Filed under: Portable Video

Reports keep on pouring in with promises of juicy info on Apple’s upcoming video rental service for iTunes. The latest news comes from Variety, and claims that the rentals will last a mere 24 hours before becoming unplayable, but it’s unclear if that includes multiple plays within the 24 hour window. Prices will start at $2 but range all the way up to $5. Variety also syncs with previous reports stating that Disney and Fox are the only studios confirmed so far for rentals, with Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount as candidates and Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. as perennial holdouts.

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By 2012, two-thirds of all high-def disc drives for PCs will support both Blu-ray and HD DVD, says an analyst at ABI Research. He also added that by 2009, universal drives will cost the same as Blu-ray drives, fueling the interest in choosing them over a single-format drive. ABI also says that the rumblings about a market for standalone HD processors inside PCs is bunk, and that Intel and AMD will soon smoothly handle HD using standard chipsets. The analyst addressed HD disc burning, too, saying only that for now, consumers will probably stick to burning DVDs for data storage, and that burning HD discs will only really matter when prices on blank media come down. It’s funny how technology always comes in to solve problems created by technology. [ABI Research]

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Filed under: Cellphones

Plenty of waterproof phones and other small weatherproof devices have made it off the assembly lines and into our clumsy clutches, but P2i, a small spinoff company using tech originated within the Defence Science and Technology Lab in England, could be bringing waterproof gadgets to the masses. The Ion-Mask is a special invisible coating that is chemically bonded to the device and repels water. It should allow waterproofing to make it into devices that are too small for the seals that are usually used to do the trick. Devices can have joins and gaps coated for a general level of water repellence, or have individual components treated for even more protection. The tech was originally designed to repel toxic vapors and liquids from soldier uniforms, and could also be making its way into athletic shoes. Three leading phone makers are apparently in discussions over using the tech in upcoming phones.

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Jeffrey Stephenson, the man who first looked at a cigar humidor and said, “I can turn that into a PC,” has made another Art Deco PC out of wood. The G-metric Nano, which will be unveiled publicly at CES this year, is the smallest enclosure Stephenson could design that contained a VIA NX15000 Nano-ITX mainboard, 1GB of RAM, and a slot-loading DVD player. The case itself is hard Pennsylvania cherry, but Stephenson’s signature inlay is done with walnut, mahogany, basswood and cherry veneers. The feet serve a dual purpose of adding style and hiding the fact that the large heatsink extends out of the box a tad. [Jeffrey Stephenson]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Transportation

Alpine’s cutting straight to the chase with its new iDA-X200 and iDA-X300 headunits. Forgoing a CD mechanism entirely, the two systems are designed primarily for use with an iPod, though they do pack a few extra goodies. The X200 works with Alpine’s Sound Imprint system for some fancy DSP, while the X300 has USB input for pulling media off of non-iPod sources. No word on price or availability.

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