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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I hate Apple, if Microsoft did half the things that Apple does, they would be sued for Anti-Trust. I despise the fawning fanboy press and Jobs’ arrogance. With that said, I’m real close to purchasing a new Macbook or iMac in the next few days. Not because I want to run Leopard, but because I want to run Windows on it. Even with my hatred, I’m big enough to admit that they are innovative and create some pretty amazing hardware - even if the software sucks. I bought into the hype last year and purchased a Macbook Pro and my experience from dealing with little weasely “know it all” store clerk to dealing with Apple’s many proprietary bs was horrible. I was nickel and dimed on everything from being forced to purchase Quicktime again - because my Windows account didn’t transfer. To purchasing a Mpeg compression codec because Apple only supports .Avi and quicktime. My experience was so awful that I sold my Macbook Pro 30 days later (the store refused to take it back - even though it was well within the return policy) at a $1,000 loss. But even still, I’m real tempted to get the MacBook and run Windows Vista. I just love the hardware, but despise the software.

I watched the Macworld Press Conference today and was completely under whelmed. Wow, you can now rent movies on iTunes. Big deal, I could do that on my X-Box 360 for the last year. Renting movies over the Internet is a fantastic idea, but until the studios get rid of their draconian DRM, it’ll never work. While they hype the fact that you have 30 days to watch your purchase, they neglect to mention the small print that once you start you only have a 24 LOUSY hr viewing window. I’ve been burned by the 360 download several times, so there’s no way I’m getting suckered into “renting” a digital download again. I’m the type of person who rarely watch home movies in a single sitting. I get distracted and come back to it a few days later.

The Macbook Air is an overpriced piece of junk. It looks beautiful, but really about the only thing you can do with it is write on it. I mean really, it only has a 1.6 or 1.8 Core Duo chipset, no firewire or ethernet ports (what do you do if you can’t go wireless?), no optical drive so you can’t watch DVDs on it. Again, I love the idea of it, especially considering my 17 Inch m9700 Alienware is like putting a 10 lb brick in your bag, but it’s too stripped down. Apple TV is pretty slick and something I may consider actually purchasing, but then I realized that I could get a Apple Doc for about $60 that connects my iPod to the TV and gets the same results at a 3rd of the price. But at $224, it is tempting, not for the rental program, but to be able to watch a ton of Internet video with minimal fuss.

Pinnacle Systems, Inc., the consumer division of Avid Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: AVID), today announced that free downloads of its VideoSpin™ video editing and sharing application are available now from www.videospin.com, two weeks earlier than planned. With the new VideoSpin application, consumers can quickly create entertaining videos and post them on the Web or email them to friends and family. The early launch will be welcomed by novice and experienced consumers who are anxious to share their holiday videos and photos as well as fans of online video-sharing sites, and the millions of people with digital videos and photos accumulating on their PCs.

Pinnacle Systems developed VideoSpin by leveraging the editing engine of its award-winning Pinnacle Studio® software and making the editing process virtually foolproof. A compelling solution for people who don’t want to spend much time turning video clips into movies, VideoSpin users can create entertaining videos in minutes simply by:

• Dragging and dropping their videos, photos and music from their PC’s hard drive onto the VideoSpin timeline
• Adding a few transitions and titles, if they wish
• Previewing the changes
• Clicking on the “Make Movie” button.

More than a video editing solution, the VideoSpin application also makes it amazingly easy to upload videos directly to popular Web sites like YouTube™ or Yahoo! Video™.
VideoSpin users and consumers who want more information can access a complete, interactive tutorial on how VideoSpin makes it fast, easy and fun to create movies at www.videospin.com. The tutorial guides users through every step of the movie-making process and makes using the VideoSpin album, timeline and preview components exceptionally easy to understand.

Twentieth Century Fox and Apple(R) today announced Digital Copy for iTunes(R), which provides customers who purchase a DVD with an additional Digital Copy of the movie. Just like movies purchased from the iTunes Store, an iTunes Digital Copy can effortlessly be transferred to iTunes and then viewed on a PC or Mac(R), iPod(R) with video, iPhone(TM) or on Apple TV(R). The first DVD to make its debut with iTunes Digital Copy is the Special Edition DVD premiere of the Family Guy “Star Wars” parody, “Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest,” which is being released in stores today. Fox and Apple are planning to deliver many more DVDs with iTunes Digital Copy this year.

“One of the most requested features DVD buyers have been asking for is the ability to get the movies they bought into their iTunes library,” said Jim Gianopulos, chairman and chief executive officer of Fox Filmed Entertainment. “We’re thrilled to offer such an incredibly simple way for our customers to get even more out of their DVD purchase, and we look forward to releasing many more DVDs this year with iTunes Digital Copy.”

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Hey Everyone, it’s Sunday morning, I’m sitting here in my beautiful 1 bedroom suite, sipping on a cup of hot water (because there’s no tea) thinking about the best way to bring you all that is the biggest Consumer Electronics Show in the World - CES. I’ve been sick all week so I haven’t been able to properly plan EM’s coverage of the big show. But I’m finally feeling like a human being again and am ready to dive in. I’m going to be here until Tuesday, but don’t fret I’ll be able to get you everything you need in two days.  Today, I’m attending 12 Press Conferences - LG, Toshiba, Samsung, et all and tonight I’m attending a special 4 hour preview party.  Tomorrow, I’m walking the floor and attending the Blu-Ray bash.  So I’ll have plenty of images of all the hot toys and entertainment gadgets.  Be sure to check out our special CES page each night for the next few days to get a glimpse of the hot new gear.

The folks at Toshiba recently sent over two different laptops for me to review, the 13.5 inch U305 and the 17inch Satellite P205 Laptops. Both machines are pretty sweet, the main difference between the two machines is the fact that the P205 includes a beautiful 17-inch screen and is packed with an HD-DVD Drive and is equipped with Harman Kardon speakers. The very first thing I did was pop my King Kong HD-DVD into the P205 and it looked and sounded amazing. What’s unique about the P205 is the price point. Most HD-DVD based laptops start at around $2,000, but the P205 starts at around $1,100. The system configuration that I test retails for $1,399. This configuration was an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.5 GHZ, 2 gigs of memory, 300 gig hard drive and Windows Vista Home Premium. Not bad specs for a HD-DVD based laptop. Toshiba is marketing this machine and the U305 as multi-media power machines. They have hit the sweet spot in terms of price verses performance with these two laptops. The rest of this review with focus on the P205, the U305 had the same basic specs except for the HD-DVD drive and instead of running on Intel Core 2 chips, it’s powered by Intel’s Centrino Duo Processors. And frankly I’m not going to lie, I don’t know the difference between the Centrino and Core 2. Intel has come out with so many different processors in the last two years that it’s become hard to keep up. From a speed perspective I didn’t notice a difference between the U305 and the P205. I ran the same tests on both machines and they both performed the same.

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One of my favorite programs, Adobe Captivate recently had an update and I thought it was time for me to take another look. What is it? It’s a screen capture software application that does more than simple screen captures. It records your every movement and mouse click on the screen and then creates snazzy flash movies out of them. It’s great for creating training material, self running presentation and more. You can also use it to create animation – although that’s not what it’s designed for. (more…)