End-user perspective on small office tools & technology

Seiki Digital Offers 4K/Ultra-HDTV LCD Display For Under $1300!

SEIKI-UHDTVNews coming out of last week’s NAB2013 conference is that 3DTV is definitely subsiding. Some might say it’s dying, but I expect that it will hang around in some applications. Certainly the movie studios will keep cranking out 3D movies in order to sustain the logic of the theatre chains ongoing transition to digital projection.

In my mind the big news was the coming wave of UltraHD (aka 4K) which seems to have largely displaced 3D as the major entertainment industry trend. UltraHD is quite interesting to me. Of particular interest was the announcement of a 50” diagonal 4K display for a mere $1299. Filmmaker and entertainment industry blogger Andrew Robinson has a good take on this announcement.

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Dave Michels On The Demise Of Netbooks

Self-proclaimed telecom Blogalyst and all-around great guy Dave Michels recently posted some interesting observations about Microsoft, the sorry state of the PC industry and the demise of the netbook category. As someone who has counted a couple of netbooks as important tools in my arsenal I’ve been pondering his assertions. While I agree with many of his observations, I’m not so certain that I draw the same conclusions. Netbooks were doomed to be transitional items from the start.

Dave is correct that Microsoft took a dim view of netbooks, offering only Windows XP Home at a price point that would permit them to retail in the $200-300 range, at least initially. Recall that the entire category was started by the Asus Eee PC. That device offered a 7.0” display, Intel Celeron CPU,  512 MB of memory and 8 GB of flash storage and sold for $199. That device tapped Linux to keep the price down and the performance acceptable.

One of the innovative aspects of the early netbooks was the use of flash-based storage. This was before SSDs were commonplace. It was a great way to eek some performance from otherwise pokey hardware.

The category evolved quite quickly, with most netbooks offering traditional hard drives for storage and displays in the 9-10” range. Most were based upon Intel’s Atom CPU family. At their peak they sold in the range of $350-500.  Only the occasional model reached beyond those prices.

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Webcams 1: The Old Days, A Personal History

I’ve been pondering a series about webcams for some months. As the use of video becomes ever more commonplace webcams have moved into an increasingly important role in both our personal and professional lives.

My own use of webcams harkens back to around 2000. At that time I was working for an English firm, but working primarily from my home office in Texas. My boss was splitting his time between the UK and an office in the Miami area. Others were scattered about North America.

A dispersed group such as this we were making a lot of use of conference calls to have meetings. Being a smaller, privately held firm, we watched costs closely. We often used the fairly new, free conference services. We were at that point blissfully unaware of the games that they played to generate revenue.

Heck, back then “broadband” was anything over 128 kbps. We enjoyed 3 mbps x 768kbps DSL and I still had multiple analog phone lines from SBC.

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New Stuff: VSee For iPad

VSee-For-Ipad-LogoYou may recall that some time ago Milton Chen, CEO of VSee made a guest appearance on a VUC call. I was impressed by the service, which at the time supported Mac and Windows. Recently VSee announced the availability of VSee For iPad.

Normally, products announcements for the iPad don’t even register on my radar. However, as I recently purchased a third generation iPad with the Retina display I thought this a fine opportunity to revisit VSee.

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The Logitech Squeezebox Lives On

squeezebox_mr.jpgThis past week I bought our fifth Squeezebox streaming music player. It’s a used Squeezebox Classic sourced via E-Bay for a rather approachable $89. This new-to-us Squeezebox replaces a Squeezebox Touch model that failed a few months ago.

We now have three in service and two that have failed. Two failures over about eight years is completely tolerable. We remain committed to using the Squeezeboxen even if Logitech has discontinued the line.

I think that Logitech stumbled in their decision to discontinue the Squeezebox line. The product range has a substantial and very loyal user base. It will continue to do so since they have ported both the Squeeze Center Server and Squeezebox player software to the little Raspberry Pi SBC.

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