I have my personal thoughts on Blu-ray, mostly concerning its viability as a successor to DVD for pre-recorded movies, especially in the face of downloads, but there’s one area where a big optical disc is still useful: backing up large chunks of data.

MCE Technologies’ new Mac specific Blu-ray burner takes care of this. Gone is the need for specific software. The Blu-ray SuperDrive behaves just like any other optical drive. Slide it into your Apple Mac Pro and you can drag, drop and burn files right from the Finder.

The 6x speed in the title refers to authoring one 25GB layer. For dual layer burning, you’ll get just 4x, and there’s a twist. The drive can also read and write CD’s and DVD’s, and burn logos into the discs with LightScribe.

The MCE 6X Blu-ray Recordable Drive plus one free 25 GB Blu-ray disc is priced at $499.00 USD.

You can also get a bundle with Roxio Toast 9 and the HD/BD plug-in which is priced at 599.00 USD.

You know, when I got a Sony laptop with an 80GB hard drive it seemed huge but after about five minutes of BitTorrent downloads, I realized that was naive of me.

I also realized that offloading files, especially music files, to an external drive is problematic. The point of a notebook is portability, and hooking up a USB drive just to listen to podcasts in the kitchen is a pain.

What I need is something like Maxtor’s Central Axis, a one Terabyte Network Attached Storage (NAS). It has a Gigabit Ethernet connection to keep speeds up near those of a local drive, and two USB ports to add further storage when you need it.

And even if you are not hooked into the network via CAT5, you can still get your media via wireless connection when whipping together a tasty late night snack (via a Wi-Fi router).

It’ll even stream movies to your Xbox or PlayStation 3 (PS3) without a computer in between.

The price is not unreasonable retailing for $330.00 USD and will be available July 2008.

Source: Gizmodo

Belkin’s latest power-strip adds a very smart feature for travelers: USB ports.

The strip has a couple of charge-only sockets along with the three-way mains AC extenders and even comes with a mini-USB cable, obviating the need to carry chargers for most gadgets.

The $25.00 USD box also squeezes in a surge-protector for those untrustworthy hotel power outlets.

Source: PlanetSean.com

It initially seems odd that Logitech would launch a Mac-only webcam: All Macs but the Mini and Pro have a built in iSight camera.

Reading the specs gives the answer — the QuickCam Vision Pro is a significant step up in performance from the built-in option.

The two megapixel Quickcam can supply 720p video via an autofocus Carl Zeiss lens, and has a built in microphone.

The camera will cost $130.00 USD and – floating eerily as it does in the product shot – the Quickcam reminds me of nothing other than the Empire’s Imperial Probe Droid, or Probot.

Source: Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro Product Page.

The ITC One from SE2 Labs resembles nothing so much as a two foot high photocopier, but inside it has just about every home entertainment gadget known to man.

The ITC One contains a 125 watt amp which is fed from a THX capable sound processor and a Netlinx controller so everything can run from one remote control.

There’s a built-in Hi-Def DVR and the touchscreen on the front takes care of things when you’re not on the couch, but what makes this $25,000.00 USD box special are the third party add-ins.

It comes standard with an Apple iPod dock and an Xbox 360 (including controller ports), and you can choose an optional Blu-ray player, an AppleTV or a Nintendo Wii.

Joining the speaker outputs around the back are HDMI out, analog audio-in, phone and ethernet jacks and a couple of sockets for a humble TV cable.

I specced one out on the site, adding in everything but the optional speakers and displays, but including $1,000.00 USD for the Blu-ray player and $3,700.00 USD for the cables.

I also chose black, so it looks a little less like office equipment, an option which adds $1500.00 USD. The final price? $34,500.00 USD.

Source: ITC One Product Page

Handlink’s Wi-Fi Kiosk is an admirable combination of the old and the new.

This coin-op 802.11b/g wireless access point is a throwback to better times, a golden age when the coins in your pocket were good for something other than tossing to a hobo in the street while on your way to buy a $5 coffee and enjoy some “free” Wi-Fi.

The kiosk works like this: drop in some pocket change and you’ll receive a ticket with an access code. When your time is up, you’ll need to go back and feed the meter.

I imagine it’s designed to work in unmanned environments, or to take the heat off a busy Starbucks Barista. I like the cash-only idea, which brings on-the-go access to non credit card holders.

I’m also looking forward to the first hack, perhaps an exploit which causes coins to cascade from the reject slot like some kind of bling-free Vegas slot machine.

Source: Handlink Wi-Fi KIOSK Product Page

Microdia has announced a new Compact Flash card, the 64GB XTRA ELITE CF, which will strike fear into the heart of the stoutest photographer.

The massive 64GB CF card is the first to market, beating out Samsung, among others, and can carry 19,000 jpegs from a 20 MegaPixel camera.

Of course, that also means you’d have almost 20,000 images sitting in one place; hardly a sensible option for anyone who has suffered a corrupted or worse, lost, memory card.

I also wonder why anyone professional enough to be using a 20 MegaPixel camera and a presumably very expensive CF card would be shooting jpeg.

The Microdia 64GB XTRA ELITE CF has some impressive specs for their world beating card, including sustained read and write speeds of 300x or 45MB/second.

The card is available now, although the price remains unknown.

Source: PC Authority

This rather clunky-looking Apple iPhone add-on brings real GPS to the soon-to-be-obsolete original iPhone.

Consisting a Holux M1000b GPS unit, a custom dock-connector cable and some software which requires a jailbroken iPhone to run.

Here’s a demo video below in which the GPS seems to work fine, updating your position on the iPhone’s built in Google Maps application every second or so:

What it also shows is that you’ll need a minimum of three hands to use it. Darn. I only have two… har har.

You can check out some screenshots over at the company’s blog that show the software turning the iPhone into a big compass, which would seem to be very useful if it, too, didn’t require the big cable and box hanging off the sleek slab.

$100.00 USD for the cable and the GPS unit, $16.00 USD for the cable alone. Good grief Charlie Brown! That seems a little high.

I say wait for the G3 iPhone. Thoughts?

If the tiny 7″ screen of Asus Eee PC is big enough to work on, it’s certainly big enough to act as a secondary mini-monitor for another computer. That’s exactly what Asus new UFOTO UF735 will do.

Sold in the guise of a music playing digital photo frame, the 800×480 UFOTO will also act as a “Sub-Display”, letting you either mirror the computer’s main screen, extend it, or just select a part to display.

The specifications list only a USB port for connection, so I assume that it uses some kind of DisplayLink-like tech to send the video signal via USB.

The metal frame also has slots for the major memory card formats. Whether this is actually useful or not depends largely on the price. If it’s cheap, it’s a surefire winner.

The trouble is, you can pick up a whole 22″ LCD monitor for not much more than $200.00 USD, and most LCD picture frames are over $100. If it’s $50, I’ll buy one, even if it does look like a turquoise Etch-a-Sketch.

Source: The Asus UFOTO UF735 Press Release

Apple Core is a company which sells Apple TVs with upgraded hard drives and, until yesterday, a very handy little USB stick called aTV Flash.

The thumb drive was a plug and play solution to hack your Apple TV, bringing a slew of extra features for just $60.00 USD. After restoring your Apple TV to factory defaults, you slip in the aTV. It goes to work and installs all the extra software needed.

Because the process is reversible (just do another factory restore) and it doesn’t involve physically opening the Apple TV, it doesn’t void your warranty.

Here are the features, as listed by MacMerc:

• Play most video formats (DivX, Xvid, AVI, WMV, RMVB + more)
• Play DVD files WITHOUT converting them [ripped VOB files]
• Sync, organize and watch non-iTunes video files
• Browse the web with a Safari b ased web browser
• Rent & watch Hi-Def movies from Jaman.com
• Stream media from UPnP(v1) media servers
• View local weather forecasts
• View RSS Feeds
• Enable SSH access

As you can see, a pretty significant upgrade. Yesterday, however, Apple Core stopped selling the device:

Due to questions arising regarding the fair use of a particular file present on the aTV Flash, and conflicting opinions as to whether or not it falls under the fair use category, we have VOLUNTARILY discontinued offering the aTV Flash at this time.

In our interpretation of the fair use doctrine, our software does not cross any lines, but since this is a grey area issue, we have taken a proactive approach and decided to seek clarifcation directly from the rights holder before we offer the product again. We are working with them to resolve this, and will have updates posted here as they become available.

Interestingly, all of the tools included on the drive are available elsewhere. The aTV just packages them and does the heavy lifting for you.

It’s hard to tell from Apple Core’s statement whether Apple has put pressure on them, or whether the litigious environment in the US made the company jittery (the new version has received a lot of recent publicity).

I imagine the smart thing to do, though, would be to release the software package as a download and let the evil hacking criminal consumers copy it to our own thumb drive

Source: Apple Core, LLC