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Harman Kardon's SB 16 established that the company could charge a premium for its sound bar ($600), but actually back it up with superior performance.

Harman is upping the ante even further with the SB 30, the company's newest sound bar selling for a whopping $800. From the outside, you don't seem to get much more for your money, with it featuring a similar exterior design to the SB 16 and a wireless subwoofer. But inside, the SB 30 is packed with drivers, including six 2-inch woofers and seven 1-inch tweeters. Harman is also touting its dual … Read more

Toshiba will introduce new USB 3.0 flash drives next week at the Consumer Electronics Show next week in Las Vegas, as products using the faster USB interface begin to trickle out.

"SuperSpeed" USB 3.0 is about 10 times faster than current USB technology and will become standard in virtually all laptops when Intel's Ivy Bridge silicon begins shipping this spring.

Toshiba says its TransMemory-EX flash drive will deliver speeds up to 22 times faster than previous models. That's read and write speeds of 220 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 94 MB/s, respectively. … Read more

Some might say "audiophile" and "digital music" shouldn't be used in the same sentence, but Pioneer is hoping they're wrong.

Pioneer released two new networked audio players yesterday aimed at the audiophile crowd, the N-30 and N-50. The two players feature Pioneer's Elite branding and have a sturdy-looking component-style design, including a 2.5-inch color display that shows cover art and artist/track information.

File-format support should please digital audiophiles: 192khz/24-bit FLAC and WAV support, plus MP3, WMA, AAC and Ogg Vorbis. Both AirPlay and DLNA are supported, which means you'll … Read more

Don't touch that dial! Do not adjust your antenna, vertical hold, or tuning knob: the image on your screen is supposed to look like that, courtesy of namesuppressed's Autointerlace Free. Interlacing, or scanline graphics, simulates what you see on analog TV screens and other cathode ray tubes, teletype pictures, and other images built up by scanned lines. Graphic designers apply interlacing to digital images to create this effect. This free Photoshop plug-in automatically applies interlacing to any image. It includes a simple photo editor for users who don't have Photoshop or a similar, compatible image editor, but … Read more

USB 3.0 has gotten the green light for becoming a standard offering on Intel-based Windows PCs next year.

The USB Implementers Forum announced this week that the upcoming "Ivy Bridge" 7 Series Chipset and other Intel chipsets have achieved USB 3.0 certification. Chipsets are support silicon that work in tandem with the main processor.

USB 3.0, aka SuperSpeed USB, delivers up to 10 times the data transfer rate of USB 2.0, as well as improved power efficiency.

Intel's Ivy Bridge silicon, due to ship in Windows PCs in the April-June time frame, will … Read more

Sick of living in the cloud?

The new Pogoplug Series 4 is a device that looks to take the best of cloud computing and home network-attached storage and combine the two into a seamless experience. Available today, it certainly seems like a perfectly timed idea in the wake of seemingly daily frustrations with services like Apple's own iCloud and iTunes Match.

Maybe the fourth time's a charm: I've reviewed multiple Pogoplugs before, but none of them came close to what this new version offers. The Pogoplug is a NAS drive without the complications, and it's finally hit a sweet spot for price, size, and feature set. The newly released Pogoplug Series 4 is a latecomer to the holiday shopping season, but if you're getting fed up with iCloud and what other cloud services have to offer, then this $99 device might be what you're looking for.… Read more

As we near the one-year anniversary of Honeycomb tablets, you might assume that Android 3.0 has led to a proliferation of devices and sales.

After all, considering it was written specifically with large displays in mind, it was sure to revolutionize the tablet industry, right?

Well, not exactly. According to new data from ad network Chitika, Honeycomb only accounts for 1 percent of the Android usage on their system.

Based on data collected from hundreds of millions of ads served over the span of a week, Chitika found that Gingerbread and Froyo still command approximately 95 percent of the … Read more

Keeping true to its word, HTC has begun issuing a Sense 3.0 update to a pair of older smartphones.

Specifically, the two models getting the bump this time are the Incredible S and Desire HD.

The custom interface was introduced earlier in the year and includes a number of aspects that can be tailored by the user. Most notable among the features is the lock screen, which allows for quick access to popular applications such the camera, e-mail, and phone.

Although these Sense 3.0 updates are designed for U.K.-only models at this point, we might safely … Read more

There's plenty of live video broadcasting platforms to choose on the Web these days, but today we're chatting with one of the pioneers.

Justin Kan is one of the co-founders of Justin.TV, and he drops by our studio today for a full episode about the origins of life streaming and how the site paved the road to Justin's new project for live video gaming, TwitchTV.

We'll also talk to Justin about his participation in Y Combinator, a start-up incubator that helps green entrepreneurs through the first three months of genesis.

The boot camp gives founders the seed funding they need for general living expenses, allowing them to focus on the business idea. YC also guides them through the media pitching process and how to grab the attention of venture capitalists and seed investors.

Some of the headline-grabbing companies to grow from Y Combinator include Scribd, Loopt, Grubwithus, and Justin.TV itself.

Tune in to hear about how TwitchTV is bringing competitive gaming to a much larger audience, not to mention a few tips on what it takes to earn a spot in the next Y Combinator batch!… Read more