Price is $799, it's also called the 'Live', and it was announced in January. This is old news. Based on their claims of 5x faster, and the performance of their similar new generation LinkStations, this should be quite a bit quicker than Infrant's product.
I also have this unit and it's great. It's small and super easy to use. THe best thing is the SirfIII GPS radio, it works awesome. You don't need an external antenna and can use it inside a car even away from windows.
This is not a network server. It's purely for adding another drive letter to your PC. You need a NAS if you want to add it to your network. This same company has 4 drive network NAS boxes that look similar.
Can't beat those prices, Maxtor wants $799 for 1.0TB in their Dual Drive product, and it looks worse than this one in my opinion. Looks like it has easy drive replacement as well:
At this time, this product is not planned to be shipped to the North American or European markets. Please check for press releases in those markets for up to date information on their Buffalo releases.
Actually, an HD Slingbox is somewhat compelling. I have a Sling and love it, and you're 100% correct about the upstream bandwith. However, I also use my Sling around the house. For instance, when I'm BBQ'ing or working on something in my garage, my notebook with a 15.4" widescreen goes with me.
There have been times where having more than 2Mbps video would be nice. Using modern codecs you could make a nice HD video stream in the 5-10Mbps range, but it'd take A LOT of processing power to accomplish that, and I mean A LOT. Remember it's encoding analog to digital in real-time!
However, if you look at it from the manufacturer's standpoint, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a handful of reasons:
1) Not many people would use it in the use case I've described, meaning they'd either have to have two products (less ideal) or just sell the HD version at a higher price (effectively reducing the size of the target audience).
2) They'd have to tactfully market it the product as HD because many people would expect to see HD when they're on the road and would be extensively disappointed (to no fault of Sling, but to the fault of the internet connections).
There are other similar issues.
I wouldn't mind seeing Wi-Fi in there, but that can be easily and possibly more reliably taken care of with an Ethernet Bridge or SlingLink. Existing Sling users already have wired, wireless, or powerline networking hooked up so adding the extra cost to add Wi-Fi might not be entirely worth it, however, as a huge advocate for wireless, I'd like to see it in there.
Chances are it's just an improved model with higher performance and lower cost structure.
-BrianV
Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"I need help! I want a small pocket camcorder but I'm not sure which one to get. I don't want to fall into the hype of the Flip because I worry two hours won't be enough. What should I be looking for when considering a small camcorder and where can I get a good quality one with expandable memory? Thanks!"
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