Face it – with well over 120 million units sold, no company even comes close to touching the extraordinary success that Apple has enjoyed with its iPod-branded portable media players. Between classic, nano, shuffle and touch models (not to mention nearly 35 million iPhones sold to date), the almighty iPod has become all but synonymous with MP3 players in just a few short years (and perhaps the first "Kleenex" or "Frisbee" of the 21st century). But commercial success doesn’t necessarily mean the iPod is the best player on the market. In fact, many competing portable media players offer equally high sonic performance, as well as a handful of features not found in Apple’s family of products. Here’s a look at five capable alternatives that also hit a high note:
Tag Archive: format
Is it Time for a Home Server?
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been testing three new home servers, two from HP and a potential revolutionary concept called a nano-plug server. This last one uses Marvell technology, comes from a company called CloudEngines, and it is called the Pogoplug. Let’s talk about home servers today, why you may want one, and what makes these particular models stand out.
What Is A Home Server?
Nvidia and Acer Ionize the Desktop PC to Spite Intel
It’s not often you see a product that is both cool, and designed to embarrass one of the technology suppliers that created it. One particular case makes both an interesting product and an interesting back story. Not only did one of the major parts suppliers abstain from its announcement, the company did its level best to try to stop the product altogether.
Group Cooks up New Photo Metadata Standard
While the popular JPEG format unquestionably reigns as the standard for consumer-level digital photography, storing the so-called metadata that goes along with pictures, like the camera they were taken with, time, and camera settings, remains a wild west of different formats. The Metadata Working Group, a consortium formed by Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony, hopes to get that all straightened out in the future with a new standard for photo metadata.
Office 2007 SP2 to Include ODF Support
Now that Microsoft has succeeded in getting its OOXML format approved as an ISO standard, the company has announced it will offer support for Open Document Format (ODF) and the standardized PDF 1.5 format in Office 2007 Service Pack 2, due in first half of 2009. The mainstream suite of productivity applications will also gain support for the XML Paper Specification (XPS). Microsoft wants the world to know this is one way it’s making good on its promise of improved interoperability with competing products and technologies.
Microsoft’s OOXML Gets ISO Approval
Microsoft’s contested Open Office XML (OOXML) document format has received fast-track approval by the International Standards Organization (ISO), with 75 percent of eligible participants voting to fast-track the standard, and only 14 percent voting against it. ISO will now proceed to publish OOXML as an international standard alongside the competing Open Document Format (ODF).
In theory, standardized documents format should offer a wide range of file interoperability between competing applications: someone could create a document in say, OpenOffice or Apple’s Pages, for instance, save it in a standard file format, and expect that document to be fully accessible in any other application supporting that format—perhaps including Microsoft Word.
Microsoft Takes OOXML Back to the Table
Microsoft Corporation has taking its Open Office XML format back to the International Standards Organization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in hopes of swaying some members to back it as an international document standard. The week-long talks won’t involve any voting, but the Redmond software giant hopes it can convince members that OOXMl is the only realistic way towards a universal document format that retains backward compatibility with the billions of Microsoft Office documents already in existence.
Warner Drops Total HD Dual-Format Discs
Late last year, Warner Bros. announced it was developed a hybrid disc format designed to end the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Named Total Hi-Def—or Total HD—the planned format would literally split the difference, offering HD DVD content on one side of the disc and Blu-ray on the other. Warner Bros. trotted out the format earlier this year at CES with a spate of retailers already saying they would carry Total HD once became available. However, shifts in the high-definition disc market and amongst the movie studios trying to peddle high-definition goods seems to have claimed Total HD as a casualty: in an interview with High-Def Digest, Warner Home Entertainment’s Jim Noonan says the company has set aside Total HD…at least for now.
Blu-ray Beating HD DVD Sales in U.S.
A quick update on the high-definition disc format war: according to Home Media Research (a division of Home Media Magazine), Blu-ray titles outsold competing HD DVD titles by nearly two-to-one in the United States during the first nine months of 2007, although new exclusive HD DVD releases with integrated games and interactive features may change the story during the important fourth quarter of the year.
Paramount, Dreamworks Animation Go HD DVD
A major explosion was set off today in the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD: Paramount Home Entertainment and Dreamworks Animation have announced they’re dropping the Blu-ray high-definition disc format and will issue new released exclusively on HD DVD. Both studios had originally announced support for the HD DVD format before deciding to hedge their bets and support both HD DVD and Blu-ray; now, the studios will exclusively support the HD DVD format based on an “extensive evaluation” of the high-definition disc market and the benefits of the HD DVD format. The deciding factor seem to have been the lower cost of HD DVD players in the marketplace (rather than consumer sales of discs in either format) and the lower cost of HD DVD production.
