"It's a hard knock life for us" Early adopters and the release of some new tech later this month.
As someone who likes to be an early adopter it's a hard life... well not really we play with the cool toys before most of our friends and are constantly on the lookout for the next innovation that's going to change the way we do everyday things.
This month I'm looking mainly at media centre devices and consoles as well as the human interfaces.
The thing that make it a hard knock life for us is our budgets for new toys, and this month sees both the Boxee Box and Xbox Kinect com onto the market (here in New Zealand).
The Boxee Box is something I have followed for a number of years and is the first release of the Boxee software in a dedicated hardware device.
Boxee is one of the best open source media centre software apps I have used, it plays virtually anything thrown at it and what I like best is that it pulls related material from the web to augment the media you are watching.
It also pulls the best of the web video channels and puts them into an easy to master interface, whether you like to watch a lot of YouTube or TED talks you can find and watch this content all through Boxee.
The hardware brings a ready to go media centre with an HDMI port to the party. Produced by D-Link (Who make a lot of routers and other IT equipment) the hardware sports an interesting slanted design and a remote which flips over to give the user a full QWERTY keyboard to interface with the Boxee software.
On the other hand, this month also sees the Xbox 360 Kinect interface to the market, again something I have been following since its original working title "Project Natal". This device using motion capture and depth perception cameras allows you to interface with your Xbox through gesture. Seeing as the Xbox also sports a good media centre, I am leaning towards purchasing this over the Boxee Box purely as I beleive gesture based interfaces will become the next big inovation in the way we humans interact with our technology. We are already seeing this on many other devices such as the iPhone, iPad, many Android phones and of course the Apple trackpad with its multi-finger gesture system.
So many toys, not enough time!
read full post
The Boxee Box is something I have followed for a number of years and is the first release of the Boxee software in a dedicated hardware device.
Boxee is one of the best open source media centre software apps I have used, it plays virtually anything thrown at it and what I like best is that it pulls related material from the web to augment the media you are watching.
It also pulls the best of the web video channels and puts them into an easy to master interface, whether you like to watch a lot of YouTube or TED talks you can find and watch this content all through Boxee.
The hardware brings a ready to go media centre with an HDMI port to the party. Produced by D-Link (Who make a lot of routers and other IT equipment) the hardware sports an interesting slanted design and a remote which flips over to give the user a full QWERTY keyboard to interface with the Boxee software.
On the other hand, this month also sees the Xbox 360 Kinect interface to the market, again something I have been following since its original working title "Project Natal". This device using motion capture and depth perception cameras allows you to interface with your Xbox through gesture. Seeing as the Xbox also sports a good media centre, I am leaning towards purchasing this over the Boxee Box purely as I beleive gesture based interfaces will become the next big inovation in the way we humans interact with our technology. We are already seeing this on many other devices such as the iPhone, iPad, many Android phones and of course the Apple trackpad with its multi-finger gesture system.
So many toys, not enough time!
read full post