That’s precisely why I’m so excited to get my hands on Google TV. The search giant’s platform strikes me as a product that does everything the Apple TV should have done. It allows me to search the Web, pull content from just about everywhere, and enjoy some of the apps that I currently use on my smartphone. It’s simply a full-featured product that I’m looking forward to using.

But that doesn’t mean that the Logitech Revue, which was detailed earlier this week and will launch at the end of the month, is necessarily worth its $299 price tag. The set-top box looks nice and I would say without hesitation that it appeals to me more than the Apple TV. But I still won’t buy it.

Google TV is a software platform that would work best as a feature baked into an HDTV. That’s why I’m happy to hear Sony is working on a Google TV-equipped device. It’s also why I hope more HDTV vendors will follow suit in the coming years as the entertainment service takes off.

See, consumers don’t want every device they can think of connected to their televisions. They actually want to have all the content they really care about just a few clicks away without worrying about switching from one device to another to access it.

That’s why Google TV is so compelling. It offers opportunities to consumers that weren’t available in the living room until now. That said, the device it’s running on should provide consumers with similarly unique opportunities that aren’t available to them right now.

Realizing that, I don’t want to throw my support behind a product that doesn’t see what consumers are really looking for. I want to support products that push the industry forward, not keep it put.

I see a future where the number of HDMI ports on an HDTV won’t matter. I see a future where every living room will have an HDTV sitting on a stand and few (if any) devices connected to it. And perhaps most importantly, I see a future where consumers see value in reducing their reliance on multiple devices and demand integrated functionality.

The Logitech Revue doesn’t fit into that view of the future. But a Google TV-equipped HDTV does. And that is the product that will not only deliver the most viable experience, but will also win out when it’s all said and done.

Relevant Entries on SlashGear

• Google optimizes Google Reader for Wii
• Google Re-upping to compete with Ask.com
• Google to make applications available offline
• Rumor – Google to announce phone plans in two weeks
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Projectors might be great for movies and essential for presentations, but they are rarely sexy. A notable exception currently showcased at CEATEC 2010 is the ultra-short throw LCD projector (the follow-up model to the CP-A200) showcased at Hitachi’s booth or rather the combination of the device and a whiteboard with touch control.

Measuring just just 45x303x85mm and weighing less than 4kg, the projector itself is the smallest, lightest and shortest-focus projector out there. It produces 80-inch images from a distance of just 56cm.

The whiteboard type display is 78 inches large. In the videos below, you can see a Hitachi employee showing how the system (projector plus screen) works. He tries hard to boost the wow-factor (which, for me at least, worked well).

Here is a video I shot at Hitachi’s CEATEC booth:

Here’s another one:

In this clip, we talk about Hasting’s vision for the future, including what life will be like when TV-as-we-know-it is gone, Netflix’s plans for international expansion and life amid two new formidable online video entrants, Apple and Google.

For the whole video go here, or go here for a podcast of the entire talk.

A simple question: how many examples can you name where technology can be argued to have ruined a movie or TV show or book? I ask this because The Blair Witch Project was released on Blu-ray on Tuesday (well, widely released—it had exclusively been in Best Buy for a few weeks now), and having recently seen the movie (sometime in the summer) I can say this: in today’s world of GPS’d smartphones, like your iPhone or Android-based phone, the movie patently doesn’t work.

The main conflict in the movie—and yeah, these are spoilers, but come on, the movie’s more than 10 years old; there’s a statute of limitations when it comes to breaking out the spoiler tags—revolves around the loss of a map.

The three college students, wasting their parents’ money trying to create a documentary on the Blair Witch, hoof about the backwoods of Maryland in search of the witch and other such content. They’re basically in the middle of nowhere—and then they lose the map! (Which wasn’t very helpful to begin with, but whatever.)

Without the map, the kids are doomed to circle around the woods forever, breaking psychologically along the way.

Fun!

That’s all well and good in 1999, when desktop computers were less powerful than today’s smartphones (is that even true? I don’t know, but it sounds reasonable enough), and nobody had access to handheld GPS, but today? Go ahead and try to promote a movie where a bunch of dumb college kids get lost in the woods ofMaryland . I give it five seconds before someone in the audience shouts—hilariously—hey man just use your iPhone!

Then the audience laughs, and leaves.

In conclusion, Blair Witch Project would never work in 2010. Real talk.

Now the question becomes, what other movies (or TV shows or books or whatever) can you think of that have been ruined by technology? I know a number of Seinfeld episodes really show their age when a simple cellphone call would solve Jerry’s (or whoever’s) problem.

Hopefully we can think of a few examples. If not I’d have wasted a good three minutes of your life, and for that I apologize.

Video demo after the cut

There’ll also be generic LongBox Digital apps for Android and iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad, so presumably you’ll be able to transfer purchased comics across platforms.  v1.1 of the company’s PC and Mac app is being released this weekend.

Perhaps we’re reading too much into the press copy, but it does say that LongBox Digital are the exclusive providers for “any other tablets or portable devices utilizing Notion Ink’s Genesis system over the next two years.”  Considering there’s also been rumors of a Notion Ink smartphone and an “Eve” device, that potentially bodes well for smaller format devices.  Meanwhile there’s also talk of “ebook, TV music and film services” all being preloaded, so we’re guessing Notion Ink has plenty more content partnerships to announce.

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“Justin.tv has been an amazing place to work and the caliber of peopleis off the charts high, but Yobongo is something I haven’t been ableto get off my mind for a long while now,” Elston writes to us in an email. “It is clear to us that there will be new ways to communicate with people due to the proliferationof smart phones which are both always connected and location aware. We have not seen anything truly new created yet, imagined from the groundup, that takes advantage of the unique characteristics of smartphones,” he continues.

Elston declined to give more details about Yobongo, but did say that they have prototypes up and running already and that people are currently testing it out on the iPhone. Elston, who previously founded KickPost (a tech news aggregator), Kallow (a tool to help regular people buy electronics), and Toluu (a way to share what you read), notes that while those ideas were on the smaller scale, he’s aiming big with Yobongo.

Elston and Kasper as the latest in a string of people to stream out of Justin.tv in recent weeks. VP of Marketing Evan Soloman left last week, and according to this post, the entire business development team has been let go by the company. Elston says not to read too much into the timing of all of this, “David and I had been planning this for a while now, so it is really just the way the timing worked out,” he writes.

Elston has more in his post on the matter. And you can follow the Yobongo Twitter account for updates here.

If you’d given up hope of using your 360 to watch AT&T U-Verse after over three years of waiting, we wouldn’t think any less of you; but for those still holding on to the dream of one less set-top box under the TV, this latest tip says the wait is all but over. As you can see from the internal memo above, a so-called Wired Release will roll out to AT&T U-Verse customers next Sunday, and it’ll bring the long awaited feature with it (though you’ll have to wait until November 7th for that particular aspect). This means AT&T U-verse customer’s Xbox 360 will have a Dashboard app, and when launched, it’ll let it function exactly like any other U-verse set-top. The only major catch is that it can’t be the only set-top — you’ll need at least one DVR at another TV in the house to enjoy one of the four HD streams that could be funneled into your home. But hey, at least it’s on the way, right?

[Thanks, Anonymous]

AT&T U-verse customers can use Xbox 360 as a set-top box starting November 7th originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon rolls out FiOS on Demand app for Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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On Wednesday, CrunchGear’s Devin Coldewey and I dropped by two product announcements, one for Cisco’s purportedly consumer-friendly ūmi and Logitech’s Google TV accessory round-up. It was a long parade of flashy products with decent specs and thought-provoking price tags. As I mentioned in an earlier post, ūmi truly does bring high-quality telepresence into the home (assuming you have a solid connection) but it will cost you $599.99 for the hardware and $25 a month— or $300 more per year— just to use the service. What exactly Cisco is providing to justify that $25 a month (besides extra padding for its bottom line) is beyond me.

Even other executives in the industry think $600 for consumer video calling is pushing it, especially when you consider that your target demo has been trained to equate video calling with “free” thanks to services like Skype and Google video chat.

When I asked Logitech’s CEO, Jerry Quindlen, what he thought about Cisco’s ūmi price point for TC TV, the polite executive merely said, “I don’t think anything that’s too expensive or isn’t easy to use is going to be successful, doesn’t matter who it’s from…if that’s where it [ūmi] is, and there’s a monthly fee, you know, that might be a tough sell in this economy.”

That’s suit speak for “Good luck, Cisco, see you at Overstock.com”

Of course, I whole heartedly agree with Quindlen but I can’t resist laying down that tired, if not apropo, idiom: pot, kettle black. To wrap up his presentation on Wednesday, Quindlen displayed a slide with Logitech’s entire mini-eco-system for Google TV: $299.99 for the Revue, the unit’s centerpiece, $129.99 for a mini-controller and $149.99 for a mountable camera for video chatting (requires the Revue for use). All told that’s $579.97 before taxes— notably less than Cisco’s one-trick-pony video chat solution but more expensive than many LCD and plasma screens on the market and roughly 6x the cost of Roku or Apple TV.

Logitech’s bundle may be the first set top solution for Google TV but it certainly won’t be the last or the least expensive. To put it bluntly, $600 for a set top bundle seems to be a tough sell in this economy.

Good luck Jerry.

See full video with Quindlen above,  interestingly, he mentions that the next wave of products will include gaming solutions for Google TV.

The Apple TV has been out for, oh, about a week now and we’re really curious what you think about it. Reviews from the usual technology pundits are good measuring sticks, but they often lack the perspective of the average user. We can attest that “reviews” are often penned from snap judgments just to meet a deadline. This is why the Internet deserves opinions from actual Apple TV owners.

All you need to do is upload your take of the Apple TV to any video sharing site and send us the link. We’ll contact a bunch of you asking for the raw video file that we’ll use in making a comprehensive meta-review. This is probably the best way for you to get 15 seconds of Internet fame while either loving or trashing the new Apple TV. (Yes, trashing is allowed)

Click through for the details.