| Leopard Launch Wrap, HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, Next-Gen PC Security, Product of the Week
I've been covering the Leopard launch for the last three weeks and will now wrap it up. There have been some issues with the new OS, but nothing critical, and it appears to be a near-flawless launch. Moving to a more interesting battle, Black Friday is coming up and it looks like the HD DVD folks are planning on nailing the Blu-ray folks to the wall. Finally, Phoenix Technology is back, and they have a really interesting idea about how we all will be using Linux on our more-secure PCs shortly. As always, I'll close with my first product of the week for November: a new PC that meets the very high Energy Star 4.0 standard, has a starting price of US$369, and allows you to help save the environment without spending a lot of your own green. .
MP3 players not going away soon
The world might be moving increasingly to personal video players, but not everyone wants to gaze at a screen when they are on the road, and the MP3 player category continues to appeal to audiophiles who want tunes on the move. "That category still has a lot of life left," says Travis Fary, a product expert in mobile audio for Future Shop. One of the biggest developments in MP3 players over the past few years has been an increase in memory. "They started out with much smaller memory," Fary says, adding that the most you could get in the early days was 128 MB. Memory capacity rapidly increased, however, and the introduction of hard-drive players expanded capacity enormously. .
Speakers just right for tight spaces
The Yamaha NX-A01 Natural Sound Speaker is so irresistibly cute that it's hard to decide whether to listen to it or pet it. Like a child's Webkinz, you'll want to feed and nurture it. This single speaker ($100 in black or white), not quite a 3.5-inch cube and weighing 11 ounces, is one of two diminutive sound systems from Yamaha I've been auditioning lately. The other, the NX-U10 USB Power Stereo Speaker ($179 in black or silver), is more conventional, more versatile and, ultimately, more useful. But who cares about any of that when you have the adorable Natural Sound Speaker in your palm, ready to introduce it to its latest plaything (an iPod)? The speaker's sturdy plastic build makes it kid-proof, and its so-simple setup — a power cord and a minijack connection for your music player — makes it virtually adult-proof.
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