Latest Tech News

<< Last Week's Show (10-12-2012) | Next Week's Show (10-26-2012) >>

 

Weekend of October 19th, 2012 - Highlights from the CEA Industry Forum in San Francisco

 

Pictured above: Dave chats with one of America's greatest inventors: Dean Kamen, Inventor of the Segway & Founder of FIRST, at the CEA Industry Forum.

 

Dave and Rob report from the CEA Industry Forum this week in San Francisco, CA. Stay tuned to learn about the "5 Technologies to Watch" and what you'll be buying this holiday season. Meantime, Chris and Mark answer more of your questions in our Miami studios via the Ask Dave Hotline. Call us ... toll-free 1-800-899-INTO (4686) ... with any consumer electronics question, opinion, help another listener or tell us what your favorite app is and why. You can also participate via our FREE "Into Tomorrow" App (iOS/Android/Intel AppUp). Thank you for your participation!

 

ITTV Video Update

Chris Graveline takes us back into yesterday, reminding us about some important tech events on "This Week In Tech History." Our KidsTech reporter Caitlyn shares one of her favorite iPhone apps and explains why you should have it.

Listeners & Guests on the show this week:

For ALL the details ... be sure to listen to the show by downloading the MP3 or clicking the RED & WHITE "Play" button on the media player, both on the right-hand side of this page.

HOUR 1:

Tech News & Commentary

 

Wesley in Nashville, Tennessee listening on WTN 99.7 asked: "I need help in HDMI areas, the cable specifically. If you can tell me if the more expensive cables are better than the cheap ones or of they have the same thing. I gotta make a decision here soon."

 

Unless you're going to run a very long cable (and we're talking over 50 feet), get the cheap one.

HDMI is a digital standard, and unlike analog standards there is no picture or audio degradation until you try to carry the signal far enough that it can't build the image anymore. So, you'll have perfect picture and audio until you don't anymore, and when you don't it won't look or sound worse, it will just be gone. There is no middle ground, either it's perfect, or it's not there.

Since that is only a problem over very long distances, if what you're looking for is 6 foot cable to connect a TV to a Blu-ray player, for example, then get the cheap one. It will make no difference at all in terms of picture or audio quality.

 

For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.

 

 

Marly in Erie, Pennsylvania listening on WPSE 1450 asked: "I'm interested in cloud services that can only be accessed by a password for a large company that has a lot of data transfer going between two different cities. I wonder how secure cloud services can be in such cases."

 

They can be as safe as they are in any other case, really. The authentication methods don’t really change.

Cloud services can be extremely secure, for example, when you get on a plane, the airline has offices all over the world that can access the details about your flight. Now think about every single cargo and passenger flight that airline operates everywhere on the planet, that’s only a fraction of the information that company handles, and it handles it in an extremely secure way. The same goes for banks, or the stock market, or the government, they all share information over highly secure computer networks.

If you if you’re looking to use a third part to transfer your date, something like Dropbox, then your most likely security hole will be a user choosing “123456” or “password” as their password.

There is always the chance that someone will hack into their servers and get users credentials from it, it has happened with several big companies recently, but those cases are rare compared to the amount of data transfer that goes on online these days.

There’s another, realistic, thing to consider: do you really have a choice?

Can you pay a courier to deliver all your data between cities? can they do it fast enough? would they really be any safer? After all, you’d be handing your data over to someone you don’t know...

 

For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.

 

 

Lisa in Fairbanks, Alaska listening n KFBX 970 asked: "I lost everything on my iPhone trying to "sync" it to my laptop. Now I want a tablet, primarily for a bigger screen. Should I just take it to a technician with the phone and laptop to get it set up and all synced together correctly?"

 

Not really... syncing a tablet should be pretty simple, if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself after what happened with your phone, maybe you can find a tech savvy friend or relative, but it’s really not something that would merit paying an expert to do.

Normally, assuming your tablet is an iPad, plugging it in and following on screen prompts should do, the easiest way to make sure you don’t lose anything is to not put anything on it before you sync it, if you do that, you really don’t have much to worry about.

 

For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.

 

Genevieve in Greenwich, Connecticut listening on WGCH asked: "I have a cell phone that is so old from Radio shack. I plug it in. It's very heavy. Is there any chance I could use it?"

 

It depends on how old it is, but the odds aren’t great.

Different cell phones run on different systems and the systems change fairly quickly, so a phone from five years ago may not be compatible with the network that’s currently in place.

There’s even the chance that, if your phone had been in service all along, it would still work, but that the company providing that service will just refuse to activate new phones to the old system. It seems silly, but it’s actually a big deal, no company wants to have to maintain an expensive, obsolete network for a handful of users, so instead they force them to transition to newer technologies.

So, Genevieve, we can’t tell you whether or not your phone will work, because we don’t even really know what “type” of cell phone you’re referring to, it could be a very old phone from the time your phone came tethered to a briefcase, and those would not work, or you could be talking about a large phone from 5 years ago that doesn’t do 3G, but works very nicely on EDGE, which is still around.

If you can give us more specific information, we’ll look into it for you.

 

For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.

 

HOUR 1 GUESTS
Christian Gunning, VP of Corporate Communications – Boingo		Jeff Joseph, Senior VP of Communications & Strategic Partnerships – CEA

 

HOUR 2:

Tech News & Commentary

Lauren in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida calling in via the iPhone App asked: "I'm an up and coming DJ and I have Stanton headphones, But I was wondering of Dr. Dre's Beats would be better or if I should have Pioneers. Thank you, have a good day."

 

It depends on what you're looking to get form the headphones. If you're looking at Beats, in your line of work you're gonna be looking at the Beats Pro, not the regular models, and those deliver good quality in every way, but they are as much a fashion item as the regular beats are, so you will be paying a very steep, and probably not justified premium.

For example, a set of Beats Pro will cost you around $450, the top of the line Pioneer HDJ-2000s will cost you $250, they won't be as flashy, and won't make as much of a fashion statement, but you can't fault them from a technical point of view, and they will cost you $200 less, you can almost get a second pair for the same price. Your Stantons are the same story, they're considerably cheaper than the Beats.

Now, as far as we can tell, the audio quality you will get from Beats headphones will be good, and if you get the Pros you won't have to pay for batteries for them for the rest of their life, but the downside of them is that a large portion of what you're paying for is not audio quality, or even build quality, but image, you can get comparable quality from other brands for far less money.

So, are you looking strictly for quality? are you looking for image too? and, how much are you willing to pay for that extra image? depending on what your answer is, you should be able to tell whether the Pioneers or the Beats are for you.

For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.

 

 

Larry in Newbern, Tennessee listening online asked: "I'm a truck driver and I wanted to get one of the 7-inch GPS units. A lot of them say they have electronic logging and truck routes. I was wondering if there were any that had specifically hazmat routing, since I drive a tanker."

There are several GPS units that include HazMat routing, they’re all obviously geared towards professional drivers, so none of them are particularly cheap.

You can look at the Cobra 7-inch GPS Navigator for Truck Drivers 7750 Platinum. The unit features 10 levels of HazMat routing, and takes into account the truck’s size and weight when suggesting routes. It’s not cheap though, you’ll be paying around $400 for it.

The Garmin Nuvi 465T will also offer routes taking HazMat restrictions and truck dimensions into account. This one will cost you considerably less. You can find it for closer to $200.

The Magellan RoadMate Commercial 9270T-LM will get you back to around the $400 mark, but it will also include dimension-based routing and HazMat routing, so it may also be an option for you. A feature you may find useful on this model is the lifetime free traffic alerts.

 

For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.

 

HOUR 2 GUESTS
Steve Koenig, Director of Industry Analysis – CEA		Dean Kamen, Inventor & Founder of DEKA Research & Development/FIRST

 

 

 

HOUR 3:

Tech News & Commentary

Bill in Garlin, Texas listening on Shortwave asked: "I don't know a lot about computers. I like listening to shortwave radio and Pandora. What is the best way for me to receive these things, a laptop or a tablet?"

 

Well... either one will do. Basically it will come down to how easily you want to move your music source around... in fact you don’t even need a tablet, a smartphone or even an iPod Touch will work just fine for you too.

Shortwave is the trickiest part of what you’re looking for, laptops, tablets, smartphones and MP3 players will only be able to play shortwave through an app or website, you won’t just be able to tune into a shortwave station using the device as a receiver.

You could try to find an Internet radio that also does shortwave, but to be honest, we couldn’t find any to recommend to you.

Since you want to use Pandora, getting shortwave over the internet instead of just over the air shouldn’t make a huge different for you, you will need internet access for Pandora anyway, so you might as well use it for shortwave as well, the problem is that you may not find every single shortwave station online.

Now, as for tablet, laptop, smartphone or iPod Touch, any of those will be able to fit your needs. If that is all you want to do with your device, any of them will work just fine for you, just get to the website or open the app and you’ll be streaming in no time on any of them. If you need to do more, laptops are always more flexible, any of the other devices are more portable, so it all depends on what your other needs are.

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.

 

 

 

Ray in Niagara Falls, New York listens online asked: "I have an iPhone 4 with Verizon and I'm thinking of switching to Sprint. If I do, can I sync my Sprint iPhone to the same place I did my Verizon phone?"

 

yes, you can sync your new iPhone to the same user on iCloud, and to the same computer. When you first get your new iPhone, during the setup process, it will ask you if you want to set it up as a brand new iPhone or from a previous backup.

As long as your old iPhone had been backed up recently, be it to iCloud or iTunes, you should be able to have your new phone automatically configured to have your old email accounts, apps, notes, and everything else, and it can continue to be backed up to the same place as your old phone.

The network really doesn’t matter, your choices for syncing your phone are: your own computer, or Apple’s computers, which company is giving you a phone line doesn’t really matter at all.

Also, make certain that you do synchronize your old iPhone 4 just before going to buy the new one. You wouldn’t want to miss something in your data just because you were using an older backup of the phone.

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.

 

Barry in Las Vegas, Nevada calling in via the App asked: "I have a question about Ultrabooks. I hear a lot about Ultrabooks lately and I don't know how the different from a regular laptop computer, could you please explain the difference?"

 

Ultrabooks are high-end, very thin and very light laptops with long battery lives. They’re kinda like the Windows version of Macbook Air.

They’re not like netbooks, which have long battery lives, small screens and low prices. Ultrabooks will typically cost around $1000, as low as maybe $800 and high as over $1000. They have larger screens, usually 13-inches and up.

Since they’re very slim, they don’t always have many ports. So you may have a couple of USB ports and not much else. They’re meant to be fairly high-end laptops, so it’s very common to find solid state drives, a good amount for RAM and respectable processing power on them. You will usually be able to find a regular laptop with better processing power than an Ultrabook for the same price, but considering the extreme portability Ultrabooks offer, you get a pretty good deal when you get one anyway. Just don’t get one to use it as a gaming machine or a video editing workstation.

If you’re in the market for a Windows based Ultrabook, make sure you look for one with the “Ivy Bridge” chipset. That’ll get you the third-generation Intel Core i3/i5/or i7 processor, the improved HD 4000 integrated graphics processor, and USB 3.0 in addition to Thunderbolt (introduced with Sandy Bridge, the previous generation).

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.

 

Seth in Murfreesboro, Tennessee listening on WTN 99.7 FM asked: "How would one know which video card would work best or their computer and for their desires?"

 

What video card you need, depends mostly on what you want to do with it. If you don’t need to do heavy video editing, and if you’re not going to be playing highly graphic intensive games, odds are any card will work fine for you. If you do plan on doing those things, you’ll probably benefit from looking at higher end models.

 A very high end video card can be more expensive than a low end laptop, so don’t just go for the most expensive card around, odds are if you don’t know that you need it, you don’t need it. To determine which specific card might be best for you, there are some excellent review sites on the Internet.

We recommend TweakTown.com for their reviews, also GPUReview.com is worth reading for their extensive benchmarking.

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.

 

HOUR 3 GUESTS
Dr. Alfred Poor, Writer & Technology Expert – HDTV Almanac		Jay McLellan, President – HAI by Leviton

 

 

 

If you have any questions about any of this week's show info, please email us here.

This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners

 

Dane-Elec: Several 8GB USB Flash Drives from Marvel’s The Avengers Collection

Ergotron: A Universal Tablet Cradle -- This accessory converts a monitor mount to hold a tablet or eReader. Works with most popular tablets and eReaders, including Apple iPad, Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle.

iolo Technologies: Copies of System Mechanic 11 - PC Tune-up Software

 

 

 

Tweet

Download Our Show

Listen To Our Show

Amazon Links »