Strange New World: Picks of the Week

From Blockbuster to the iPhone, this week's best and brightest tech news.

ByABC News
February 10, 2009, 6:52 PM

June 21, 2007 — -- Life on the Strange New World was particularly strange this past week. We're loving the latest way to link your PC to your home stereo. And we've ferreted out the logic behind Blockbuster declaring a winner in the high-def wars. But we're a little bummed that gadget shopping for holiday '07 is shaping up to be a one-trick pony: the iPhone.

Here are our picks for the must know tech trends and gadgets for the week.

If you're like us, you have a ton of digital music on your PC &133; all legally obtained, we're sure. But bridging your tunes to your high-end home audio system has been a big hassle. Well, problem solved: Check out Slim Devices' Squeezebox V3 ($299, www.slimdevices.com).

Sure, there are other ways to pipe music from your PC to your stereo -- the Wireless DJ from Logitech and the X-10, to name just two -- but none do it as well. The Squeezebox ports all of your stored audio tracks, plays Internet radio, and can even play music when your PC is powered down. Slick.

Setup is easy via ethernet or wireless connectors. And because the unit is away from your computer's noisy power supply and internal electronics -- and made from the highest quality components -- audio quality is excellent.

One caveat: Expect to be disappointed by how ratty much of what passes for digital music is these days. Since the Squeezebox plays on your stereo you can compare your ripped digital track to the original one on the CD. All we are going to say is, digital Dylan is particularly ugly.

Do we have a high-def winner? Maybe. On Monday, video rental giant Blockbuster announced that it would phase out HD-DVDs and eventually only rent high-def Blu-Ray disks in its 1,450 stores nationwide. Blockbuster found that 70 percent of customers, given the choice between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, went Blu-Ray. So out went the HD-DVD.

So what's going on here, you ask? That's easy: the Playstation 3! People rent Blu-Ray disks because they have the PS3 at home, not an HD-DVD player. The irony is that the much vaunted PS3 has been reduced to a mere high-definition DVD playback too. That was hardly Sony's intention when it spent billions developing the PS3.