit surprised when D-Link announced their new MovieNite media streamer the other day. After all, doesn’t D-Link sell the Boxee Box? At $200, the Boxee Box is obviously targeted at a different market than the $50 MovieNite, but I would have expected D-Link to work with the Boxee team on producing a more limited version of the […]
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At Cebit this year, ZOTAC unveiled three new ZBOX mini-PCs. At the show, ZOTAC was also showing off a prototype motherboard for a new generation of ZBOX machines, a motherboard that was only a fraction the size of a mini-ITX board and even smaller than VIA’s pico-ITX standard. It merited little more than a blurb in the Cebit write-ups that […]
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Roku has quietly begun shipping a new model, the Roku HD. We can often look at the specs and price of a new device, and see where it fits in the manufacturer’s line-up, but the Roku HD seems to defy traditional attempts at pigeonholing. The Roku HD is priced the same as the Roku 2 HD at $59.99, but drops […]
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