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Holiday 2010 Roundup

Well, the 2010 holidays have come and gone. For me, they were a time to spend with family, and also playing with my newest gadgets and tech. So here, I offer you a roundup of the neat things I got, and recommend that you go and check some of these things out for yourself.

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First of all, we got, for our house, a new Hitachi TV. It's pretty swell, but that's not what I want to talk about. Remember way back when, when I had said that we had gotten a Logitech Revue from Adobe MAX? Well, a few weeks ago that arrived, but we were still without a tv to plug it in to. Well, that has changed.

We hooked it up, it completed its system updates, and within 20 minutes we were rolling. At first impression, it's a very slick and refined system. You can set it up to connect to your netflix account, cable box, tv, stereo system, and just about anything else that can be controlled. Currently, we have it set up to control only our TV, as the basic cable we subscribe to does not come with a cable box. Now, many people had complained about the controller that goes with the Revue. I do agree on some level with their complaints (i.e. it's bulky, and almost too big), but to a much larger level I do not agree. Honestly, I enjoy being able to sit down on my couch and dial up a youtube video or web address without having to use the keypad on my remote. Having the full keyboard there is extremely helpful. Pair this entire system with the logitech harmony app for iPhone or Android, and you have a perfect home entertainment system. I highly recommend this one.

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The next thing I received is a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex. This drive has 1TB of storage, which is about triple what I had before. Half of this drive is now my Time Machine backup, and the other half has become my main unit for external storage. I don't have much to say about this drive, except that it's fast, reliable, and small. I highly recommend this one too.

 

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Lastly, the thing that I liked the most was the Nook. For those of you who don't know, the nook is essentially Barnes & Noble's answer to the rest of the E-Reader market. Now, I did not get a NOOKColor, nor did I want one. I don't have much faith in an LCD display being as readable as an E-Paper display. I trust those much more. So far, it is a very fast, ver versatile e-reader. I can from it very easily download books off the B&N market, and also use Borders Desktop to sync books to it from the Borders eBook store. The E-Paper display seems to be very quick to refresh, and the small touchscreen on the bottom also seems much more responsive than I had expected it to be. This too, I highly recommend for any student or anyone who reads a lot and doesn't like to carry around many books.

In the end, the holidays went pretty well for me. What about for you? Let everyone know how your holidays turned out in the comments!

All for now!


Arthur Rosa is an engineering manager based in Sunnyvale, California.