Cool new products

With the opening of CES this week I thought I would give you a quick round-up of stuff that interests me.

The one I'm most excited about is the Sonos system. With the Sonos system you can attach any audio source in any room in you house and wirelessly pipe it into any other room in your house. You can do this with multiple sources in multiple rooms. For example, you can hook up your stereo in your den, your TV in your living room and your computer in your office and then listen to TV in the den, your stereo in your office and your iTunes collection in your living room. Add a fourth Sonos Player in your kitchen and you can listen to any of those sources while cooking.



Sure you can do this with iTunes and Airport Express, but the kicker is that it's all controlled by a very cool remote. It interfaces with iTunes and accesses your playlists. iTunes supports unlimited sharing within your home network (as long as all the computers are within the same subnet) so you can listen to your iTunes collection anywhere you have a Sonos Player.

I think this is a much better solution than Airport Express, Roku Soundbridge or the Slim devices Squeezebox.
Next up is TivoToGo, the newest service from my favorite DVR maker. It's included with the network recorder service, which is a nice added-value, so you just download the software to your PC (not for OSX just yet) and take your favorite shows on the road with you. When you look at how well Tivo has integrated it's software with iTunes, iPhoto, Web scheduling data retrieval it's no wonder that it's the best DVR on the market. i read somewhere that Tivo has a 95% user recommendation rate. In other words, 95% of Tivo users tell their friends. That's unheard of. Apple is only around 70%.

There are a few iPod accessories. AudioVox announced an adaptor that will connect an iPod to your factory car stereo allowing you to use your cars built-in controls. There are a few products like this on the market but none have gotten rave reviews. Maybe this product will live up to the hype Pioneer has announced an interface box for their line of car radios, following in the footsteps of Alpine.

The most titillating, I love that word and I love puns, iPod accesory for the iPod is Playboys new iBod (I kid you not) service. Playboy is offering digital pictures of, I assume, Playmates to display on your iPod Photo.

Seagate had a couple of good announcements. First off is the new 5gb microdrive in a CF card form. That means you can put it into your digital camera and take loads more pics (although I wonder what it will do to battery life?). They also announce a 400gb drive that is being bundled with DVR units or as an external drive.

Canon announced a complete update to their MiniDV line of video cams. All the changes look good and responsive to user suggestions. This is a good follow-up to their spectacular EOS 20d digital SLR announcement a few months back.

All in all there are nice products coming to your local electronics store in the next few months,

I'll be back next week with a MacWorld round-up!