Amidst mounting losses across the board, Sony’s decided to jettison a few under performing businesses. While their exit from computers grabbed most of the headlines, they’ve also thrown in the towel on eReaders. Early on Sony actually produced the best eReader hardware. However, their success was held back due to pricing, marketing, and distribution. Not … Read more
Beep is latest entrant in whole-home audio. But, unlike Sonos‘ key products, their music streaming technology isn’t currently embedded within a speaker enclosure. And we suspect the potential market of people looking to network traditional speakers is rather modest. The $99 Beep appendage is sharp looking blinky, clicky dial … that’ll ratchet up your clutter … Read more
Best Buy has launched an interesting promo to proactively reach potential customers, no matter one’s smartphone predilection. Register your intent now to pick up any new phone by the end of the year, and receive a $50 gift card upon completion of that purchase. Of course, with two huge 2014 launches expected in the Samsung … Read more
Fellow tech enthusiast and DC neighbor Joel Ward continues his role as a Features contributor here at Zatz Not Funny. Beyond ZNF, Joel can be found at Joel Explains It All and @joelsef on Twitter.
A few months back, we finally replaced our 2007-era Sony SXRD rear projection 1080p HDTV with a newer Samsung LCD/LED model. Not only do we find Sammy’s picture quality light years ahead of the Sony–even though it’s still “only” 1080p and not 4K—the new set shipped with all the bells and whistles of a modern “Smart TV.” In fact, it’s hard to find a large, high quality television nowadays that doesn’t have some sort of apps built-in. So whether you want them or not, you’re probably getting something.
Samsung’s Smart TV Hub is impressive, featuring one of the nicer TV UIs out there right now. While the LG WebOS TV unveiled at CES may be a contender, I’d say Samsung is probably the most sophisticated TV UI at the moment. It definitely has a lot of features and the Smart Hub is divvied up into five main screens: On TV (aka TV guide); Apps; Social; Photos, Video & Music (aka DLNA); and Movies & TV Shows.
Bringing tech to the corn fields of the Midwest, gadgeteer and cat lover Adam Miarka contributes to Zatz Not Funny when the overlord allows. When not on ZNF, Adam posts pictures to http://www.adammiarka.com and harasses the public from @adammiarka on Twitter.
Background
Being a Kickstarter for the first generation Simple TV, I’ve always been interested in technologies that could disrupt traditional TV viewing. When the original Simple TV was announced back in 2012, it looked like something that could actually let me break from my current (TiVo) setup while lowering our monthly expenditures.The original Simple TV had one fatal flaw, a single tuner for recording.
Despite this limitation, I decided to back the project to get a feeling for how this new setup might work in our household. The idea of having a device that could basically capture any OTA or ClearQAM signals and then have it playback on a myriad of devices (web browser, iOS devices, Android devices, Roku) was very enticing. You only need to bring a hard drive to get the Simple TV party started!
Although neither the Super Bowl 48 match-up nor the 2014 crop of ads lived up to expectations, according to TiVo quite a few remained tuned in until the bitter end – with 3 of the top 5 most “engaging” commercials airing during the 4th quarter. Of course, there were the bizarre, the the boring, and … Read more
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— Budweiser (@budweiserusa) January 31, 2014
In an industry where any publicity trumps questionable publicity, several brands have leveraged Twitter to draw attention to themselves via apparent mistakes. It’s a low risk, high reward approach that got going last summer when Chipotle faked a Twitter hack. The costs of sending a tweet, versus shooting and placing a Super Bowl commercial, are insignificant. And many members of the social network seem to enjoy calling out and retweeting the “drunk” 140 character missives. But as an old fuddy duddy with an apparently rusty funny bone, the attempted manipulation and misdirection is too much to overcome, leading me to purge most “brands” I follow on Twitter.