Amy and I spent the Rosh Hashanah weekend with her family in Rochester, and Sam had a grand old time playing with all his cousins. Here’s a quick link to the gallery of photos.
All posts by jetrotz
Apple drops a bomb
So, after suing folks who published ‘rumors’ of upcoming Mac products, his Steveness 
decided to do some rumor-mongering of his own today with a classic ‘one more thing’ during today’s announcement of iTunes 7 and the new feature films on the ITMS. Flying in the face of the Apple-PR bible, he confirmed the existence of an unreleased product well in advance of release: a Macintosh set-top-box optimized to connect directly to HD tv sets. Codenamed ‘iTV’, (and priced at $299) the new box is due in Q1 2007, and will be 1/2 size of Mac Mini, built-in power supply (no brick!),
- Networking: 802.11, Ethernet (not sure what flavor of 802.11, though)
- USB2
- Video: HDMI connector for the best HD goodness or component RGB
- Audio: Analog via RCA jacks or optical digital
Steve also shows off the UI, a very slick and more 3-D treatment of the existing Front Row interface for the new device and wows the crowd by playing an HD-quality flick. At root, this completes an ecosystem – rather like ITMS and the iPod did for music, you now have a STB device (the iTV), a storefront (Showtime in ITMS/iTunes7), and a portable outlet. If they can bring more content aboard, this has a good chance of taking a strong foothold.
Problems I see – no TV tuner or information on how this might take incoming video from your existing cable or satellite vendor. It’s also unclear if this is going to have a hard drive at all, or provide any kind of DVR features. And I’d worry about the stability of the wireless connection for HD video content (I know my Windows Media Center and 802.11pre-N network struggles with SD at times). I suspect that the lack of a tuner and possibly of a drive are quite intentional – you’re probably less likely to buy flicks and shows on the ITMS if you have free alternatives like ripping content off the cable and saving it to your drive. That sucks. But if this provides access to HD movies, I’m sure I’ll be buying one as soon as it’s available.
Super Grover at CNN Center
Heading to lunch at my favorite Asian fast food joint at work on Thursday, 
I noticed an awful lot of disembodied Elmo heads floating around the CNN Center atrium. Ah, I thought – Sesame Street Live is in town. And, since Sam seems to be infatuated with Grover, Elmo, Cookie Monster and the rest of the clan, I thought he’d just love to head out on Saturday morning – plus that should work as a good way to tire him out since I had baby-duty the rest of the day while Amy played two performances of Beauty and the Beast at the Fox. The storyline featured Grover SuperGrover getting the help of all his buddies in trying to find his lost “superness.” Despite the audio being way too loud, especially for a bunch of kids’ ears, the show was a lot of fun. Sam had a grand old time, could barely stop talking to and pointing at his favorite characters and we (of course) came home with one of those giant-headed Elmo balloons. Forgive the photo quality above – it’s with my VX6700 camera phone, and not all that wonderful. But the subject was too cute to pass up.
Going Mobile
It will come as little surprise to many of you that I pretty much sleep with my Handspring/Palm Treo, 
having gone through many versions including the 300, 600, and most recently, the 650. Well, I’m leaving all that behind. After having the thing cease to accept or send SMS messages (critical for 911 pages from work), and absolute refusal to sync with my office PC despite soft, hard and other resets – not to mention the email client I had to leave running at work 24/7 to push email to the device which would constantly die and need to be restarted – usually when I was on an extended business trip – I’d had enough. I am now the proud papa of a new Verizon XV6700, their version of the HTC/Audiovox Windows Mobile Smartphone. The most compelling features? Enterprise support at Turner – they have enabled mobile ActiveSync from our Exchange web email access application, so I can get mail, calendar, tasks and my contacts on this device without running something on a desktop client. Pure Joy, that. The device is much faster than my old Treo, the screen is huge, and the near-3G speeds from Verizon’s EV-DO network is a pleasure for web use. And it includes built-in Wi-Fi support, so when I am near a hotspot, I can get even faster performance. Now if the battery lasted longer than about eight hours of typical use, I’d be much happier – I’m looking at the extended life battery right now as my first accessory. I’m hoping that that soon-to-be-in-my-hands MacBook Pro with the Core 2 Duo ‘inside’ as Intel likes to say will make a nice companion for this new phone – courtesy of Boot Camp and Parallels. Woohoo!