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Switched On: TakeTV is SanDisk's flash drive-in
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment. This week's marks the column's third anniversary: Entering the market with smaller dimensions and a lower price than television bridge products such as Apple TV and the Xbox 360, SanDisk's TakeTV is unconcerned with DHCP, WPA, SSIDs and several alphabetical dalliances of IEEE 802.11. In fact, it eschews any kind of direct home network connection, returning to that tried-and-trod transfer known as "sneakernet." Using portable physical media as a liaison between devices goes back at least to the early days of the floppy disk and was revived a few years ago by the USB flash drive.Indeed, the latter is at a basic level the portable component of Take TV, a large, flat flash drive with four or eight gigabytes of SanDisk's trusted flash technology. The flash drive component docks into a video adapter that connects to TVs, but can take advantage only of an S-Video connection at best. When not connected to the television, it also snaps into its own minimalist remote crowned with an oversized Play button.By design, using TakeTV is very similar to using a flash drive; simply drag and drop video files onto the flash drive component. TakeTV is a certified DivX device and also supports XVID and MPEG-4. Videos shot with a Flip Video camcorder played back perfectly. However, the popular Windows and Mac formats of WMV and H.264 are not yet supported; Apple's Leopard instructional video was not recognized.
Hands on with SanDisk's USBTV
SanDisk wasn't exactly forthcoming with pictures and personal time of USBTV this thing, but justice won out in the end and we got to spend a few quality minutes with the new widget. We suppose we "unboxed" this thing in a physical sense, but while most of the specs are pretty well ironed out, the design is officially a concept, so we'll have to keep an eye out for a final version in the coming months. The word on capacities right now is a reasonable 2GB, 4GB and 8GB of flash storage, but that's about as much detail as we've got at the moment. Peep it all after the break, as always.
SanDisk intros USBTV
Uh, usually when people talk about moving media around the home though don't mean it quite so literally, but SanDisk is announcing a new standard called USBTV that's based on just that practice. We're still trying to get our heads around the announcement, but it sounds like USBTV is for anyone who doesn't want to deal with connecting up and streaming over a wireless network. Basically you connect up a flash-based, USBTV-enabled media player to your PC via USB, automatically copy over your content, and then physically shuttle the device to a cradle connected to your TV. Honestly doesn't sound much different than using an iPod with a video dock connected to your TV, but no matter, SanDisk says they've already talking to LG, Mitsubishi, and Pioneer about incorporating USBTV ports directly into their TVs and are showing off a prototype device that they're confusingly describing as a Digital Flash DVD Player.
