What comes in buckets? Rain, fried chicken — even photo printers.
Canon's Selphy CP770, which goes on sale this week at www.usa.canon.com and through retailers for $150, is a typical photo printer in an atypical bucket-shaped container. The printer has a colour preview screen and five ports that allow photos to be imported from an impressive 20 formats, including all flavors of SD cards and Sony Memory Sticks. One notable exception is standard USB flash drives. While the onboard software adjusts for things like red-eye and brightness, there are no cropping options.
The printer snaps onto the bucket, which stores the AC adapter, spare ink cassettes and two paper trays, one for 4-by-6 postcards and another for wallet-sized prints, which cost on average about 28 cents each. The optional $80 battery pack provides additional portability, in case you want to combine a family canoe trip with on-the-spot photo printing. If things don't go well, it's nice to know that the bucket holds water.
— Warren Buckleitner
The ZeeVee ZV-100 (top), Canon's Selphy CP770 compact portable photo printer, Lenovo’s U110 IdeaPad and the Samsung Glyde. (NYT)
Streaming online video by piggybacking on cable TV
Online video is an embarrassment of riches, from reruns of Lost to clips of classic weatherman bloopers. It's little wonder that everyone is trying to get that video from the Internet to the living-room TV. The ZeeVee ZV-100, a $500 kit that connects to your PC, avoids many of the common video pitfalls and streams what's on your computer screen to an open cable channel on your TV.
The box accepts a monitor output from any computer and transmits it over your in-home cable wiring, essentially creating a local private cable channel. The ZV-100 bundle comes with the box and a remote control, which also allows you to control the PC remotely by pressing a few buttons.
Because the ZeeVee box simply mirrors the action on your computer, you are not limited to just video playback. You can also read e-mail and browse the Web, although ZeeVee recommends using the optional ZvKeyboard, which will be available later this year.
The ZV-100 bundle, due out June 30, is available for preorder on Amazon.com and zeevee.com. You'll have to find your own exciting video content, however.
— John Biggs
Thin and stylish reigns in laptop couture, too
After Lenovo bought IBM's laptop division in 2005, everyone expected more of the same: somber ThinkPad laptops with IBM's signature durability. But now Lenovo is releasing laptops that are more suited to the catwalk than the boardroom.
The U110 IdeaPad is a thin laptop with an 11.1-inch screen and Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It starts at $1,899, which includes a 120-gigabyte hard drive and 2 gigabytes of RAM. Not unlike other thin-and-light laptops, the U110 does not have an internal optical drive and instead uses an external DVD/CD recorder. A 1.3-megapixel camera is built into the monitor bezel.
The design will turn heads. The laptop comes in black and red; its top is mottled and textured with a floral pattern, while the air intakes on the bottom feature a Greek key design straight out of a Versace catalog. Even the indicator lights are wrapped in a floral motif. The IdeaPad is aimed at creative professionals and, presumably, those who need to accessorize their evening wear with a 2.4-pound computer.
— John Biggs
It's a touch-screen phone, but you can still hunt and peck
The invasion of the multimedia touch-screen phones continued last week as the Samsung Glyde landed in Verizon Wireless stores. Although the Glyde's icon-filled 2.8-inch screen looks familiar, the phone features a slide-out keyboard for people who like the feel of physical buttons when pecking out e-mail and text messages.
The phone includes Verizon's VZ Navigator feature for maps and directions, as well as the V Cast service for music and video content.
After a $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year contract with Verizon, the Glyde costs about $250. The Nationwide Premium calling plan for voice and data services will run $80 a month; details are at verizonwireless.com.
On the hardware side, the Samsung Glyde comes with a 2-megapixel camera-camcorder, Bluetooth connectivity and a microSD card slot to add up to 8 gigabytes of extra memory. As for software, it has a full Web browser with touch navigation, a personal organizer and instant-messaging software for AOL, Yahoo and MSN, for those who really want to ride the Glyde's keyboard.
— J.D. Biersdorfer
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