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It's enough of a challenge to launch a new subscription movie channel in an industry segment dominated by the likes of HBO and Showtime. However, Epix, which begins life Friday, starts its adventure with a double feature of sorts: It will also offer a Web streaming version of its channel. That means...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

The Audacity of Droid

The Android mobile operating system is graduating soon to 2.0 status, and Google gave it a pretty nice present to celebrate: a free turn-by-turn navigation app called "Google Maps Navigation." It'll run on Android 2.0 phones with GPS, and it'll use the phone's cellular Internet connection to get liv...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

HP Launched the Craziest DreamScreen Last Night

HP has just made either the most hyperactive digital picture frame on the market or the lamest tablet PC ever. The DreamScreen looks sort of like what you'd have if someone tore an HP Mini in two and handed you the monitor side. It's a device that can run video, show pictures and play music with bui...

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has come up with a new way to attack the chaotic home entertainment market: Let users create their own personal information clouds. On Tuesday, it unveiled its FreeAgent Theater + high-definition media player; and on Wednesday it announced the FreeAgent DockStar netwo...

Toshiba unveiled its first Blu-ray disc player on Thursday at the IFA consumer electronics trade fair in Berlin. The announcement comes less than one month after Toshiba applied for membership in the Blu-ray Disc Association and announced it will introduce products supporting the Blu-ray format. Tho...

Pity the early technology adopters in this world. Just as they have accepted the fact that three years ago, they paid more than $5,000 for a 42-inch flat-screen HDTV that now sells for close to $1,000, a new image starts to coalesce in front of their eyes -- an image so real, so lifelike, it could o...

PRODUCT REVIEW

PlayOn for Wii: Sometimes a Great Application

When they were designing the latest generation of video game consoles -- the generation we're currently right in the middle of -- two of the three major players envisioned their systems as hubs not just for games but for all sorts of digital entertainment. Downloaded movies, songs stored on a PC, hi...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

A Last Call for Snarkers Anonymous?

The old saying used to be, "If you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all." Then the Internet came along, and the saying changed to, "If you can't say anything nice, then invent a fake user name and go to town." The Web has allowed us to get away with saying some pretty awful things...

Chinese PC maker Lenovo, best known for office computers like its ThinkPad laptop line, has announced four new products aimed at the consumer home market. One is its first home theater PC, the IdeaCenter Q700. Another is its first home server, the IdeaCenter D400. The other two are the Q100 and Q110...

New technologies are changing the way we watch video. DVRs, VoD, and online video are freeing us from the broadcast schedules that previously dictated when we could watch programming. The latter two, combined with an ever-growing number of channels, are dramatically increasing what we can watch. The...

When Microsoft rolled out its beta version of Hohm on Wednesday -- a Web site that helps consumers save electricity -- it pulled off a veritable hat-trick. First comes the good publicity from positioning itself as a public benefactor. Second is a live test of its Azure cloud service, first announced...

The recession may indeed be forcing you to cut back on some cellphone and cable television services, but apparently it will only get your high-speed Internet access when it pries your computer mouse from your cold, dead hands. The latest Pew Internet and American Life Project study, released Wednesd...

Computers are the cause of a surprising number of serious injuries every year -- usually to children. The number of acute computer-related injuries increased by 732 percent -- from nearly 1,300 to approximately 9,300 injuries per year -- according to a study conducted by the Center for Injury Resear...

For the last decade, the PC market has kind of sucked. Against the massive growth of the '90s, and with the exception of Apple, which didn't do well in that decade, the PC market has been a poor reflection of the excitement that once surrounded it. Part of the problem was the focus on computation an...

For the last 30 years, many people have invested a lot of money and effort chasing an unrealized promise of hoped-for explosive growth in home automation. With not a lot of commercial progress, it might be seen as foolish to pursue opportunities in this space. However, the promise of addressing lat...

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