WD TV streamer is a Play on Apple TV, Roku
Small, square, sub-$100 black boxes dominate streaming internet-television devices in the US, in the shape of Apple TV and Roku’s LT, XS, XD and HD boxes.
There’s no shame then in Western Digital imitating this successful formula in launching today the WD TV Play - the latest variation of its WD TV lineup of content-streaming set-top boxes. Read more
Toshiba floats Canvio Personal Cloud storage
Toshiba has confined its consumer storage offerings to its Canvio line of portable hard drives and external desktop drives to date, but the Canvio Personal Cloud unveiled on Thursday at the IFA show in Berlin sees the brand breaking out into network-attached storage (NAS) in the home.
The concept is around storing personal files in the “cloud” in the home rather than in a remote data centre that can mean subscription fees and slow uploads and downloads. The Canvio device, in 2Tb or 3Tb internal hard drive sizes, hooks up to a spare ethernet connection on the wireless router in the home to provide both local and remote connectivity. Read more
Hard drive maker WD adds router family
The leading hard drive makers seem set on reinventing themselves – extending not just their storage capacities but their product lines as well.
Seagate announced Backup Plus, a drive that can also backup media on your social networks, on Monday and it is in the process of acquiring the premium drive maker LaCie.
Now Western Digital is taking on the likes of Linksys and Netgear with a complete lineup of routers it claims will usher in a “new era of blazing fast HD entertainment streaming”. Read more
Western Digital’s Eastern promise
The problems for the global PC supply chain caused by the flooding in Thailand are slowly receding, if not as fast as the floodwaters themselves.
Western Digital, the hard-disk drive maker hardest hit, said on Monday it was continuing to ramp HDD production and had resumed manufacturing on Sunday of sliders – a key component where the heads that read and write to a disk are mounted. Slider operations had been suspended since October 10. Read more
Wi-Fi, Spotify glorify WD TV Live
Western Digital this week made its WD TV Live internet media player more competitive with the likes of Apple TV, Roku and the Logitech Revue, adding more hardware features, new content channels including the Spotify music service and pitching it at a lower price.
This category of small set-top boxes seems up against it compared to the more integrated efforts of internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players and game consoles, but they keep fighting back with lower prices, improved interfaces and imaginative additions to their services. Read more
Gadgets for geeky New Year resolutions
My geeky New Year resolutions for 2011 are the same as 2010 – back up my stuff, digitise content, clean out my computer and centralise my media.
At least this year, I have a few more tools to review and help me finally achieve this – namely a Drobo S, a Western Digital My Book Live external drive, an Eye-Fi Pro X2 memory card, iolo’s System Mechanic 10 software and the MiCorder. Read more
Best of the internet on your TV
With Google TV coming to screens near you in the autumn, internet-enabled television is set to attract a lot of eyeballs.
For those that cannot wait for the Google/Sony/Logitech/Intel product, there are already plenty of set-top box options for streaming movies and adding internet content channels to your TV. We explore some of these in the Personal Technology column in Friday’s Business Life section of the FT. Read more
Hitachi adds 3D life to external drives
With Western Digital and Seagate Technology fighting a neck-and-neck battle to be the world’s leading hard-drive maker, Hitachi is appearing as a dark horse in third with a new range of external drive products.
Its LifeStudio series, available in stores from Friday, is its first foray into more consumer-friendly products and includes some unusual hardware and software features. Read more
Hard-driving media players battle it out
Seagate Technology and Western Digital are two Californian companies that dominate the global hard drive market and are in constant, close competition with one another.
Western Digital overtook Seagate in the first three months of 2010 in hard drive shipments for the very first time on a quarterly basis, according to a recent iSuppli report. On Wednesday, it unveiled its latest attempt to challenge it in the media player category, with the WD TV Live Plus HD. Read more
Future-proof your data storage
External hard drives and their new flexibility are the subject of this week’s Personal Technology column in the Business Life section of the FT:
“I have been testing a new 500Gb portable hard drive, the FreeAgent GoFlex Pro from Seagate, which brings the concept of modular design to data storage and enables each drive to be customised to a user’s changing requirements by selecting from an array of cables and desktop adapters.” Read more
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Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
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