Here’s a summary of the week’s digital lifestyle action on last100. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special weekly wrapup RSS feed or by email.
Top digital lifestyle news
The biggest digital lifestyle news this week was Apple’s almost complete refresh of its iPod lineup. The iPod Shuffle got new colors, the Nano got fatter and support for video, the iPod Video became the Classic (with up to 160GB capacity), and Apple launched a brand new device: the iPod Touch, which may just be the iPhone without the phone that I was hoping for.
Lots of Internet TV-related news too.
First up, we reported that Sony may have plans to launch its own video download store which would work in conjunction with its PlayStation 3 and PSP, as well as the company’s new video Walkmans and Bravia line of digital TVs.
Next up we wrote about Vudu, a soon-to-be launched set-top-box which will offer 5,000 downloadable movies for purchase and rental.
We also brought news of Next.TV, a new Internet TV service that will be bundled with future HP laptops, but that will eventually be offered to non-HP customers via the Next.TV website.
In a post titled ‘Microsoft announces DivX-friendly media extender‘ we reported that Microsoft is taking yet another stab at solving the PC-to-TV problem (the “last100 feet”), with the introduction of its Extenders for Windows Media platform. This time round, Microsoft’s partners include Cisco Systems’ Linksys division, D-Link and Niveus Media, each of which will bring to market devices “in a variety of innovative form factors and price points”, capable of streaming photos, music, video and live television from a PC running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate to a wide-screen TV.
More digital lifestyle news:
Features
Our big feature of the week was a look at eleven video download stores, in which we concluded that while there appears to be much competition, many of the resulting services lack innovation, in terms of their technology choices and how they approach copy-protection.
We also reviewed “GadgetTrak”, a system that can be installed onto supported USB devices, which claims to provide a means of tracking those devices in the event that they are lost or stolen.
That’s a wrap for this week! Have a great weekend.
