The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘features’

My aunt called last night to ask about a laptop she saw advertised in the weekly circular. It had most of the features she wanted, and was priced lower via the ad than she’d seen online for a similarly configured laptop. This led to a brief discussion of name brand preferences for laptops, and the price differences between them.

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You get what you pay for, with SSDs and just about everything else

Last year we wrote about dazzboard, the public beta of a browser-based media manager that claims to have all the features of iTunes without locking you down to Apple’s warm but sometimes stiflingly closed world.

The product from Finnish startup Linkotec has now received $1.5 million in seed funding to boost growth and expand globally. The investment round was led by HTT Sixgen (a Finnish, family owned, VC) and was followed by additional funding from another Finnish VC, Veraventure.

As with so many Finnish startups, there is usually an ex-Nokia person hovering around somewhere. In this case it’s former Nokia Ventures head Timo Teimonen is joining the board. It’s also adding Mats Therman, partner at HTT Sixgen, and Tero Salonen, a serial entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder of Dazzboard.

Amazon’s lopped $50 off the price of the 4.7-inch Magellan Maestro 4700, which includes Bluetooth, voice command, and predictive traffic features. You can get it for $140, today only. Other features include a built-in AAA TourBook, 6 million points of interest, highway lane assist, spoken street names, and 3D landmarks “such as stadiums and bridges.” Magellan Maestro 4700 4.7-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator [Amazon.com]

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CrunchDeals: Magellan Maestro 4700 GPS with Bluetooth for $140

Looks like Google is really going full steam ahead with its shortened URLs. Only a week after the search giant launched its own Goo.gl short URLs, its subsidiary YouTube is launching its own short URL service: youtu.be.

In a blog post announcing the new feature, YouTube writes that the short URL will be used exclusively for YouTube videos (which means it isn’t as useful to spammers for misdirection). The post also notes that because all youtu.be shortlinks include the YouTube video ID, developers can use that information to surface thumbnails and track how a video is spreading.

Unfortunately, embedding a video ID has a downside: they’re relatively long. Whereas your typical bit.ly link weighs in at around 20 characters, a youtu.be link comes out to 27 characters, primarily because YouTube IDs are a beefy 11 characters long. That may not sound like much, but those extra 7 characters represent 5% of your maximum tweet length. Hopefully the features that video IDs enable for developers will outweigh that cost.

Any videos shared through YouTube’s autosharing features to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader will take advantage of the new short URLs automatically. You can also create the link yourself in this format:

To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/” to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into a browser, and you’ll see it redirects to that video.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Attention Battlestar Galactica Android OS fans, Samsung has just taken the wraps off its newest Android-powered smartphone, the Galaxy Spica. By the sound of that name, it appears the Cylons have taken control of Samsung’s mobile division.

The newest soldier in the ever-growing ‘droid army features a 800MHz processor (just like its Moment sibling) and is the first Android smartphone to include native DivX support (so you won’t have to convert your downloaded collection of BSG to watch on the go!). Along with the improved codec support, the Galaxy Spica (GS) also touts other improved multimedia-centric features like the inclusion of DNSe 2.0 for “better sound quality” and 3.5 mm jack for use with your favorite headphones.

Short Version: Western Digital’s newest addition to its growing lineup of media players, the WD TV Live , essentially picks up where its older sibling (the great WD TV ) left off. With the newly added networking capabilities via a built-in Ethernet port or USB Wi-Fi adapter (sold separately), the WD TV Live has taken Western Digital’s little black box to the next level. Be it photos, music, video (encoded with just about any codec under the sun), or the newly added access to YouTube, Flickr, Pandora, and Live365, the WD TV Live can handle just about any kind of media thrown its way

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Review: WD TV Live HD Media Player

The Nook, Barnes & Noble’s new ereader, has upped the ante.

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Chart: How the Nook stacks up in the e-reader race

Portable gaming emulators: Can there be too many on the market?

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Portable gaming emulator costs $81, runs multiple systems

Dell’s got something for the business set today in the 16-inch Latitude Z, a $2000 notebook that measures just over half an inch thick, weighs 4.5 pounds, and charges wirelessly. That’s right, thanks to the miracle of inductive charging, the Latitude Z needs only be placed atop a docking station that both rejuvenates the battery and connects the computer to various peripherals.

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Dell Latitude Z: 16-inch notebook weighs 4.5 pounds, charges wirelessly