Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Hitachi Displays has just announced a 4.5-inch IPS LCD panel that fits 1280 x 720 pixels within its frame, accounting for an eye-watering 329dpi density. That's higher than you can get on the iPhone 4, but the fun doesn't stop there. Hitachi's new goodness also promises an 1,100:1 contrast ratio and 500 nits of brightness coming from an LED backlight."

Awesome! While I never have found the display lacking on my Droid, by a pure numbers game this can be one less feature my iPhone wielding friends can hold over me in the future.

"LifeStudio comes in four flavors, each with several capacities. Where "Desk" SKUs are chunky contraptions with 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM disks, the "Mobile" units have cradles with detachable 2.5-inch, 5400 RPM laptop drives. Meanwhile, "Plus" adds a $20 premium for a dockable USB key -- which makes the LifeStudio Mobile Plus 500GB we tested (above) the maximum in portability for a retail value of $139.99."

The added software that Hitachi offers looks interesting and a good step forward for helping people make sense of their digital data. Sure, there are other options out there, but having it come with your hard drive is a bonus. The one trend that I have found with hard drives, NAS devices and even netbooks that worries me is this whole online storage deal. With most new purchases, I find that most companies are looking to offer you a year of free service (nominally a few gigabytes of storage) of online storage. It is a nice gesture, but a really transparent attempt at getting you locked into their own particular service for which they can collect a nice monthly/annual fee. Manufacturers no longer seem content with hardware sales, but have moved into the regular income of a subscription based revenue source. Watch your wallet!