After being turned away by Warner Brothers from supporting its format and cancelling their high-profile CES press conference hours before scheduled time, the HD-DVD people have regrouped and trying a different strategy. This time, they're cutting prices on all their HD-DVD players (by as much as 40% to 50%).

Déjà vu, you say? I think so.

It seems like the HD-DVD camp is following the same strategy as the VHS folks when they pulled the same stunt and won the VHS-Betamax war of the 80's. In the previous "war", VHS format won out because it was cheaper and could record/play longer than the Betamax counterpart. In the current "war", HD-DVD is trying to cheaper (really cheap) to win the war.

We'll see if this strategy would work. Hey, if it worked for VHS before in the 80's, there is no harm trying it.

And I thought paying $140 for my 16GB Voyager Flash GT flash drive was way too much money. Apparently not.

Meet USB drives from mii STOR. Together with flash media giant, Sandisk, the online store sells nothing but "high-end" flash drives. No, not high-end in terms of performance or durability but rather "blingability". That's right. The Sheffield-based store sells flash drives encased with precious stones.

Available in 6 different models (STAHL, SILVER, JET, JET+, SNOW and ICE), the pricing of these USB drives starts at around Euro 199 to an astronomical price of Euro 15,500. The most expensive model, ICE, is made with Hallmark platinum and covered with 456 white diamonds.

Hmm, I wonder if they have an affiliate program. I figure with just only 1% commission on the ICE, I'll be making a killing selling these through my site.

After eyeing this item for the past 10 days, it is finally sold. The Sky Commuter prototype, which was listed on eBay Motors and had been generating quite a buzz in the media, has been sold to an eBayer by the name of prattesgirl (whose last transaction was way back in 2006).

The Sky Commuter Project was funded by Boeing engineers in Arlington, WA, back in the mid 80's in hopes of replacing wheeled cars with flying ones. With over 60 investors and $6 million in R&D fund, the project went bust and yieled only 3 prototypes. However, the one listed on eBay was the only one that survived.

prattesgirl, I'm jealous.

Korean DAP maker, iriver, is letting the public in on its new iriver Life (TM) service. As expected, the service works only on iriver devices. When connected to the Internet its PC cradle, iriver Life allows iriver devices to download news, information, cartoons and stories from the service. Though the default sync time for the service is at 5 AM, you can change it to fit your schedule.  It also has a Twitter-like feature that allows you to microblog and share your thoughts with other iriver owners.

But here's the best feature of iriver Life for those lonely hearts out there. Based on your blood type and other information you subscribe to, iriver Life can also find another iriver owner that is a good match for you.

Who needs Match.com when you have iriver Life.

You've probably heard the rumor about a 13.3" thin Macbook-like laptop that maybe announced at Macworld tomorrow. Combine that with the message on the banners that Apple put up for the event - "There is someting in the Air". 9to5Mac now has reported that the new thin MacBook will be called "Macbook Air."

Why "Air"? Could it be related to WiMax, since Intel is really pushing this technology? It's a possibility. The name might also refer to the new technology that Apple filed for patent for that allows charging via induction. If this is true, it would be awesome. No more wires.

Whatever the reason behind the name or even if that is the name or if the product is pure rumor, we have just less than 24 hours to find out tomorrow. Maybe it will come during his famous "one more thing" section normally reserved at the end of the keynote.

Oh the anticipation...

Now that CES is over, I have spotted significantly more Apple-related rumors on my RSS feeds than usual. There is just no shortage of speculations and "anonymous tips" about what Jobs-san will bring to his keynote on Tuesday at Macworld.

So what have I seen so far?

• Macbook nano - Everybody from Macmegasite , Mactropolis to Macrumors are speculating there is a slim notebook in the works. Though not a subnotebook, it will have a 13.3" screen, an SSD drive, and an external optical drive.
• Movie Rentals from iTunes Store- This has been confirmed by many analysts . However, it is unclear whether Jobs will announce this at Macworld.
• New Cinema Displays -This is likely because it has been a while since this product line has been updated. I would love to see their displays equipped with SD slots, webcam and DisplayPort already. It's about time.
  
• New Apple TV - Of course, being the operator of AppleTVSource.com and AppleTVHacks.net , I'm most excited about this one. I heard that it will feature a Blu-ray drive, DivX support and a bigger hard drive . Whatever it is, I'm quite excited about this.
• And countless others more than I care to write about.
  

Man, it must be good to be Apple. I don't see any other companies getting this kind of attention. You don't see people go wild and report rumors on new products from Dell, Sony or Motorola.

A few more days...

After all that anticipation building up for months, it is finally over. CES has come and gone and I'm actually kind of glad it has ended.

The CES 2008 was my second trip to CES. The first year, I didn't get a press/blogger pass and, boy, did I have a hard time taking pictures and talking to the booth people. I have to say this year was much better. I just had to flash my blogger badge and people just somehow got much friendlier. They would go out of their way to talk to me and show me the products in detail.

This year, I was able to spend my time at the "prestigious" Bloggers Lounge, a room set aside for the bloggers. I got free food, free drinks and, most of all, had a great time socializing with other bloggers. It was a lot of fun. I even got to chat with some celebrity bloggers like Noah Kravitz of Phonedog and PowerBookCentral and Ken Silverman of LiveSide.net .  I also saw Hubert Nguyen of Ubergizmo and Howard Chui from HowardChui.com in passing.

While I totally enjoyed talking to the exhibitors at CES and getting information about their products, I have to say I didn't enjoy the walking so much.  My feet were sore and my shoulders almost "fell" off from carrying my laptop around.  The show was way to big for one blogger to cover.  I still have tons of photos that I didn't post.  I just didn't have enough time.  Now that the show is over, there is no point posting them.

Next year, I will just have to recruit more people to help out.  I actually wanted to blog live from the show floor but the WiFi connection was pretty bad.  Of course, while I was gathering information, I couldn't update the site.  That was evident on Tuesday when I put up only 2 posts.

So I have to say I learned a lot from my CES experience this time around.  I will just have to be smarter next year and bring more people and plan a better way to get more posts in.

CES product announcements were big news but, apparently, not as big as this news. Actually, it was kind of a sad news, at least to me.

Yesterday at CES, the Gizmodo boys pulled out one of the meanest pranks I've seen in a long time: they went around shutting off TVs with their TV B-Gone . They did this at one of Motorola press conferences, then at the Seagate booth, and on and on and on, wreaking havoc everywhere they went. In the video they posted on their site, you could see a barrage of upset booth represtatives trying to figure what went wrong with their TV sets.

Rafe Needleman of news.com wrote on his post about the incident that he would not be surprised ifthe Gizmodo crew would be banned from CES next year and that they would probably be sued by the people that they played their prank on. Though I think that some companies will probably sue them for this, I don't think banning them would be the right move. No good things are going to come out of banning anybody.

Though I do NOT agree with what Gizmodo crew did, I was surprised that it took this long for somebody to pull out a prank like this. Anyone of the hundreds of thousands of showgoers could be carrying this little prank device and use it at any time. And it would be impossible to track down the source. At least the Gizmodo guys admitted to it.

The solution for this is for the CES people to be smarter about it. Though it is impossible to check every attendee for a TV B-Gone device, they should find some other ways to prevent this type of thing from happen again (ie. cover the IR port on the TVs, etc.) I can already see the warning in my next year CES invitation about not bringing a TV B-Gone to the show.

Everybody loses if CES bans the Gizmodo staff from showing up at the show again. Next, they'll start banning all the bloggers too. And then what? It's bad for CES and bad for bloggers like us. I'm sure the boys are sorry for what they did.

The only people benefitting from this prank? The TV B-Gone people. After this kind of publicity, I'm sure they are selling the prank device like hot cakes.

[Update] What do you know, the Giz staffer who did the stunt has been identified and officially banned from future CES. Read it here.

One of the products I was excited about at CES 2007 was the Moxi HD DMR. The rep at the booth wowed me with all its features and informed me that it was going to be available very soon at major retailers. Weeks went by, then months. HD-capable Tivos were announced, and I held on. Now, one year later, still nothing.

So I went by Digeo's booth to see what was new with Moxi line of products. And the final answer is: nothing!

The company announced partnerships major companies and services like Flickr and Finetune but still no release date. The only thing I heard from the rep was they are coming in 2008. But, hey, that was what you told me last year. I will not believe it until I see them at Best Buy.

Hear that Digeo?

I went by the LimePC booth and saw what I thought was pretty nice-looking all-in-one PC being displayed. With a 17" glossy widescreen LCD with built-in front speakers and a sleek wireless keyboard, equipped with a trackball, it would be quite a contender for the iMac and Dell XPS One.

It turned out that I was misled. The company was actually showcasing its ThinPC, a small-form factor PC. The screen and the keyboard were optional. Oh well, it was still quite nice.

The ThinPC is powered by the Freescale MPC5121e mobileGT processor (with 3D graphics and media processoring capabilities); it's a basically a PC on a chip. Piling on to the features are 802.11g WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, ethernet, USB 2.0 and VGA connector. It comes in 3 storage flavors: 30GB, 80GB and 100GB.

For the curious, yes, the ThinPC is powered by the same chip as their more popular UMPC, HandheldPC and Palm PC. In fact the motherboards of these products look very similar.

No words yet on its availability.