Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Inspired by you, the consumer, iFlyz was born after spending tireless hours traveling and watching as passengers tired to master a way to watch their media. Either you hold it, share the holding responsibilities with someone or rig it up a cup of some sort. Every option leaves you annoyed and with a slight kink in your neck, just reassuring you that flying is sheer joy. iFlyz introduces hands-free viewing while traveling, allowing you to relax and enjoy your downloadable movie or TV show while flying."

It's hard to get a handle on how compact this is, but it's a brilliant idea for anyone that travels a great deal and wants a better way to hold their media playback device. I know I could have used this product many times in the past! It would work equally well on a Zune, a Windows Mobile smartphone, or any other number of devices. The product is available for pre-order ($29.95 USD within the USA, $34.95 to Canada, and $36.95 elsewhere in the world, shipping included) and they'll be shipping them out come February.

"It may have been a bad idea to begin with and Dell finally seems to have realized it. The company says it has now abandoned plans to launch a digital media player tied to an online store. Dell had planned to launch a MP3 player this year that could potentially compete with Apple's iconic iPod line and Microsoft's struggling Zune player. But the company could have done well to learn from Microsoft's experience with the Zune before it started on its venture."

Oh un-named Dell music player...we hardly knew ye! I can't say I'm all that surprised at this - in order to compete with the iPod, a music player needs to have great hardware and great software...and when's the last time you saw Dell crank out any great software? Yeah, exactly. The Zune is a credible option to the iPod because it has quality hardware, and a solid desktop software experience. I can't see Dell doing anything in this market to compete with either the iPod, or even the Zune.

I wrote about the issue of the 4 GB iPod Nano that Apple created, then never announced, last month - but what I didn't expect to see was these 4 GB Nanos show up in Canada. The screen capture above is from the Best Buy Canada Web site. I'd heard rumours of the 4 GB Nano showing up in smaller European markets, but for Apple to release them in Canada - when the Apple Canada Web site doesn't even list the 4 GB Nano as a product - is decidedly curious. Apple must have made a lot of these 4 GB Nanos for them to end up here. What's kind of crazy is the price point - they're only $20 less than the 8 GB Nano, while the 8 GB Nano is $40 less expensive than the 16 GB Nano. $20 to double your storage is a no-brainer - $40 to double your storage is a bigger jump. Has the 4 GB Nano shown up in your local market?

"SanDisk on Wednesday unveiled the Sansa slotMusic Player, its new MP3 player for listening to music on the go. According to the company, the plug & play, portable music player was specially designed for use with the new slotMusic cards available today in the United States. The company rolled out both a Sansa-branded player and new personalized, branded slotMusic players for popular artists such as Robin Thicke and ABBA -- both of which are shipping to U.S. stores today, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart and are expected to be available from retailers in Europe and other regions of the world in 2009."

Well, it looks like slotMusic wasn't just empty industry hype - we posted on it back in September, but I wasn't sure if this was really going to happen or if it was one of those "let's make this public and watch the reaction" scenarios. SanDisk has released the Sansa slotMusic player, and it will sell for a mere $19.99. For that price, you get the Sansa slotMusic Player, slotMusic player shell, earbuds, an AAA Battery, and a Quick Start Guide. That's right, SanDisk is pulling us back into the world of disposable batteries - a very curious move considering the "Go Green" mantra that many people are now chanting. They even tout this as a feature, stating "Free yourself from the hassle of charging". The single AAA battery will apparently give you 15 hours of playback, which is impressive, but who wants to have the hassle of manging a collection of rechargeable AAA batteries? File support for the player is MP3, OGG, FLAC, WMA without DRM.

I'm more positive about slotMusic as a whole than I am this SanDisk player. Do people really want a cheap, low-end player like this? Is listening to your new album on slotMusic worth buying a special player just to do so? I kind of doubt it, but I guess we'll see. What's your take on this new player from SanDisk?

"Remember those new Walkmans we saw recently? Well the folks at Sony have decided to get all fancy and official with them. The electronics-maker is introducing S-, E-, and B-Series PMPs, all featuring MP3 and WMA playback, drag-and-drop file management, and a variety of storage capacities. The 4GB NWZ-S736F and 8GB NWZ-S738F sport Sony's "Open Platform" which allows AAC, Linear PCM, and other codec support, 40 hours of battery life, in-flight noise cancellation, and SensMe -- which creates song shuffles based on user listening habits...The players will be available come September, ranging in price from around $45 to $180."

I love that brushed metal design - it looks better than matte metal, but doesn't have the fingerprint magnetism of glossy metal or plastic. The user interface looks surprisingly good for a Sony product, and if the 40 hour battery life is to be believed, that's quite impressive.

I've had two different SanDisk Sansa Clips, and both have given me radically different experiences, so this is going to be a strange review. I bought the first Sansa Clip when I was in Las Vegas for CES 2008, because I knew I was going to start working out when I returned home and wanted something as small as possible (the Zune 8 is too big for my needs). I picked up the 2 GB version (they didn't have the 4 GB at the time) in red, and was quite impressed with the brightness and clarity of the little two-colour, four-line OLED screen they managed to put on it. I liked having the voice recorder because it allowed me to make a voice recording of my lock combination code, and yes, I did have to use it when I forgot what the combination was. The sound quality is pretty good as well (loaded up with 128 kbps WMA files), although it doesn't go loud enough when you're working out at a noisy gym. I've used it with both the Super.fi 5 EB and the Metro.fi 2 Ultimate Ears headphones, and I have no complaints about the sound.

One of the main reasons I bought it was for the integrated clip. I had a Zen Stone but refused to spend nearly as much for the clip as for the player itself, so I figured I'd get a new player instead. My wife uses a second-generation iPod Shuffle and she loves how she can simply clip it to part of her workout outfit and go - I clipped the Sansa Clip to the waistline of my gym shorts and it worked pretty well, though on two occasions the Sansa Clip disconnected from the clip and fell to the gym floor. Not all that impressive. Anythingbutipod.com has a detailed review that talks about all the features if you want to dive deeper. Back to my tale of techno-woe. Read more...