Just how well does the Sony Bravia Internet Video platform succeed in putting YouTube and the like on your Sony Telly though? Is it just a gimmick (as well as a mouthful!), or does Sony Bravia Internet Video successfully turn your telly into the biggest social gadget in your living room, and the ultimate social hub?

Read on to find out.

Why choose the Sony Bravia Internet Video platform?

The Sony Bravia Internet Video platform massively extends what you can watch on your TV by giving you almost limitless options of new videos and content. Not just movies-on-demand from the likes of Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand, but all the countless videos on YouTube as well.

This sounds like a great idea, but it’s not eactly new – in fact, every manufacturer now has its own version of Internet TV, so why should you choose the Sony Bravia Internet Video platform over the competition?

The answer lies with the choice of applications that Sony have provided combined with a range of arguably the best HDTVs on the market. Add to this 3D, WiFi and DLNA support, and you’ve got a mouth-watering combination of superb features that makes the new range of Sony HDTVs super-social gadgets!

Sony Bravia Internet Widgets

The applications themselves are called the Sony Bravia Internet widgets, which again, isn’t exactly the most concise term! The widgets are simply Web apps displayed on your HDTV. You can position the widgets anywhere you like, and there’s a good selection to choose from, including:

• Netflix
• Amazon Video on Demand
• YouTube
• Slacker Internet Radio
• Pandora
• NPR
• Sony Pictures
• Sony Music
• USA Today sports
• Yahoo Finance
• Twitter
• Flickr photos
• and many more, including news and weather.

The widgets connect to the respective Web sites through built-in Wi-Fi, which makes connection set-up simplicity itself – no worrying about how you’re going to get an Ethernet cable to reach from your home router to the TV; simply switch the Tv and it’ll find your Wireless LAN automatically.

Sony Bravia BRAVIA XBR-LX900 Series 3D HDTV – the best of the bunch

The widgets provided offer a good selection of Web apps. Certainly the usual suspects of video streamin gsites and social media sites, but nothing quite as open and extensible as Samsung’s offering via its SamsungApps Store.

What makes Sony’s offering unique, though, is the quality and features of the TVs that support the Bravia Internet video platform.

Take, for example, the BRAVIA XBR-LX900 Series 3D HDTV. With screen sizes ranging from 40″ up to 60″, these technological marvels offer full HD 1080p, 240HZ MotionFlow PRO for smooth images with fast moving video, Sony’s BRAVIA 3 engine for superb picture quality and contrast, and full 3D.

That’s right – one of the best screen displays on the market, combined with 3D, plus all the benefits of Internet widgets. It’s this combination of TV quality and Internet and social media extensibility that makes the Sony BRAVIA Internet Video platform so compelling.

This advantage might not last for long, though. With every manufacturer releasing their own version of Internet TV, Sony’s superior display technology might not be enough to beat the competition in the long run. Just like the war currently being waged in the mobile phone world, in the end it might all be about who has the best range of apps.

But what if you don’t have $5,000? Or worse, what if you just spent $5,000 on a shiny new HDTV that isn’t Internet-enabled?

Step forward Boxee and D-Link, who together have been showing off the Boxee Box.

If you want to expand the features of your HDTV, open it up to a world of rich new (and free!) Web-based content, view your pictures and videos as well as those of your mates, or listen to your music or Internet radio, then read on: the Boxee Box does it all, remarkably simply, and for an unusually low price.

Boxee overview

Boxee began life as one of those cracking apps that lets you stream your movies, videos, etc., from your PC to your TV. Originally just a software application, it’s been doing this a few years now, but the problem has always been that it was a little too teccie. Although Boxee provide a few clues as to how you can hook your PC up to a TV, the info provided is a little vague!

Basically, it boils down to installing the Boxee software on your laptop, then hooking your laptop into your TV via an HDMI, DVI or VGA cable. The problem here is that you need to tether your laptop to your TV and yourself to your couch.

Not exactly convenient.

If you want anything more fancy (wireless, perhaps?!), you’re pretty much on your own. There are dozens of different solutions, but finding the best option (and the best trade off between ease of use, price and picture quality) is a nightmare.

So Boxee, despite being a cracking app in its own right, was always for the geeks. You would never give Boxee to your Dad, for example, and expect him to set it up on his home TV (at least, not if your Dad’s anything like mine!)

Fortunately, Boxee realised this, so they’ve come up with a solution: the Boxee Box, or everythng you need to get Boxee working on your TV with absolute simplicity.

The Boxee Box

The Boxee Box is a Set Top Box developed by D-Link that contains everything needed to start using Boxee on any HDTV straight away. As you can see, it’s a somewhat unconventional looking box, and I guess its shape will make you love it or loathe it.

Personally, I love it!

Boxee hope the box will become the center for all of your media, and so have provided a plethora of connectivity options to ensure whatever you’ve got will connect to it in some way. As such, the Boxee Box comes with the following:

• HDMI – one inexpensive HDMI cable to connect The Boxee Box to your TV
• SPDIF – hi-definition digital audio that will pass through Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound and DTS to your A/V Receiver
• Stereo Audio (RCA) – red & white cables from the 80’s, 90’s and today
• 2 x USB ports – add devices like external hard drives and more
• Wireless 802.11n & Wired Ethernet – Cords if you got ‘em, wireless if you don’t
• RF Remote Control – control playback from anywhere

It’s what’s inside that counts

The Boxee Box has some serious hardware inside to give you the richest experience possible on your shiny HDTV. Inside is an NVIDIA Tegra2 chip powering the cracking user interface. Based on a dual-core ARM Coretx A9 CPU (i.e. very very fast!), there’s more power in the Boxee Box than in most laptops. Tegra2 has enough grunt to play 1080p HD content pulled from either your PC or the Internet (it supports Adobe Flash 10.1) without even breaking sweat.

The Boxee Box is also unusual in that it doesn’t use InfraRed for its remote – it uses RF, which means it doesn’t require line of sight, and can work in any room in the house.

Add to that an 802.11n WiFi chip and you’ve got a full powered media streamer that’s guaranteed to work flawlessly with 1080p HD content pulled in from anywhere.

How the Boxee Box solves the four problems of media streaming

The Boxee Box at a stroke fixes the four most common problems that have plagued media streamers and media hub applications since they were first conceived:

Connectivity

How do you connect your PC to your TV? By wire or wireless? If it’s wire, do you use HDMI, DVI, Video-S, VGA or (more rarely) Ethernet? Do you connect directly to the TV, or to a Set Top Box such as a media streamer?

If it’s wireless, what type do you use? WiFi via a media streamer, or wireless HDMI, streaming the video from your PC via a transmitting dongle straight to your TV, which also needs a receiving dongle? There are many other options you could also try, but each comes with its own trade-off between price, quality and usability. How do you know what’s going to suit you until you’ve actually tried the different options? Unfortunately, that’s an expensive strategy!

Boxee’s Solution
The Boxee Box solves these problems for you at a stroke. It uses WiFi and connects to your HDTV using a standard HDMI cable (the same as you’d use to connect your DVD player to the TV).

That’s it! Turn your PC, your TV and the Boxee Box on, and start using it straight away.

You don’t need to make a decision about which technology to use. Because the Boxee Box has been designed to provide a robust experience with a great user interface and the highest quality picture , you can be reassured that the Boxee Box will work exactly how you want it to – straight out of the box (as it were!)

Quality

Streaming media from PC to TV has always been fraught with quality issues. If it’s a wireless link you’re using, it needs to be robust enough not to keep dropping all the time, and fast enough to ensure a smoothly flowing picture without jitter.

Boxee’s Solution
The Boxee Box uses fast 802.11n WiFi for super-smooth Hi-Def video streaming, and D-Link have ensured the WiFi signal won’t miss a beat thanks ot the high quality 802.11n WiFi chip by Broadcom.

This is the advantage of Boxee teaming up with D-Link. Boxee tell D-Link exactly what their software needs for optimal operation and ease of use; D-Link have the hardware chops to develop it. The result – a box that’s been optimized for the quality demanded by Boxee, and ultimately by you.

The Remote

Another problem with getting the Web onto your TV: YouTube videos, Web sites, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, etc., all require text entry. If you’ve ever used a TV remote to enter text, you’ll know it’s the most frustratingly hideous thing you’ll ever do. Hunting and pecking for characters on the screen using the remote’s up, down, left and right buttons is ludicrously bad; in fact, it’s so bad, you’ll only ever do it once and then give up in a fit of exasperation!

All that content in the world, and not of it available because you can’t enter any text.

Boxee’s Solution
Boxee’s answer is to kit their remote out with a full QWERTY keyboard. It’s a normal remote control on one side, but flip it over, and you’ve got a physical keyboard for entering text. Obvious really!

It also uses RF rather than infra-red, and so can be used anywhere in the house – you don’t need line of sight for it to work. You can therefore control your music, skip tracks, rewind, etc., from any room in the house.

User Interface

The final problem with media streaming applications and media receivers has been their awful user interfaces. Because most of the R&D has focused on the hardware (i.e. the tricky part of actually getting the video on the PC to stream to the TV), not much thought ever went in to how the user would actually use the product.

The result was usually the user interface from hell!

Boxee’s Solution
Boxee, in contrast, has designed the user interface first, around the user, and then tasked D-Link with the problem of building the hardware to support it. The result is a beautiful user interface that looks superb, is genuinely intuitive, and has features that even dedicated Internet-TVs can’t replicate.

Like what, you’re asking?

Boxee itself – the ultimate social media app for your TV!

Here’s a video of the Boxee interface showing some of its features. You can see for yourself how great the interface looks.

Now check out more of exactly what Boxee can do for you.

The Boxee Box’s social side

When you fire up Boxee on your TV, you’ll see three main windows:

• Feeds – the latest feeds from your friends’ social networks. Plus what they’re watching and what they’re listening to.
• Featured – recommended content that Boxee thinks you’ll like based on your past viewing habits
• Queue – a list of movies, videos and TV programmes that you’ve found that you want to watch later. This is your playlist of things you want to watch.

That’s the homescreen. The best bit, though, is finding content you want to view.

Boxee contains content from pretty much everywhere. In fact, it’d be easier to list the places it doesn’t get content from, but because that wouldn’t be particularly useful, here’s a list of some of the key places it does!

Watch content from your PC

Boxee is a media streaming application, and so is designed to pull your pics from your PC. It’ll scan your PC to find any pics or videos there, and will then display them in its own beautiful user interface. You can view the pics picture by picture, or watch them as a slide-show, zoom in or out or rotate them.

Videos, too, can be played back and controlled just as easily, as can TV programmes or movies that you’ve downloaded, and any music that you’ve got on your PC.

Just imagine: you’re sat on your couch, viewing your videos, your pictures, and listening to your tunes on you HD home entertainment system, even browsing the Web, while the PC that’s storing all this content is tucked safely away in your study upstairs.

And if you’ve got the ultimate home entertainment setup with full surround sound, Boxee will let you pump your tunes effortlessly from your PC to your home entertainment’s amp and speakers, so you can hear your tunes how they should be heard – loudly!

View content from the Web

Perhaps the best part of Boxee, though, is the way it integrates with the Web.

You can select from hundreds of apps that connect to different Web sites, letting you pull in content from virtually anywhere.

You can link to your Flickr or Picasa account, for example, and view the pics you or your friends have taken, or just browse pics from other people. Connect to YouTube and view your own videos or any videos for that matter.

There’s even a Boxee Bookmarklet that lets you add any video you see on a Web site to your Boxee Queue with a single click, making it ready for you to view when you get home from work, for example.

Remember, all this is taking gplace on your beautiful HDTV.

With your Boxee account, you can also view all this through any PC with Boxee installed as well (it’s a free download), but the Boxee Box means you can view it all in super HD (assuming you have a super HDTV!)

Share what you’re watching

Boxee doesn’t just download content, though – it lets you share what you’re watching with your friends. Add your user details, and it’ll automatically share what you’re watching via Twitter or Facebook.

Probably best not to share everything you’re watching, though (particularly if you’re an MP!), as some of the apps you can download are a little, shall we say, risque! Don’t worry, though, you can set parental controls to prevent adult apps from being viewed.

Conclusion

Boxee is a brilliant way to view all the content that you’ve collected over the years, and the Boxee Box is the perfect compliment to an already excellent application.

If you’ve been wanting to get a media streamer for some time now, but have been put off by the complexities, quality, poor user interface or even the price, then the Boxee Box is the perfect solution.

Download Boxee onto your PC or Mac to try it out – it’s completely free – and see for yourself how good the user interface looks, and how easy it makes viewing pictures and videos form across your PC and the Web.

Now picture all of that content running wirelessly on your HDTV, the sound coming out of your surround sound speakers, all controllable from a QWERTY-equipped remote whereever you are in the house. And all that for less than $200 (UK price to be confirmed).

Perfect! The Boxee Box is already on my gadget wishlist – how about yours?

Quite how they managed to cram the WiFi gubbins into an SD card is beyond me, but what it gives you is automatic uploading of your camera’s pics and videos to any of over 25 photo sharing Web sites, including Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Facebook and Evernote.

Similar in many ways to the existing Eye-Fi, the new ProX2 offers Endless Memory (oh if only!). What this nifty little feature does is to delete the photos it’s uploaded from the card, meaning you never run out of storage space – ever!

Imagine that – you can keep on snapping away all day, safe in the knowledge that your pics are being sent safely to the cloud.

Eye-Fi works by hunting for Wi-Fi signals. When it finds one that you have access to (it can store configuraiont details for 32 different networks), it’ll automatically upload your pics to the photo sharing site of your choice without you having to do a thing. No messy menus or buttons to push, nothing to remember – just automatic background uploading from any camera.

The new Pro X2 features WiFi 802.11 b/g/n for super-fast uploading on any WiFi network. You can also upload your pics directly to your PC or laptop if you wish via a desktop client that also comes with the card.

In addition, the Eye-Fi Pro X2 will let you upload RAW pics if you’re serious about your shots, and will even geo-tag them for you, as well as renaming them according to time and date. So not only do you not need to worry about uplaoding again, you don’t need to worry about finding your pics either!

As if all that wasn’t enough, the Eye-Fi will even notify you when uploading is complete via Facebook, Twitter, text message or email.

This is an incredible piece of technology, and given that I’ve just bought a Nikon D5000 (ah, so that’s why so many camera-related posts!), it’s something that I desperately want right now!

The Eye-Fi Pro X2 will cost $149.99, but you can get cheaper versions from £50.

[Source: SlashGear]

Samsung have managed to endow (for that really is the right word!) the CL80 not just with cracking camera optics and all sorts of image improvement trickery, but also a plethora of connectivity options including WiFi, Bluetooth and DLNA. And HDMI. And then they threw in email as well. Oh and auto-uploads to a range of Web apps!

Seriously, the list goes on and on. So I suppose I’d better start then (deep breath!)

Samsung CL80 camera specs

First, the camera. The CL80 offers the following:

• 14 megapixels
• SchneiderKREUZNACH lens
• 720p video recording
• 7x optical zoom
• Digital image stabilization
• Smart face recognition with up to 20 faces
• Smile shot, blink detection, red-eye fix
• Panorama shot
• Object tracking auto focus
• Smart filter

Nothing too amazing there – indeed, it’s not that different from the latest top end camera phones! However, it’s the other features that Samsung have added that make the CL80 a revolutionary camera.

Connectivity

The CL80 is all about connectivity. To that end, Samsung have given it the following features:

• WiFi
• Bluetooth
• DLNA
• HDMI

This means you can view your shots in loads of different ways:

• Connect the CL80 to your HDTV via the HDMI connection and a cable
• Upload the pics to your PC via WiFi and view them there
• If your HDTV supports DLNA and WiFi, you can view the pics on your telly without the need for wires
• Same goes for a DLNA-equipped PC
• Transfer your pics to your digitial photo fram wirelessly (if your photo frame supports WiFi and DLNA)
• Share your photos with your own or your friends’ mobile phones via Bluetooth

One touch uploading to the Web

What if you want to upload your pics to the Web? Nom problem – if you’re in range of a WiFi connection, you can automatically upload them to the following:

• Facebook
• Picasa
• YouTube

Email sharing

Photo sharing Web sites not your thing? Fine, simply email your pictures instead. Yep, not only has the CL80 got an email client built-in, it’s also got a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard, so you can write an email, attach the pic, and send it to whoever you want!

Somebody from Samsung’s mobile phone division obviously walked into the wrong room one day and started working on the CL80 thinking it was Samsung’s latest wonder phone!

Other Features

I’ve still not finished, though. Aside form all the connectivity and super-sociable gadgets, the CL80 also features a tonne fo super-cool tech, including:

• 3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen
• 720p HD video recording
• SmartGesture touchscreen interface, which lets you access the phone’s various menus using swiping and gestures (told you someone from their phone division got lost!)
• Accelerometer – scroll through your pics by tilting the camera left or right

The Samsung CL80 – superb!

The Samsung CL80 is a fantastic new camera, and probably the most sociable camera around. With its huge range of connectivity options and super-easy uploading to loads of different Web sites, the CL80 makes it absurdly simple to share your photos with anyone or any device.

And surely that’s the point of photos – to share? I don’t want to go all wishy washy on you, but how many photos have you got trapped on your hard drive, or in your mobile phoe or camera?

At last, camera manufacturers are making a real effort to help not just take great photos, but to let others see them as well.

Samsung should be congratulated on make a cracking camera with the CL80 that really helps the user get the most out of their memories.

[Source: Gizmodo]

Of course, it’ll also display pics from an SD card like every other digital photo frame, but its social media features give it an extra dimension that lets it act as a window onto you and your mates’ social lives (though thinking of some of the pics of me on Facebook, I’m not sure my mates would want a window of my social life on their living room!)

In addition to Facebook, you can also email pics to the frame, which is perfect for sending camera phone pics directly to it.

Actually, this opens the Pulse (and your living room!) up to some pretty diabolical uses! Imagine if one of your friends got hold of the email address. Whatever photo they wanted to send would be instantly beamed directly into your living room for full and proud display. How many moons do you think you’d see?!

The Kodak Pulse is a cracking idea – the perfect blend of gadget and social media. With 800 x 600 resolution, the 7″ photo frame will be available on in April 2010 for $130, and is expected to ship worldwide.

[Source: Pocket-Lint]

This camera has everything; the picture even has a snazzy “web2.0″ reflection. Manufactures have been adding features and gizmos to mobile phones for years but this could be the first sign that cameras are going to get the same treatment. We have been moving towards the one device to control them all for sometime but it has always been MP4 players and mobile phones which have received the attention and had cameras added, and been internet enabled but now it is the digital camera’s turn.

Sony has pulled one out of the bag with its new Cyber-shot DSC-G3 digital camera, the world’s first camera with a Web browser. We are still reeling from the announcement that cameras come with Wi-Fi but the G3 has taken it up a notch by providing a web browser so you can, among other things, upload your photos and videos to popular sites such as YouTube and Picasa.

And because the Cyber-shot G3 is a camera you get also the usual suspects: 3.5in display, 10MP with 4x optical zoom and a very generous 4GB of internal storage. Digital cameras usually come with so many features that you can spend a year just playing with them all and this one is no different among the plethora of snazzy options and features you get face detection, DNLA support and intelligent scene recognition. As I was looking through the specification, one of the features did catch my eye and so I had to look it up, smile shutter. Now face detection and scene recognition is one thing but smile shutter is built around the intriguing notion that the camera will automatically take a picture the instant your main subject smiles. All I can say is nice. Here is the smile shutter feature in action (not on the G3 but gives you the idea):

With a price tag of $500 it is a little steep but it is available now and Sony even throw in a few years of free AT&T Wi-Fi access (the kind you

Intel are looking into all manner of different ways of harnessing the energy from the environment. Body heat, the movement of a phone’s trackball, power from a mobile phone basestation, and the sun, are all areas of interest by the company in its quest to completely unshackle the world of gadgets from their dependence on bulky, expensive and annoying batteries.

Solar-powered PMP player anyone?

Which, incidentally, leads me briefly to another story: the Shiro SQ-S Personal Media Player (above), which is entirely solar powered. Apparently it takes six hours to completely charged, but if you don’t have that long, you can always recharge it via a USB port.

Seems that batteries may very soon go the way of the external mobile phone antenna (remember those?!), and good riddance too!

[Source: SlashGear, MobileTopSoft]

You can stream your tunes from your PC, your mobile phone (naturally!), an MP3 player (via USB) or even directly from the Web. In short, anything with a USB connector or that supports UPnP can connect with the Nokia Home Music System.

As far as connectivity goes, Nokia’s little box supports both Ethernet and Wi-Fi for Internet and PC streaming. It also comes with an FM receiver, and will connect to dozens of Internet Radio stations.

It has a great looking display, which will display the contents of the connected device, and you can control your playlist directly from the Home Music’s LCD screen via a remote control, rather than from the connected device.

There’s even an SP/DIF optical connector (for digital connections) and RCA line-out (for analogue connections) to hook up to literally any Hi-Fi ever made, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and, as if all that wasn’t enough, a 10W built-in speaker, just in case you haven’t got your Hi-Fi switched on yet and you really need to hear that new tune from Timmy Mallet!!!

Frankly, I’m in disbelief. This has to be the media streamer that has everything – looks, all the connectivity you could ever need, and exactly the right level of features to make it a must have. I’ve been after a media streamer now for some time, and I think I’ve just found it! Shame it’s not going to be available in time for Christmas, but I’m sure I can persuade the Easter Bunny to give me a Nokia Home Music system next year, rather than the half a hundredweight of chocolate he normally leaves!

I’ve been excited by Nokia’s new N97 phone that was also announced today, but this is just the icing on the cake!

[Source: Nokia]

Any exercise can get a little dull without your favourite bit of music to keep you going, so a small MP3 player has become a common site in gyms. It is all well and good to strap a MP3 player to your arm and go for a job but there are a few problems if you do this when swimming.

Waterproof MP3 players are generally on the pricey side and retro fitting a waterproof case to a standard MP3 player can be a little nerve wrecking, so it is with great pleasure that I introduce you to the Speedo AquaBeat MP3 player.

Let

The Wooo also supports the increasingly-popular DLNA, which is used to transmit pre-recorded video to your DLNA-equipped TV (the Wooo incorporates a DLNA server), and also to browse the contents of the Wooo’s videos through the TV via the TV’s standard remote.

The Wooo supports H.264 for its HD pictures, and incorporates an IPTV server to stream live HD video over to your TV in real time.

The new Wooo won’t be cheap. Not only do you have to buy the camcorder itself, but you’ll also need a TV capable of supporting DLNA, IPTV and WiFi (although you can buy STBs and other boxes of tricks that’ll support the last two).

However, it shouldn’t be long before this technology finds its way into most HDTVs, and so WiFi camcorders should start to become more and more popular.

Effectively, this turns the Wooo into a sort of reverse SlingBox, which currently streams “live” TV programmes from your TV to any client device with an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

With the Wooo you’ll be able to stream genuinely live video that you shoot in real time not just to your TV, but to any TV (or screen, for that matter) that has an Internet connection, again, anywhere in the world.

An intriguing development indeed.

It’ll be interesting to see the applications that emerge for this new way of recording and broadcasting video.

Security is an obvious application, as it turns your camcorder into an instant CCTV camera.

You can also picture people streaming events such as conferences live over the Internet.

All this won’t take place for a while, but a new era in amateur video broadcasting looks like it’s about to dawn.

[Source: TechOn, via SlashGear]