Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Belkin Home Base lets anyone within an existing wireless network print to a single, shared printer from anywhere in the home. Attach an external hard drive to one of Home Base's four USB ports to save and share music, pictures, and videos with your family. Home Base has wireless built in, so the wired port is an option if you do not want to go wirelessly. It will automatically back up each connected computer's files periodically to a connected external hard drive, so you don't have to worry about sudden data loss. With the automatic sharing feature, Home Base can automatically upload your new photos to a Flickr or Picasa account. With popular gaming consoles like PS3™ or Xbox 360®, Home Base lets you wirelessly access media files stored on an attached hard drive."

Pretty neat, my Western Digital WorldBook recently died, leaving me without network file storage (luckily I've got a mutli-layered backup scheme and didn't lose anything). The above paragraph just mentions sharing storage and printers, but the bullet points seem to suggest that you can share any USB device, so I wonder if a scanner would work too.

"However, Lexmark is using its touch technology–which it’s calling myTouch with SmartSolutions (not to be confused with T-Mobile’s myTouch 3G phone)–for quite different purposes than HP’s. The Lexmark printers, unlike HP’s consumery model, are designed for use in small- and medium-sized businesses. Lexmark’s screens are Web-enabled (they let you scan documents and e-mail them without a PC being involved, and include a simple RSS reader) but don’t let you print Web content directly in the way that HP’s does. Instead, Lexmark mostly uses the screen to simplify tasks that you’d normally accomplish with the dedicated plastic keys that most printers have. And the SmartSolutions part of myTouch with SmartSolutions is a nifty-looking feature that lets you save multiple custom sets of settings for use by different people–potentially pretty handy in offices where folks share a printer."

I'm a luddite when it comes to printers, I just have a really basic black and white laser printer. Sure I print photos, but Costco costs $0.13 a print and is a minute away from my house. But, I do find these features pretty compelling for the office. In fact the scan/e-mail function is something I use quite often on our workgroup printer at work.