Accessories

With the Super Bowl just a couple days away, sales of big screen TVs are probably up a bit – after all, in consumer electronics as well as computing, software (must-see content) drives sales of hardware (televisions, in this case). That’s never more true than with sports content, whether football, the Olympics, or the big one, the World Cup (for my U.S. readers, that last one is a big soccer game. Billions watch it. Manufacturers alter their return policies on projectors and TVs so that "football" fans don’t buy just to watch and then immediately return the sets). Other content …

Logitech has done really well with their acquisition of Intrigue Technologies, makers of the Harmony remote control line. With the broadened marketing and distribution muscle behind it, Logitech announced that they have overtaken Philips and Sony as market share leaders for programmable remote controls. This doesn’t surprise me, as most remote controls have a serious drawback – you have to program them. The Harmony essentially programs itself once you walk through a questionnaire online. While it took them a year or so before they had enough codes online to work consistently, I now consider the Harmony the reviewer’s best friend: …

Convergence is such a loaded word.  Often people assume it means that your TV is networked to your TiVo which plays MP3s off your PC.  While that vision is well and good (and my 4 year old assumes everyone lives that way), most people adopt point solutions that meet their needs at much lower price points.  It’s not just home theater; even in the PC world, this is true.  Sneakernet is a prime example: rather than wire up their homes to share files, many people burn a CD or DVD, or put the files on a USB keychain drive and …