WAY TO STREAM VIDEO
$150 • www.theflip.com
The maker of the shoot-and-share Flip camera has added a $150 companion device to watch your video creations on your TV.
The FlipShare TV (for use with Windows and Mac computers) allows you to wirelessly stream video clips recorded with the Flip camera from a computer to a base unit connected to your television. The base has the two main connections you'd need, HDMI and composite, to pipe the video into your display. It can also accommodate videos created on other cameras, as long as they're in the same MP4 format.
Other media streaming devices cost as little as $100, such as the Netgear EVA2000, which streams video, audio and photo formats to a TV. Even the Xbox 360 or Sony PlayStation 3 video game consoles can wirelessly connect to a home computer and deliver this type of content to a TV.
FlipShare TV worked fine in the same room as the television. The signal to the base unit comes from a thumb drive-sized transmitter that plugs into the USB port of the computer. The on-screen menu was simple and the remote control works through the television rather than the computer. You can sign up for a free account on Flip Channel to share videos.
It's hard to see this trumping the simple task of uploading video clips, but FlipShare excels at ease of use. If you don't own a device to stream video from your computer, it's a decent solution.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
HEAVYWEIGHT FLASH DRIVE, BUT AT A PRICE
$1,108 • www.kingston.com
It has a larger capacity than the hard drive on many computers, but is significantly smaller than a Snickers bar.
It also costs way more than a standard drive. Kingston has just released the DataTraveler DT-310, a 256-gigabyte USB flash drive that stores up to 54 full-length movies or enough music to let you play a different CD each day for a year. It can read data at up to 25 megabytes per second and write it at 12 megabytes .
