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Virgin Galactic plans to open a commercial spaceport in Italy
Virgin Galactic announced today that it has partnered with two Italian aerospace companies with the aim to bring commercial space flight to Italy in the future, The Verge reports. Alongside Altec, which is owned in part by the Italian Space Agency, and private space company Sitael, Virgin Galactic intends to develop an Italian spaceport from which future flights can take off. "From the Renaissance to modern space science, Italy has always been a natural home to great innovators and breakthrough ideas which have shaped the human experience," Virgin Group founder Richard Branson said in a statement. "I believe Italy's vision, which has led to this collaboration with our Virgin space companies, will provide a real impetus as we strive to open space for the benefit of life on Earth."
Altec Lansing Live 5000 WiFi music system makes its debut, plays nice with Android and iOS (ears-on)
During CES, Altec Lansing showed us its latest premium wireless speaker system, the $500 WiFi-equipped Live 5000. If you're thinking "wait, isn't that attractive-looking, teardrop-shaped gizmo just its inAir 500 AirPlay speaker?" you'd be sort-of correct. While the system is nearly identical to the inAir, the unit itself isn't tied to iThings for wireless audio streaming -- instead, Altec's created its own "ecosystem" that'll support a variety of devices. After hooking the speaker up to your network, you can use any Android, iOS device or computer running the company's Live controller app to setup up a central playlist of your tunes. The music isn't sent to the cloud, but rather, streamed directly from each device's local catalog of music -- salvation from the pains of aggregating your files to one central storage hub. Best of all, there's also support for services like Rhapsody, ensuring you'll be able to load up your music from wherever you normally would. We checked out an early build of the iPhone app (on an iPad), and the interface was simple and intuitive, but we're told to expect more polish in the final edition -- along with that missing tablet-sized version. Notably, the app allows playback to multiple speakers, giving you the option to set up various linkable "stages" to stream independent playlists to. We gave the unit a quick listen on the noisy show floor, and while it got plenty loud, the bass was on the anemic side, despite its 4-inch woofer. Highs and mids were alright, although, at times things felt a bit tinny to our ears. Of course, the hustle and bustle of CES isn't exactly the best spot for hearing how speakers like this sound, so we'll have to reserve final judgement until the unit ships this summer (not to mention that the testing material was streaming from Rhapsody). For now, hit up the gallery below for a closer look, and you'll find a press release past the break with more details.
Altec video screen kind of misses the point
The video iPod is tiny. Tiny and more than a bit hard to watch. So when Altec introduces a "high resolution" LCD display to magnify the iPod video, I pay attention... until I find out that the $350 iMV712 screen is just 8.5 inches (one presumes diagonally) big and designed for nonportability. That's a great sized screen for, say, airplane travel, but you can't carry a huge boom box like this onto a plane, let alone plug it in. For at-home or in-office playback you need to consider a much larger display. For on-the-go playback you want a much smaller form factor--one that doesn't need to be plugged in. Maybe they thought this would be a good bedside night-stand accessory? If so, it's a pretty darned big one with those integrated speakers.
