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radio

Eton adds iPod and Sirius for personalized clock radio

Add Eton to the growing list of manufacturers such as iHome and DLO adding iPod to a clock radio so that you can wake up to your own music. But the company has gone one step further and added Sirius satellite radio connectivity to its new Sound 101 AM/FM clock radio. Unfortunately, the iPod doesn't dock on the Sound 101 (April, $150), but jacks in via a separate charging dock, which could be an ungainly arrangement on a small night table. You also have to add your own Sirius receiver.

A second Eton expandable alarm clock, the Sound … Read more

Pioneer's A/V receiver handles XM and Sirius all-in-one

The big surprise at CES 2007 has been the dearth of major announcements about new home-audio products. Receivers with HDMI 1.3 and built-in decoding for next-gen lossless audio formats are nowhere to be seen. But at least one receiver has brought something new to the table: Pioneer's VSX-1017TXV is the first model we've seen that offers built-in compatibility with both XM and Sirius satellite radio services. (In fact, it's one of three receivers in Pioneer's 2007 line that offers the dual-satellite option.)

As evidenced by the model number, the 1017TXV is just an evolutionary upgrade … Read more

The FlyTech Dragonfly: a new and exciting way to pester your friends

There's a new buzz in the air at CES, and robotic toy company WowWee is creating it. The FlyTech Dragonfly is a remote-controlled dragonfly that can fly, flutter, swoop and crash with gusto. The little Styrofoam-and-plastic bug is thrown like a paper airplane, then controlled using the included Xbox 360 controller-like remote. Because it uses wings rather than a propeller to generate lift, it flies like an erratic airplane. While it's slightly harder to keep in the air and can't take off on its own, it's far easier to steer than spinout-prone remote-controlled mini-helicopters.

The Dragonfly … Read more

Harvesting RF energy

A Pennsylvania start-up says it has the answer to one of the biggest problems in mobile phones: battery life.

After three years of keeping its technology under close guard, Powercast has come to CES 2007 to get consumer and manufacturer attention. Powercast is a radio frequency that is transmitted over a small area, and its energy is "harvested"--wirelessly--to give power to small devices like cell phones.

While it's presented as wireless power, Powercast isn't just a replacement for a universal charger. Instead, it's meant to either continuously charge a battery or replace the need … Read more

Ford and Microsoft in Sync for in-car infotainment

As we first reported in December, Ford and Microsoft have been busy working in collaboration on in-car communications and entertainment, to be unveiled this week at CES. Well, here we are today at CES, and we can spill the beans on details of the system to be marketed under the name "Sync."

Initially to be made available in twelve 2008 models across the Ford family and across the entire 2009 lineup from FoMoCo, the service will be a fully-integrated, flash memory-based system that enables drivers to call hands-free and to control a range of digital audio via voice … Read more

We all bathe with a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine

I wish I had a little yellow submarine that I could putz around in. Motorized would be optimal, but I could even deal with foot pedals, as long as it's a submarine and it's yellow. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find one within my price range, nor a piece of dock space where I could keep it securely stored, so I guess I will have to settle for this, which was featured on ShinyShiny. It's a fully-functional FM radio with a waterproof speaker, is powered by four AAA batteries, and it's designed to float … Read more

Musicovery gets clustery

Musicovery is a new Internet radio browser service that combines streaming music with some really neat visual navigation for discovering new (to you) music.

Musicovery is controlled with a sidebar and a song list that's strung together by genre in small clusters. Each color represents a different genre, and you can dig even deeper by selecting your mood. The playback controls are shown on each individual song, along with the title and the artist.

What's even cooler is that similar songs can get linked together by choosing the mood and tempo, so if I pick out that I'… Read more

Sirius TV on the way

Sirius Satellite Radio may start beaming video through its service by end of next year, according to comments made by boss Mel Karmazin at a media summit this week in New York. Don't expert to see Howard Stern and his naked guests; The company will initially focus on video content that keeps the kids quiet in the back seat. That's probably the easiest sell to current users and a fairly affordable type of content for Sirius to license.

Bits is bits, so sending video shouldn't be much harder than audio with the main difference being that the … Read more