A periodic roundup of relevant news… from our friends at Last100:

Adobe Flash seen running on Palm Pre – Netbooks, MIDs, and other smartphones
Adobe was already known to be working with smartphone platforms from Palm (WebOS), Nokia (Symbian) and Microsoft (Windows Mobile), along with a raft of content providers, chip makers and consumer electronics companies. The company has added Google and Research In Motion, with relation to Android and Blackberry-powered smartphones respectively, leaving Apple’s iPhone as the odd one out regarding planned support for full Flash.

Opera wants to put Internet widgets on the TV too
Opera, the Norwegian company behind the desktop and mobile web browser of the same name, wants to be a major player in the nascent Internet-connected TV space. Like Yahoo’s ‘Widget Channel’ or the boutique gadget maker Chumby’s own platform, Opera’s newly released Opera Devices SDK 10 is touting the ability for TV and set-top box manufacturers to add Internet widgets to their feature set, along with full web-browsing if required.

Social networking impressions of the HTC Hero
Having lived with the Hero for over a week, it’s easily the most social networking savvy smartphone I’ve tested, going far deeper than the efforts of most, if not all, of its competitors. For example, while the iPhone has by far the best standalone Facebook app – it’s just that. Standalone. Whereas the Hero takes a people centric approach.

BBC iPlayer on PS3 gets a makeover, higher quality video and 1080p UI
The version of BBC iPlayer optimized for the PlayStation 3 has been given a major update that delivers improved video quality and a User Interface designed for High Definition televisions that operate up to 1080p.

Although the Star Trek holodeck always held great appeal (when it wasn’t malfunctioning and killing off lesser characters), many people reserve a bit more skepticism on the need for 3DTV. This has a lot to do with left-over images from the 1950s, but it also stems from the fact that 3D viewing still requires special glasses, which can be a minor annoyance or a major headache depending on your particular visual cortex.

Possible consumer hesitancy aside, the CE and TV industries are now moving aggressively forward to bring 3DTV to a household near you. The latest evidence? According to a GigaOM Pro report, up to 46 million 3D-capable TVs will ship by 2013. There’s a lot of wiggle room in the words “up to”, but several elements determining this prediction are undeniable, including 3D box office success and the money being spent on 3D technologies by CE manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic. The ecosystem extends far beyond consumer television sets too. Motorola (my own employer) has been making noise lately about encoding advances designed to support 3DTV.

Unfortunately, the GigaOM Pro report doesn’t have any good news with regard to 3DTV viewing without 3D glasses. Autostereoscopic displays still use far too much processing power to make them practical outside the digital signage arena. In other words, the future is here, but it still requires glasses. Maybe this year I’ll stock up at Super Bowl time.

EyeTV, the OS X DVR software and television tuning/encoding hardware provider, receives a companion iPhone app today. The $5 EyeTV for iPhone (iTunes link) provides access to both live and recorded content originating from your Mac, which needs to be running the new EyeTV 3.2 update. While a prior iteration of EyeTV enabled local streaming of recorded shows around the home, these new features are supplemented by router configuration and an EyeTV dynamic DNS service for a true worldwide placeshifting experience – including access to live television.

Given my current OTA situation (Antennas Direct to the rescue?), Cox’s near total clear QAM lockdown, and the fact that my primary Mac is a laptop, I can’t really put the WiFi-only app to use. Not to mention, I’ve been hoping for more OS X EyeTV software refinements which could allow a Mac Mini, supplemented by Front Row and Boxee, to be used as a full time HTPC.

Click to enlarge:

myStarbucks

While it’s true Apple’s App Store is a huge hit, with thousands upon thousands of iPhone and iPod Touch offerings, most are worthless and/or marketing fluff. Like the new myStarbucks. It looks pretty but doesn’t do much of anything. Probably the top feature is the store locator, but I’m not sure you can trust it… It indicates that my preferred weekday SBUX, which closed permanently last week, is open for business. The UI is more attractive than the default Google Maps, but the results appear quite similar. So why even blog this app? Because of what it might one day offer… A second app was also released which allows one to manage their Starbucks debit card and can be used to make purchases. Payment scanning is only available in select Seattle and Silicon Valley coffee shops at the moment, but this is an interesting model worth tracking.

Hava Mobile

Hava support seemed to think it’d be a few weeks before Apple unleashed their placeshifting app, but here we are. And, as expected, you’ll only be able stream video from your Hava box over WiFi. (You can blame AT&T for that.) Somewhat unexpected is the $10 Hava Mobile fee, which flies in the face of their free mobile clients and is a clear shift in strategy based on my conversation with them at CES… where they indicated the app would be free. Regardless, $10 is quite reasonable compared to the $30 iPhone Slingbox client. I plan to give it a spin in the next few weeks.

ESPN Radio

It may not be free like the fine NPR app, but a one-time $3 fee for the new ESPN Radio seems like a small price to pay to aggregate and access a great deal of sports talk. It features live streaming from several ESPN Radio affiliates, including the morning shows and college football broadcasts. You can also stream SportsCenter highlights on demand and bypass iTunes to directly access a few dozen ESPN podcasts.

The new Popcorn Hour C-200 has arrived for review and I have a few quick photos to share while you wait for the complete coverage. This media player looks quite interesting. It’s powerful, supports an extremely large number of video/audio formats and codes, has HDMI 1.3a support, support for an internal drive and a nice LCD screen on the front. So as you can imagine I’ve been waiting for this thing anxiously for the past few weeks – and originally that’s when the review unit was supposed to arrive.  It’s definitely much larger than the old PopcornHour A-110 and is closer in size to a DVD player, if not a bit bigger.

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Do Home Theater PC’s (HTPC’s) have a future? If yes, how will they look and operate? And if not, what will people use instead to bring Internet digital content to their TV’s? Could there possibly be an HTPC in your future?

There are billions of dollars and thousands of jobs at stake in determining these questions, but it’s hard to say that the answers are yet apparent, much less already decided. Having played and worked in this area for a while now, I thought I would jot down some ideas. The timing seemed appropriate as a follow-up to Dave’s recent article on media streaming devices, and as I just finished building a couple of new HTPC’s (and also, sadly, retired my prized DivX Connected “Gej-box” media streamer).

The latest media streaming devices that Dave looked at included a digital media adapter from Netgear, a networked Blu-Ray player from LG, and another networked Blu-Ray player from Sony. Despite how new they are, they still seem to be hobbled by the kind of issues that have faced basically all streaming devices since they first appeared a few years ago. These devices are inevitably limited in what they can do, either in terms of playable file formats or by a particular digital distribution systems (i.e. Netflix, Amazon VOD, YouTube, etc.). None of them have proven to be “universal players,” despite some of the marketing copy them employ. And as Dave noted, the context for such devices is still somewhat dominated by gaming devices such as the XBOX 360 and Playstation 3, that also have very strong streaming options, but still share a number of annoying limitations (some dictated by hardware, some by business decisions).

Fundamentally, these networked media devices are asked to do something they are just not fully designed to do, no matter their particular pedigree or price point.

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In my continuing quest to find meaningful evolution in the digital photo frame space, I stumbled upon the Sungale desk lamp with photo and video display. Not long ago I reviewed a Sungale touch-screen frame, and came away hoping for more. But the desk lamp is a different story. The photos are sharp on the 3.5″ screen, video is surprisingly crisp and easy to upload, and the device even plays any MP3 files you’ve got. My one hesitation here is that the lamp retails for $100 ($90 at Amazon). It’s probably not an unreasonable price, but I still find it hard to justify in my own budget as someone who would normally spend about $15 for a desk light. If your price range is higher, however, you should definitely give the Sungale lamp a whirl. It’s a lot of fun and would be a good gadget gift for the office worker.

First off, this desk lamp doesn’t disappoint in its primary function. The light is bright, soft, and easily flexes in any direction. It’s also energy efficient, consuming only 5W of power.

Getting beyond the lighting function, the lamp has a little pop-up LCD screen that resides in the base. As a photo frame, it’s a bit small, but remarkably clear. The screen gets 320×240 resolution, and the lamp has 512 MB of built-in memory. You can also plug in your camera’s memory card (SD, MMC, MS), or connect to a computer via USB. Transporting photos was easy. My PC opened up a dialog box asking if I wanted to connect using the “program provided on the device.” The software isn’t flashy, but it’s perfectly serviceable, and settings on the lamp allowed me to control the slide-show display.

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