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Philips is diving into the portable video and music market with a range of devices lined up for release. But frankly speaking, i’ve tried the SA1926/27 player. The player is pretty good. But the flaw remains with the ear phones. It surely fits great and sounds great initially. But within a couple of months, you’ll notice that you would require a replacement. Also, the device is bulky and you can’t clip it on like the iPod shuffle. It doesn’t have a clip provided for this purpose. So one should keep it securely in your pockets which I feel is a little difficult.

Coming to the best features of the device is that it has an in-built radio to go with it. Also it has a tremendous battery which can hold upto 24 hours of music play though Philips claims it to go on for 27 hours. If you can get a better ear phone, it surely is a good one to use. It would take an hour for it to charge to 80% of its capacity and another couple of hours to reach the maximum charge. This is again a wonderful feature as we can charge it for an hour and it would run for close to 20 hours.

Finally, Microsoft has come with a wonderful hand-held device, The Zune HD. The looks are stunning. Its sleak, its stylish and its sexy to hold. It has perfectl curved edges which feels good to hold. The two colors, platinum and black, both look great. It is very light and you barely feel it. It is thoroughly impressive on the outside. Now combine this with the OLED touchscreen which provides you the option of multi-touch. The screen is as good as the ones that you see on the iPhone. But the performance of the screen under bright light could have been better. The best feature about this is the NVIDIA’s Tegra chip which runs it. It is a mini-CPU in short. It has eight different coresincluding HD encoder and decoders, a stand-alone 3D GPU, and a 600MHz ARM11 component. This ensures that the Audio and Vedio plaback is unmatched. The depth in Audio and Video would make us feel as though we have something more than a hand held device in hand. It comes in two variants, 8Gb and 16Gb. It is priced at $229. Give it a try and you’ll simply end up admiring it.

Here’s a gamers machine. The all new Asus G51 is in the market and it performs wonderfully well. It does sport a stunning look in white colored external panel. I’m pretty sure that it would be a hit in the market in no time.  It suports a 15.6″ (1368×768) display. Its CPU has a Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 2.0GHz which keeps pumping out everything that you need to keep you glued. The RAM is a 4GB DDR2 800MHz (2×2GB) and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M 1GB GDDR3 has been fixed along with it. You will never see too many gaming laptops with this gaphic card and the results are here to see. It has a 320GB 7200RPM storage unit and runs on Windows Vista Home Premium X64. It weighs just over seven pounds and is priced at $1049. It will surely give its competitors a run for their money.

Comcast is back with yet another scheme to rob Internet bandwidth from its users.  After the attempt to mess with bittorrent traffic last year and the subsequent back off cos’ of the FCC investigation into the issue, comcast is coming up with novel ways to cap bandwidth or in their words ‘ managing traffic during peak periods’.

In October Comcast announced its plans to have a monthly data cap of 250 GB for all its residential users. And decided to terminate accounts who exceeded the data limit for two months. This time Comcast has come up with a much more complex method to cap transfer rates realtime.

According to their new policy, the system is alerted if you use more than 70% of your UL/DL bandwidth for 15 minutes continuosly or if you Cable modem termination point becomes congested cos’ they say it is partly because of your usage. In such cases your transfer rate is capped till the usage drops to less than 50% over a 15 minute interval.

This new method is much more crappier for residential end users, a download lasting more than 15 mins would mean a bandwidth cap till the end of the dowload and till the time the average usage falls below 50%,  like a HQ streaming youtube video will slow down after 3-4 mins and you would have to wait for it to buffer up after that.  What crap ?

Yes, if you are in Finland that is part of your list of rights from next July. To begin with the Finnish government is starting with a 1mbps assured Internet connectivity to all households expect the 2000 odd homes which are too remote.

Come 2015 the Finnish goverment plans to have infrastructure ready for a 100mbps internet connection to every single person in the country. Now, this is one goverment that truly understands technology. With Finland setting an example we’re hoping more countries including India would follow suit to make plans to develop the Internet infrastructure even if it is a long term one.

Right now the average bandwidth for an Internet user in India is around 256-512 kbps, and this ‘high speed connectivity’ is available only in major cities and towns and the subscription plans usually has a pathetically small data transfer limit. And the higher bandwidth plans (upwards of 2mbps) are termed ‘business’ plans and priced out of reach for the residential users.

Dlink has started shipping the all new storage router, the DIR 685 and it can be your for $300. For that price you will get a wireless router, a central HDD storage for backup, a USB share port and a LCD photo frame.

First the basics, the router function is the typical setup with 1 WAN/4 LAN ports with inbuilt antenna for wireless networking. The central storage is from a 2.5″ SATA slot which can take HDDs upto 1TB. The router has the industry standard firewall options like NAT, Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) and the WPA2 for wireless security.

The two USB slots or ‘SharePorts’ can be used for plugging in printers, USB media drives to be shared by the entire network. But a slight drawback is that the USB drive can be used only by one computer at a time because of the USB interface. The router has a  3.5″ LCD screen displaying 1.6 million colors and touch sensitive buttons for navigating through the menu. The screen might not be a replacement for a LCD picture frame but does work for a 4-in-one device.

Sony is going to enter the market with a low cost reader available in two variants, the Pocket and the Touch. The Touch is a replacement for the existing PRS-700 and it is equipped with Memory stick/duo and SD card slots. It has a 6-inch touch screen which looks very elegant and feels good in ones hand. It doesn’t have a backlight in order to reduce visiblity issue due to glare and it comes with an in-built digitized Oxford Dictionary. It comes in three colors – red, balck and silver. The Pocket, doesn’t have touch. It is a regular device. It also doesn’t support external memory slots and comes in three colors – blue, silver and rose. Both are equipped with USB 2.0 and do not suppot WiFi and also have an 512 Mb internal memory. Sony has promised to come with the WiFi version in the near future. The Touch would be priced at $299 and the Pocket would be priced at $199 making them cheaper than their predecessors.

Nokia has come up with the new  BH-905 Blutooth head phone. They claim that it is the best head phone in the market. It comes equipped with ten mics, eight for background noise cancellation and two for the voice. It also comes equipped with a high-performance speakers on one side and phone controls on the other. The speakers come with stainless steel audio controls. The performance of this head phone is pretty good, but no way it is the best in the market. The noise cancellation is great, but the looks leave one asking for more. It would look a little awkward with its bulky looks. Also the price tag of over $400 would make people think twice before getting one.

Netgear has now started shipping out what it is calling the ‘The Ultimate Networking Machine’ which is the new RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router or the WNDR3700. This wireless network router is said to redefine the performance, features and range benchmarks in this category of network devices.

The router promises real-time 350 Mbps wireless transfer speeds and 500 Mbps WAN to LAN speeds makes it the best bet for a small office or a advanced home network. Features like ReadyShare which allows USB drives to be shared by the entire network make this product very interesting.  The router has a 680 MHz on board processor unit to drive its system to make sure the transfer speeds don’t slacken on  multiple simultaneous transfers.

Dual band technology makes use of both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz band at the same time, which provides twice the bandwidth and also reduces interference. The router has eight internal wireless antennas each finetuned for a partucular band. The router has enterprise class wireless security and allows creation of sub WiFi networks to provide access for visiting devices and keeps them away from the main local network.  There is a inbuilt broadband meter to help monitor total broadband usage this is very useful for users who have a data cap with their ISP.

This device retails for $189.99, very pricey for a wireless router… but then you get to have ‘The Ultimate Networking Machine’ for that price.

Yes.. you read it right the first time. Magellan is coming up with a new supersized GPS device – the Magellan RoadMate 1700. Looks like we’re shifting from 5-inch displays to 7-inch now, as a lot of  companies have such big-screen models lined up for launch. The old 3.5-inch GPS devices are history now, as most smart phones with GPS are taking up that space now.

Now, this product is aimed at truck drivers and for other such large vehicles, but no one is stopping you from installing one of these in your little hatch. Coming to the specs of this new launch, it has the standard North American maps pre-loaded, text to speech, lane assistance, route planning, AAA tourbook etc.

The Roadmate 1700 will be priced at $299 and will be available in stores very soon.