I never understood this whole fascination people have for unboxing videos and pictures. Normally when I get a review product, I just want to tear into it like it’s Christmas day, but then that’s probably the appeal of these unboxing photos. Since getting an Alienware laptop is an experience, I thought, hold on there, let’s try and take some pictures of the joy of opening this thing up. Let me just say, I’m a terrible photog, so don’t expect professional quality pictures.  I will have a full review of this beast of a machine next week.

Awhile ago I talked about a little company called eMedia Music, they specialize in creating self-paced music training CD-Roms and DVDs. I recently reviewed their Piano and Keyboard method cd-rom and it was really good, if a bit dry. After playing the heck out of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, I got it into my head that I wanted to learn how to play the Guitar. So once my buds at eMedia sent me a copy of the Essential Rock Guitar method DVD, it sat on my shelf for several weeks before I finally got around to purchasing my first Guitar.  Being left handed my choices were limited, when I walked into the music store, they had ONE left handed Electric Guitar and ONE left handed acoustic guitar. After holding the acoustic one, I decided the thin electric one would be for me.  The minute I held it, I was like, hmmm…This doesn’t feel like my Guitar Hero guitar.  I went home and popped the Rock Guitar DVD in and slowly followed the instructions. The DVD is over two hours and teaches you everything you need to get start. My issue with it was, that it was really dry and bland.  It’s all text and tutorial based. 

Each fully interactive, multimedia lessons featuring an animated fretboard with right and left-handed views, eMedia’s multi-camera “Tri-View” video with close-ups, a song-based curriculum, English and Spanish instruction, tuner, interactive chord charts, music tracking and live performance audio. Bonus downloadable toolkit includes: metronome, personal digital recorder, chord dictionary, and digital automatic tuner. The titles in the series are Essential Acoustic Guitar, Essential Rock Guitar, Essential Bass Guitar.  While the interactivity is fine, it’s just not flashy. There’s nothing there that would keep you coming back for more, unless you are really committed to learning your new instrument.  Now most people don’t have the short attention span that I have, and most people who decide they want to learn to play a guitar are willing to put the work in to do it.  For those people this is a great product, but I think it would work better as a supplemental to initial lessons. Especially if you are a left-handed player.  While the DVD does support inverse frets, I found it hard to tell exactly what I was supposed to be doing and if I needed to reverse my fingering or if it was already reversed. The tutorials didn’t make that entirely clear.  I was impressed with the fact that after only an 1/2 hr I was able to get around my guitar, and I knew some notes. When I tried out their Piano and Keyboard Method, I already knew how to play, so it was a nice refresher.  Considering, I knew nothing about the Guitar, this didn’t suck me in the way I’d hoped. I think after I get my 2 free initial lessons and revisit this DVD, I’ll be rocking out in no time.  I’m curious has Rock Band or Guitar Hero made anyone else consider getting a real guitar?

Final Grade B-

EM Review
By Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted 4/6/08

Earlier this Apple released the latest version of their AppleTV product. I found the improvements to the service intriguing, but I wasn’t about the pay more than $200 for the product. I already have an iPod and frankly I can’t stand Apple products. A few days after this announcement I received an email from a small company called Tekkeon. They have an interesting product called a NavDoc, for less than $140 you can turn your iPod into a nifty AppleTV clone. NavDock includes a 16-button dockable remote with a five-way navigation pad and quick keys that jump directly to the videos, photos, music or settings menus to lets users adjust or mute volume, shuffle, repeat or skip songs, and fast forward or rewind through music or videos. What sets this product apart from other TV Docs that I’ve tried is it includes an onscreen menu, so you don’t have to keep getting up to manually change your iPod. The onscreen navigation works fairly well, although it does take a few minutes to figure out how to get in and out of your Podcasts.  The menu is pretty and the fonts are nice and big. I wish it would scale the picture so that video podcast would crisper and cleaner. For instance when I watch video Podcasts on my Tivo box, they generally look really good. That’s because they are made specifically for that format. The same with AppleTV, video is made specifically for the larger format. 

The Navdoc also supports all iPod media. So you can use it to play video, music, and photos on your slide show.  The remote is very straight forward and full featured, but fast forwarding and rewinding still leaves a lot to desired and doesn’t always work properly.  Sometimes it’ll skip to the end or beginning of your media, but rarely lets you manually skip around.  At times it’s a little frustrating. Connecting the doc to your television is simple, just plug the composite cables into your tv, doc your iPod and you are ready to go. The unit itself is a little big, but it is lightweight making it something that I would consider taking with me on my next trip. It could use some improvements and tweaks, but the system does achieve it’s limited goals well. I love watching video Podcasts, and this is a great way to do it on your TV.

Final Grade B

EM Review
By Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 4/6/08

If it’s Tuesday, it must be Bluesday (copyright EM) and we have a tone of interesting news on Sony’s PS3 upcoming firmware upgrade.  Not only are we going to get the new Profile 2.0 update which will bring us Blu-ray Live functionality.  I saw this at CES earlier this year and it looks really promising. The Internet interfaces that was showcased at the Blu-ray conference looked beautiful and fully like Web 3.0.  My fear is it’s going to end up being just as lame as all Internet enabled DVDs in the past.  Not only is the new PS3 upgrade bringing us profile 2.0 capabilities, but today rumor has it that you will soon be able to download a copy of your Blu-ray movie directly to your PSP.  I recently picked up an 8 Gig SD Duo stick for $80. How cools will it be to be able to drop your movies onto your PSP. It’s nice to see studios finally loosing up on their draconian DRM and helping people take their content with them.  The first two movies to support BD- Lve will be Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and The 6th Day.  Here’s the full press release on the PS3 Upgrade.

Update (Tuesday, 8am) -  Sony saw my post and decided, “Y’know what? Let’s release this update now!” So get it while it’s hot.

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If you are looking for a solid, easy to use and cheap video editing application look no further than Adobe Premiere Elements. This product has come a long way from it’s first release a few years ago. It’s stable and pretty fast. A few weeks ago I complained about the interface in Photoshop Elements. Adobe uses the same interface in Premiere but somehow it works much better; maybe because I spent more time with Photoshop, or it’s because the workflow feels more logical to me in a video world than a photo one.It’s pretty simple and straight forward to create a project. You start by creating a project directory and dropping your video and the related files into it. The interface is so slick and simple that it becomes pretty self evident what to do. (more…)

This short film is circulating the web today. While you watch it, keep this in mind - it was made by one person!  Don’t know what tools the person used, but it’s pretty amazing.

Before you shell out over $200 for an AppleTV, take a look at this cool new tool - Nav-Doc.  It turns your iPod into an "AppleTV."  Just put it in the doc and you can watch all your iPod Videos on your TV.  NavDock™ Home Media Center is a home media center with on-TV navigation for iPod. The first dock with on-TV navigation to be available for the newest iPod models (iPod classic, iPod nano 3G), NavDock lets users navigate iPod through an on-TV menu to play videos, photos and music on a connected television. NavDock includes a 16-button dockable remote with a five-way navigation pad and quick keys that jump directly to the videos, photos, music or settings menus to lets users adjust or mute volume, shuffle, repeat or skip songs, and fast forward or rewind through music or videos. With NavDock, users have complete control to customize the language, menu color scheme, screensaver, album art, and navigation speed. And users can even access the equalizer presets on the iPod or display the store song lyrics. NavDock includes a 16-button wide angle infrared remote that is housed in the dock. The remote provides a five-way navigation pad and quick keys that jump directly to the Videos, Photos, Music or Settings menus. Buttons for volume control, mute, shuffle, repeat or skip songs, and fast forward or rewind through music or videos are also included on the remote.  At a retail price of $129, it’s definitely a cheaper alternative to the $229 AppleTV and you get an infrared remote, standard AV output cable (6 feet), universal dock adapters (3), power adapter (100-240 VAC) and user guide.

It’s pretty amazing how far music education has come and the different ways of learning. A few months ago, I wrote about this really cool product called Piano Wizard that turns learning how to play the Piano into a game. I used to be an avid player and played for ten years before stopping. So I’ve wanted to get back into playing. It’s ironic that as I write this, I’m watching a John Legend concert on Blu-Ray and it’s beautiful. But more importantly when he sits down at the Piano playing, I can honestly imagine myself up there doing the same thing. Heck, back in the day I used to perform recitals all the time. So Piano Wizard got me back into one of my early loves. But there’s another software application called Piano and Keyboard Method from eMedia group and it takes everything you learn in Piano Wizard to a whole new level.  Piano Wizard is geared towards kids 5 - 12, while Piano and Keyboard Method is geared towards adults.  I prefer the ease of Piano Wizard, but love the depth of Piano and Keyboard Method.

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Toshiba’s Digital Products Division, a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., today announced the Satellite U305-S2816 featuring the new Intel® Core 2 Duo processor T8100¹. Code name Penryn, Intel’s newest line of premiere mobile processors provides Toshiba’s high-end, thin-and-light consumer notebook with ample strength for powering the most demanding applications, while consuming less energy to empower users to accomplish more with greater efficiency. 

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Everyone who has read EM for any length of time knows that I’m a fan of Adobe. I generally love working Premiere but never had much use for Flash or Photoshop. Not because I think they are bad products, but because they are overly complicated for my simple needs. I actually use Premiere to create a lot of composite video and animation instead of Flash. So a few years ago Adobe heard my complaints and created a simpler version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements and they even have a simpler version of Premiere called Premiere Elements. You can purchase each of these separately for $99 or get a both for $149. Recently I discovered that since I stopped working with Video and switched to photos my life has been a lot easier. But I’m a terrible Photographer and need some post production help. That’s where Photoshop Elements come in.

At first glance this looks like a sexier version of the industry standard Photoshop. Adobe really needs to hire some UI folks if they want to go after the casual crowd with Elements. The Organizer isn’t as user friendly as I would have liked it to be.  Once it’s set up, it works perfectly fine, but on first blush it’s pretty intimidating because it doesn’t do a good job of just finding your photos and you know, organizing them.  No, it opens a screen that lists all the folders on you hard drive, but it doesn’t import anything or even prompt you to import your photos - there’s probably a way to do this, but since it didn’t do it by default I lost interest for awhile.  I downloaded Google’s Picassa tool last week and was up and running in a few minutes. It automatically searched my entire drive, imported my photos and organized them by directory.  Photoshop Elements didn’t do that and it’s disappointing. I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out the interface and gave up for awhile.  I just wasn’t in the mood to play with "complex" software. If I’m not up and running in less than 10 minutes, I have very little interest in using it. But since I did want to review this, I stuck with it.  I eventually realized that, duh, all you have to do is drag your photos over to the organizer and then it’ll do the rest. It doesn’t automatically sort your images (again, I’m sure this feature is buried somewhere in the options tab). You have to tag them, then you can go and look at images by tags/keywords.  Unsorted you get something like the image below. 

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