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Ah, the problems of modern technology … Digital Video Recorders like TiVO are good for the time-shifting of TV broadcasts – for later viewing, but the question arises: What to record? Today’s limited capacity and single-tuner DVRs require choices to be made … some programs get recorded, but most cannot. Wouldn’t it be nice simply to turn on the DVR and just record everything?

A step in the right direction is provided by some new multi-channel recorders from Sony and Sharp. The Sony Vaio X Video Station (pictured), aka the VGX-XV80S, for example can record 8 analog TV channels simultaneously for almost 3 weeks on it’s 2TB disk drives. (Well, actually it’s a maximum of 17.8 days of recording at a bandwidth of 1.25 Mbps, which is not exactly high quality).

If you’re willing to wait a while, help is on the way in the form of all-channel recording. A recent article in Nikkei Electronics describes a bright future for time shifters, consisting of the movement to digital TV, HDTV, rising storage capacities, falling prices, and adoption of the H.264 video compression standard. Truth be told, we may never get to true all-channel recording, especially with the bandwidth requirements of the estimated 1,000 channels of HDTV expected to be available by 2010, but we’ll be closer.

All-Channel Recording Ready for Digital TV – Nikkei Electronics Asia, Jan 2006 issue

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The RIM versus NTP patent disputes have been going on for almost 5 years now. The twists and turns and reversals of fortune are now documented in a new article entitled Patently Absurd in the Globe and Mail. The article does not make note of or try to analyze the worthiness of the 11 main patents held by NTP Inc. but rather focuses on the 2 main personalities behind the dispute and the hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.

In the 5,400 word article, the Globe documents the origins of the patent fights, the backgrounds of the 2 main combatants, the chronology of the various trials and some of the “Non-final Rejection” decisions regarding many of the NTP patents.

In sum, the article attributes the fact that the dispute has not been settled, to the pride and stubborness of both inventors: Thomas Campana of NTP (now deceased) and Mike Lazaridis of RIM.

Patently Absurd – The Globe and Mail, January 28, 2006

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The new issue of Business Week recounts the start of one of the most dramatic business meetings that we’ve seen in a while. The setting is on the occasion of Steve Jobs’ return to the helm of the then underperforming Apple Computer in 1997 after having been fired by them twelve years earlier. In a set tableau, Jobs enters the conference room, sits down and then turns slowly in his chair to the assembled remaining, and probably terrified, Apple executives and demands: “O.K., tell me what’s wrong with this place?”. After some mumbling by the execs, Jobs goes on to yell “It’s the products! The products SUCK! There’s no sex in them anymore!”.

Jobs’ vituperative opening remarks are appropriate, insightful, to the point, earthy, a defining moment, and ought to be considered a classic.

The remainder of the piece goes on to detail the Disney acquisition of Pixar, the fact that Jobs is now Disney’s biggest individual shareholder and a member of their board, the challenges of working with Steve and his credo of quality over quantity, as well as the many implications of all this for your living room.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is on a roll, an icon, a billionaire and a genuine success. One hopes that, and wonders if, he can stay true to his adopted self-propelling aphorism of: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”.

Steve Jobs’ Magic Kingdom – Business Week, February 6, 2006

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Apple Computer is doing very nicely, thank you very much. AAPL share prices have doubled over the last year, and are at an all-time high, yielding a market cap of just over sixty billion dollars. Earnings have doubled, revenues are up by two-thirds, the company is cash-rich and debt-free, iPods are selling fast, but that’s not enough for Alyce Lomax and the investment analysts at The Motley Fool.

Despite all of the above, Apple did not make The Motley Fool’s Stocks 2006, which is their list of top recommended stocks for the coming year. It seems that Alyce didn’t care for Apple’s discounted cash flow (too low), their P/E ratio (too high), and the competition (too many). Oh well, she may be right, plus there might be a head and shoulders pattern forming, and the Feds are likely to keep raising interest rates.

2006: Year of the Apple? – Motley Fool, January 26, 2006

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The Motorola Razr V3 was launched in November of 2004, and went on to become the world’s best selling mobile phone with 12 million sold to date. The Samsung SPH-A900, aka the Blade, became available exactly a year later (11/05) and, according to a new review in yesterday’s New York Times, although the 2 are near clones in appearance, the Blade is a much better phone.

While the review praises the RAZR’s physical beauty and acknowledges it’s much better battery life, it’s pretty much downhill for the RAZR after that.

The Times tears into the RAZR’s usability and software. They lambaste the address book and call list, the poor design of the menus, the inefficient predictive typing, the lack of memory and the bad user manual.

They conclude by saying that the superiority of the Samsung Blade over the Motorola RAZR V3 is virtually a slam-dunk.

Razr vs. Blade: Cloning Is Only Skin Deep – New York Times, January 26, 2006

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Sony has been making Walkman music players at their fabled Saitama plant since the first TPS-L2 models rolled off the lines there in July of 1979 … but no more. In a sign of the times, Sony has just announced that it will shut down this 1 remaining Walkman manufacturing facility that is located in Japan, and place-shift all production to China and Malaysia. Labor costs in those countries are bottom-line-friendly, at less than one-fifth of that in Japan.

Coincidentally, and on the following day, Sony announced a 47% increase in quarterly profits, thanks largely to a weaker yen and strong sales of the PSP game console. Conspicuously absent from the list of contributers to Sony’s bottom line was any mention of the Walkman product line, which remains mired at a domestic market share of only 15%. Sony has yet to find a way to dislodge this immovable object called Walkman from the irresistible force of the Apple iPod. With half of the domestic portable music market, the iPod is doing well in Japan – Asahi Shimbun attributes this largely to the ease of use provided by iPod and iTunes. The newspaper goes on to say that iPods even occupy 20% of the first floor sales space in the famous Yodobashi Camera gadget super-store.

Sony to stop making Walkmans in Japan, shift all production to China, Malaysia – Mainichi Daily News, January 25, 2006

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The Toshiba Gigabeat S series music and media players were announced at CES 2006 recently. The S series is available as the S30 with a capacity of 30GB, or the S60 at 60GB. Toshiba plans to release this iPod-seeking-missile in March of 2006.

The Toshiba Gigabeat S60 gets as close to the Apple video 5G iPod 60GB as possible, without becoming one. The size, price, capacity and specs of the two devices are virtually identical. One big difference, however, is that the model S60 is a Windows Portable Media Center, so it works with wma, wmv, wav, jpeg and mp3 files. The iPod of course is more Apple-centric, and it supports mpeg4 and H.264 video playback.

Another interesting difference between them is the screen. While the iPod and the Gigabeat S60 both offer QVGA resolution, Apple has opted to go landscape, while Toshiba has gone with portrait orientation. And, despite appearances (see attached image), the screen on the iPod (left) which measures 2.5 inches, is actually larger than the screen on the S60, which comes in at 2.4 inches.

Concluding thoughts: unfortunately for the Gigabeat S60, it’s somewhat anaesthetic.

2006 CES new PMC/ portable videoplayer compilations – Impress Watch, 20060108

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Here’s yet another list of so-called coolest gadgets, this time for January 2006. Courtesy of IDG News, the apparent coolest gizmo in the coldest month (Jan) is the Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player. The HD-XA1 plays HD DVDs in either 720-progressive or 1080-interlaced modes, handles current-gen DVDs, and is one of the opening moves in the Blu-ray versus HD DVD format wars.

1. Toshiba HD-XA1 HD-DVD player.
2. Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray Disc player
3. Pioneer BDP-HD1 Blu-ray Disc Player
4. Sony Reader
5. Panasonic VDR-D300 DVD Video Camera
6. Panasonic 103-inch Plasma TV

7. Samsung HSDPA Cell Phone

Samsung’s HSDPA phone is still in the digital sandox, but a prototype has reached a blistering 3.6 Mbps. The High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) 3GPP Release 5 spec can ramp up to 10 Mbps.

January’s coolest gadgets – IDG News Service, 01/17/2006

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Here is a pointer to an exhibit of photographs at the Library of Congress taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii in Tsarist Russia between 1909 and 1915. Prokudin-Gorskii was a bona-fide pioneer in the area of photographic innovation, was appointed Photographer to the Tsar and charged with creating a photographic record of the Tsar’s empire. The photographs were originally recorded on glass plates through colored filters, purchased by the Library of Congress in 2001 and then scanned, digitized and enhanced for purposes of the exhibition.

An outstanding example of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work is his portrait of Muhammad Alim Khan taken in 1911 on the occasion of his accession as Emir of Bukhara.

The Empire That Was Russia – The Prokudin-Gorskii Photograhic Record Recreated

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Hasselblad has released a new digital camera, the model H2D-39, which it claims is the world’s first 39 megapixel, digital auto-focus camera. It offers ultra-high resolution at an ultra-high price which ranges upwards from $30,000, depending on options and features and backs. A single uncompressed RAW file image from the H2D-39 can require as much as 78 MB of storage.

Hasselblad launches the world’s first 39 megapixel DSLR camera – Hasselblad Press Release, Jan 9, 2006

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