Don Cayo
Sun
SANYO Internet Radio R227, Sanyo, $220
An Internet radio that lets you listen to thousands of stations and podcasts around the world without those pesky subscription fees. Expected on store shelves in Canada this week, the Sanyo Internet Radio is WiFi enabled and can be used on a secure wireless network anywhere in the house, the office, or your hotel room should you feel inclined to carry it along. It has clock-radio features so you can wake up to the Internet or to FM radio; it has a remote control, headphone jack and output so you can connect it to an external audio system. www.sanyo.ca.
E20 teleconference phone, Tandberg, $1,500
For companies that are cutting back on air travel to meetings, Tandberg, a Norwegian company that has headquarters in New York and Oslo, has a lot of telepresence, high-def videoconferencing and mobile video products. This phone, coming out early in the New Year, puts video and voice calling on every desk and has a high-res Tandberg camera with DVD quality, w448 video resolution and 10.6-inch wide format LCD display. www.tandberg.com/products/
tandberg_e20.jsp.
XD-E500 upconverting DVD player, Toshiba, $160
I had a chance to see this in operation upconverting from 480i/p to 1080p with 24 frames per second capability and, just as Toshiba says, it does bring DVD quality a bit closer to HD and at a price point that won’t break the bank. If you don’t want to scrap your entire DVD library but love HD, it’s an option. You can play around with the settings — sharp, colour and contrast. Check it out at www.toshiba.ca/xde.
Netbook NB100, Toshiba, $470
I have a new plan for mobile computing and that means leaving the clunky laptop on my desk and instead throwing one of the new mini laptops in my purse, where they take up about the same space as a big paperback. And not even War and Peace. Toshiba’s new entry in this market is a bit heftier and heavy-featured than the one offered by Dell and Asus’ Eee PC but it still comes in around a kilogram (2.2 pounds to be exact). It has a 8.9-inch display screen and 160 Gigabytes of hard drive space and it runs Windows XP Home. At that price point, it also beats spilling gravy on my more expensive laptop that sits on the counter while I’m trying to follow an online recipe.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
