Published in the March-April 2008 print edition of PC World Philippines May 16, 2008
Hybrid Hard Drives
Innovation: First hard drives with a built-in NAND flash memory cache.
Benefit: Power savings and performance boost for laptops. Samsung and Seagate each have shipped new hard drives that combine traditional hard-disk media with a flash cache to improve both reliability and performance. Our tests of the Samsung Spinpoint MH80 and the Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD showed that the 256MB NAND flash cache provides some clear benefits—particularly in power saving and read speed.
Eye-Fi Card
Innovation: Allows digital cameras to upload wirelessly to photo-sharing sites or your PC.
Benefit: Wi-Fi-enabled SD Card bridges digital photography’s wireless divide.
The Eye-Fi Card (www.eye.fi) does what few digital cameras have done, and what no digital camera has done well: enable wireless uploading to a photo-sharing site. Pop the 2GB SD Card into your camera and fire off a few shots, and the Wi-Fi-enabled card transmits the images to your preferred site—and, if you like, to your PC. The setup is simple, the device imposes no limitations on the image size, and the uploads happen automatically. And you can use the card at any Wi-Fi hotspot that does not require a splash screen.
Panasonic TH-42PZ700U
Innovation: Packs full 1080p highdefinition resolution into today’s most popular size for flat-screen televisions, 42 inches.
Benefit: Stellar image quality.
Though 1080p LCD sets quickly became commonplace in 2007, showing 1080 vertical lines on a plasma TV this small remained technically difficult. Panasonic’s efforts paid off: In our tests the TH-42Z700U earned stellar image-quality marks. With highdefinition content from Blu-Ray and HD DVD sources, the picture is phenomenal; and because it’s a plasma, even standard-definition programs look pretty good.
Media Servers
Innovation: These HDD-packing players feature multiple in/out ports and support a wide range of digital media formats.
Benefit: These boxes can store thousands of movies, music, and photos and then connect directly to your TV/ home entertainment system for playback without having to go through your PC.
The idea of hard drive-based media servers isn’t necessarily new, but compressed media formats are gaining ground. Thanks to compression technology used for creating DivX and Xvid files, you can compress a two-hour DVD movie into a 700MB file without sacrificing much audio or video quality. These boxes can connect to a PC via a number of ways—LAN, wi-fi, or USB—for file transfers into an internal drive, and then play them directly on your TV. DViCO’s TViX players (such as the HD M-4100SH) also sports two USB host ports for connecting other drives for more storage, file transfers, or an external DVD drive for reading/playing DVD discs.
Zoho Notebook
Innovation: Web-only app stores just about any kind of content and allows you to share it with anyone.
Benefit: More full-featured than competing online tools. AdventNet’s Zoho tools include everything from wiki software to customer relations management and project management applications, many of them free. Notebook (free, in public beta; find.pcworld.com/59300) continues the winning streak. You can enter text, graphics, audio, video, and embedded content from other sites onto your notebook’s pages—or use the page as a single word processing document or spreadsheet. Put together everything on a certain subject, and you’re ready to share your work with online compatriots.
‘In Rainbows’ by Radiohead
Innovation: Band allows its fans to pay whatever amount they want for this new album, starting at zilch.
Benefit: Approach calls the bluff of illegal downloaders, who say they’re happy to pay artists but not music studios.
The recording industry is desperate for new ideas about how to sell music. Radiohead’s pay-whatyou-want approach may not work for all acts and the band has remained mum on reports that 62 percent of early downloaders paid nothing for the group’s new album—but the strategy certainly does one thing that most music companies seem loath to do: It respects fans. And all of the voluntary fees go directly to Radiohead, not to a publisher.
Microsoft Popfly
Innovation: Lets you use Microsoft’s Silverlight platform to create Web mashups.
Benefit: Though Popfly is still in early beta, its operation is clearer and its display is more attractive than that of the similar Yahoo Pipes tool.
If you ever played with Legos as a kid, then you should be able to assemble a Web mashup in Popfly. No coding know-how needed—using Popfly is as simple as choosing content sources (such as pictures, video, or news feeds from various online sources) and connecting them to a display model (such as a video player, a dynamic box for text, or a game of whack-a-mole that pops up pictures, for instance). Voilà, you
have your mashup. You can embed the resulting creation in a blog entry or Web page, or just share its URL so others can admire your work. (See find.pcworld.com/59366 for more information.)
Ask.com
Innovation: Melds comprehensive search results more coherently than competing universal searches do.
Benefit: Proves that not every site needs to mimic Google, and that a venerable search engine company can do cool new stuff. Ask.com, a complete redesign of the former Ask Jeeves site, asks very little but gives a lot via its thoughtfully designed interface, including search suggestions as you type. With one query you can retrieve traditional search results as well as news, images, blogs, video, and more.
Once you’ve searched, you can filter the results with useful suggestions to home in on just what you were looking for. The site is visually minimalist, but you can skin it for a new look. If privacy is a concern, AskEraser wipes away private data that search engines typically store (read more at find. pcworld.com/59305).
