microsoft on technabob...

Hot on the heels of Apple’s recent announcement to drop the price of it’s latest (5.5 generation) iPod 30gb model to $249, Creative Labs has just dropped the price on their Zen Vision:M 30gb model to $249 as well…

Mobility Today posted some up close footage of the new Microsoft Zune media player in action today.

Note the huge album art, and video playback is done in landscape mode to provide excellent widescreen movie viewing…

Hot on the heels of Apple’s iPod announcements, Microsoft has officially taken the wraps off of their Zune media player. As expected, the player can handle both audio and video playback on a 3″ LCD screen that can work in either portrait or landscape mode. The player can handle media in h.264, MP3, AAC and WMA formats…

One of the great challenges of having an HTPC or Media Center PC as part of your home theater is finding a wireless keyboard that can actually be operated in a dimly-lit room…

Microsoft today released the Beta of their XNA Game Studio Express software development kit. The SDK will allow independent developers to create games for Windows Vista and the Xbox 360 (soon).
Now you still have to know how to program in C# in order to use this software, so it’s not for the uninitiated. You can download the XNA Game Studio Express Beta here…

Xbox insider Major Nelson is reporting that Microsoft has released a new backwards compatibility update which provides support for the following games:
Aggressive Inline
Aquaman: Battle of Atlantis
All Star Baseball 2003
All Star Baseball 2005
Burnout 3: Takedown
Catwoman
Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart UPDATED
Counter Strike
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Dead to Rights
Digimon Rumble Arena 2 UPDATED
ESPN Major League Baseball
Fatal Frame 2
Ford vs…

While Microsoft is touting the wonders of the music sharing features of the new Zune media player, I’m quite familiar with a project in which a team from the MIT Media lab developed a similar wireless music sharing capability a couple of years ago. The team filed a patent application back at the end of 2005 for virtually the exact functionality that Microsoft is planning…

Crunchgear has broken the news that the initial Microsoft Zune media player will be manufactured by Toshiba, not Microsoft.
The device has been registered with the FCC as the Toshiba 1089. It’s been confirmed that the player features a 30GB hard drive, a 3″ LCD, USB 2.0 and 802.11 b/g connectivity…