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Wireless Media Receivers
Clear your schedules, because it's time for another one of my Web chats at 2 p.m. ET today. If you
can't make it during the one-hour discussion, stop by early and submit a
comment or question. I'm guessing that most of the questions will be about
wireless media receivers, the
topic of yesterday's column, in which I
reviewed Apple's AirPort
Express and SlimDevices'
Squeezebox. (Observant readers may
recall that I'd announced plans to try out a third media
receiver, Roku Labs'
SoundBridge; the company was unable to
send me a working production model in time for my
deadline.) I've now looked at quite a few of these things -- besides
the two in
yesterday's column, I've covered D-Link's MediaLounge,
Gateway's Media Center PC and Connected DVD
Player,
Hewlett-Packard's Digital Media Receiver ew5000,
Prismiq's MediaPlayer and Roku's HD1000. From all this testing, I can draw a few conclusions: * A digital media receiver should have no more trouble
accessing a WiFi
network than any laptop or handheld organizer. Why so many
companies
continue to get this wrong utterly escapes me. * If it's going to play my digital music, it needs to play
all of my
digital music, including the stuff that I've lawfully purchased at
an online store like iTunes. I suppose it's too much to hope for
that one media receiver be compatible with both iTunes and
Napster/Wal-Mart/Musicmatch's Windows Media-based
downloads. But a device that already plays AAC files should
support their copy-controlled variant, and a Windows Media-
compatible receiver should have no problem playing a copy-
controlled WMA file bought online. * The less software I have to install and use, the better. I
should not
have to learn a completely different program to manage the
songs
broadcast to the media receiver, as opposed to the one I use
to manage
the songs I play on the computer itself. The AirPort Express's
advantage
in working directly within iTunes should be obvious (Roku's
SoundBridge
will also offer this feature), but the Squeezebox's SlimServer
software
also earned some points just for being an easier, lower-
maintenance
program than, say, the atrocious server application bundled
with the
D-Link product. * Devices that promise an all-in-one convergence
experience, streaming
not just your digital music but also your digital photos and
videos to
the home-theater system, may be more trouble than they're
worth. If
they don't support HDTV output, they make your photos look
far worse
than they are. They often require you to turn on the TV just to
listen to
music, and then there's the question of whether there's the
same kind of demand for photo and video-viewing in the
living room anyway? * The ever-decreasing cost of WiFi laptops has to impose
some kind of
ceiling on the price and complexity of wireless media
receivers. Make
them too difficult and too pricey, and most sane people will
decide
they'd rather just spend a little more and get a laptop that will
let
them check their e-mail and browse the Web in addition to
playing their
music and showing their photos. While I'm on the subject of the AirPort Express, it's worth
taking a
look at what this does to Apple's other WiFi access point --
the AirPort
Extreme base station. With the launch of the
Express, Apple got rid of the entry-level Extreme base station
and cut the price of its higher-end sibling, which adds a
modem port and an antenna jack, from $249 to $199. I'd previously criticized Apple's entire line of WiFi
hardware as being
dramatically overpriced compared to the competition. I think
the Express
is a great bargain at $129, given everything that it does. But I
can't
see the Extreme as any kind of a great deal. For that price, it
should
have at least two local-area-network Ethernet ports, instead of
just one
(in addition to the one reserved for the Internet connection). It
ought
to support the "power over Ethernet"
capability of its discontinued sibling, which can eliminate the
need to plug the thing into the wall. This must be a busy time of year for Internet-phone
services, to judge
from the pleading tone of the "please review us" e-mails I'm
getting
from publicists for "VoIP"(Voice over
Internet Protocol) services. The latest arrival is
Verizon; my colleague Leslie
Walker noted the launch of its new VoiceWing Internet-
phone service in her Web Watch
column yesterday. I
agree with her that it doesn't seem the strongest contender on
price
grounds alone. But I also find it strangely weak in the area-code-
availability
department. You can't get a number in the 202 and 301 area
codes, along
with the entire New York City assortment. I can see not
offering 212,
but when even the universally unloved 646 area code isn't
offered,
something odd is afoot. Two other notes about phone service -- in this case,
Verizon Wireless, which is finally catching
up to its competitors' selection of cell
phones in two important respects. This week, it began selling
PalmOne's Treo 600 smartphone, just over nine
months after Sprint PCS offered a version
of the device that used the same basic wireless technology as
Verizon's. Separately, Motorola and
Verizon announced that the handset
maker's V710 phone
would be available through Verizon next month. This is a big
deal because this phone will be Verizon's first ever with
Bluetooth wireless
built-in. As such, it will end one of the sillier standards battles
ever -- there
was never any good reason for Bluetooth to be restricted to
carriers
using GSM wireless technology and not CDMA (which Sprint
and Verizon
use). Now if Sprint and Nextel could get
around to offering their own Bluetooth phones, we'd actually
have a fair competition going on.
-- Rob Pegoraro (rob@twp.com)
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