Filed under: Wireless

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

Whittling down the amount of remotes in one’s living room has long since been a challenge for the amateur home theater builder, and while there are some decent universal solutions on the market, the RF4CE Consortium is hoping to make things painfully simple. The group has been formed in order to “drive the adoption of an open radio frequency (RF) entertainment control specification based on IEEE 802.15.4.” If you’ll recall, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard that standard called, as it’s also used in MaxStream’s XBee Xtender. Notably, Freescale is hoping to incorporate its Synkro technology into the specification, and in an ideal world, we’d see said protocol filter into DVD players, AV receivers, set-top-boxes and all manners of components. Let the IR-to-RF transition begin, we say.

Read - Sony’s RF4CE Consortium release
Read - Freescale’s RF4CE Consortium release

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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Lots of news on the VUDU front today, starting with the announcement that the grossly overpriced VUDU XL is finally shipping to all three people who forked out for one. Moving on to more important matters, the forthcoming v1.3 software — which is hitting barely a month after v1.2 was loosed — will open up the VUDU Vault. Put simply, this feature will “enable consumer to move owned titles from the VUDU hard drive to a secure area on VUDU servers to free up space for additional purchases.” As expected, the feature will only be available on “select titles,” but hey, we suppose we’ll take what we can get. Moving on, VUDU is also announcing the $39 IR receiver kit for both the original STB and the XL, which will “allow for the operation of the service using approved programmable remotes.” Lastly, v1.3 will bring about a numerically listed Most Watched overlay as well as improved searching for TV episodes. No word on when the update will start being pushed out, but we’d guess it’ll be sooner rather than later.

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Remember that intriguing KP-900 that came our way courtesy of the FCC late last month? Turns out, this creature is getting all official on us today, with Universal proudly proclaiming that its newest IR / RF dual-use remote will be debuting at the Electronic House Expo in Orlando next month. The multifaceted gizmo is made to be retrofitted into any home that could use a wall-mounted home automation controller and a sophisticated home theater remote, and it should be hitting authorized dealer locations next month for $599. Not bad, not bad at all.

[Via Widescreen Review]

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Remember that intriguing KP-900 that came our way courtesy of the FCC late last month? Turns out, this creature is getting all official on us today, with Universal proudly proclaiming that its newest IR / RF dual-use remote will be debuting at the Electronic House Expo in Orlando next month. The multifaceted gizmo is made to be retrofitted into any home that could use a wall-mounted home automation controller and a sophisticated home theater remote, and it should be hitting authorized dealer locations next month for $599. Not bad, not bad at all.

[Via Widescreen Review]

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

So do you go out and throw down on a fully-featured RF remote to control your home automation gizmos, or do you get one of those snazzy wall-mounted keypads installed to handle the same duties? Frankly, we’d recommend option C, which would involve picking up a device that operates as both depending on your mood. Universal Remote Control’s KP-900 is one such unit, which easily snaps into and out of a wall mount for use in both of the aforementioned scenarios. Furthermore, there’s even a built-in LCD which showcases relevant activities depending on what main selection you make first. As with everything else spotted in the FCC, you’ll have to wait a tick longer before finding out a price or release date, but it looks like this bugger may actually be worth holding out for.

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Filed under: Cellphones

While we wouldn’t mind a bit if the iPhone had an easy-to-replace battery like most mobiles these days, it seems that Exradia feels that such an oversight was nothing short of (potentially) harmful. As you very well know, we’ve seen so much conflicting data regarding the true danger of “cellphone radiation” that we’ve basically given up on trying to make sense of it all, but the aforementioned replacement battery outfit — which just so happens to integrate a mystical RF-blocking circuit into each cell — is reportedly “surprised [that] Apple has chosen to ignore this potential health issue” by not giving users the option to spend a bit of coin with Exradia. David Schick, the firm’s chief executive, went on to state that there was “no scientific evidence that clearly demonstrates mobile devices are safe,” but he unsurprisingly failed to mention that the flipside of that statement is also true. Whatever the case, we wouldn’t worry too much about this shameless grub for money — considering just how many mobile users are yapping it up right now, we’ll all go down together should these fears prove true.

[Via TGDaily]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Sure, your average PlayStation 3 controller is functional… but is it super ugly? Enter the dreamGEAR Lava Glow wireless controller — a peripheral so heinous looking it can likely be used to visually stun your opponents. The liquid-filled, glowing controller transmits on the lovable 2.4GHz RF band, and is said to be the “most comfortable controller ever created,” according to the company’s modest PR. The Lava Glow is also jam-packed with “motion sensing gyroscopes,” which somehow provide you with “complete latency free game play,” though we’re not sure how. The controller comes in red or blue, and is available now for $34.99 — just be sure you don’t spike it against a wall and get lava juice on your carpet.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

Handover technologies are nothing new, but Agito Networks is hoping to offer up scalable systems that can “hand voice calls over quickly and accurately between company WiFi and cellular networks.” More specifically, the startup system utilizes RF to tell when an individual is approaching “predefined points at the limit of the company’s WiFi coverage,” after which a mobile-based client cooperates with a RoamAnywhere router (which integrates with the company’s IP PBXs) in order to hand the call over. Reportedly, the actual transfer “takes less than one second,” and administrators can even set up RoutePoints and instruct calls to be sent directly to voicemail when users are off duty. Granted, it seems Agito is aiming its products at medium-to-large businesses looking to save on cellphone bills, and if all goes well, models ranging from $9,995 to $24,995 should hit the US by the year’s end.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!