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HP's Digital-Audio Entertainment Box
ARP writes: "Hewlett Packard has introduced the de100c Digital Entertainment Center, a one of a kind stand-alone product that combines Internet features and digital multimedia capabilities. The unit connects to the television and stereo, from where it allows for organizing and storing MP3 and CD music that can be stored on its 40GB hard drive. It also comes with a CD writer for burning CDs on the fly, and USB connections for transferring files from and to portable devices such as PDAs. Coolest of all is the ability to connect through the Internet (broadband and dial-up both supported) to download music. The de100c is expected to hit the stores around the holidays. More info and shot at RatedPC." If this had the video capabilities like TiVo, it might be a much easier sell, but still looks like a useful component.
First, does anyone have an idea about how much this will cost, what PDAs it works with, what kind of outputs it has, ANYTHING? A lot more information is needed.
Second, why USB? Perhaps this is for compatibility with the aforementioned PDAs/MP3 players, but IMHO it should have firewire for future scalability.
Third, cost could easily kill this thing. It doesn't seem like it has many more features than say a GCT Allwell set-top (which is easily hackable), and the aesthetics of it certainly don't appeal to me, so the only way that I would consider it is if the price was *very* low.
Fourth, how much you want to bet that the RIAA will have a field day trying to push against this thing? Maybe they already have a foothold (i.e. you wont be able to burn anything unless its a digitally signed download, etc.?) with this. I myself don't trust set-top devices for burning, especially not with the latest digital rights management push.
Fifth, Access to RealNetworks will never convince me to shell out money. In fact, nothing Real has ever done anything worthy of purchasing, in my opinion. I just don't think its a selling point.
On a side note, all of my home entertainment equipment is Black, what's with this sudden push to make everything blue && || silver? Cut it out!
According to their specs, they are using a 4/8/4 CD-RW (rips music at 4x, writes 8x, write CDRW at 4x). Considering 32/16/10 are the minimal specs for CDRs now, it looks like they's using this box to get rid of outdated CDR stock they got.
I don't know about you
Wow. You can violate somebody's constitutional rights by putting some computer chips together and allowing them to buy it?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?