The folks who let us watch our TVs wherever we happen to be are offering Windows users a sneak peek at the next version of the software that makes it all work. Sling Media this morning announced a public beta of SlingPlayer for Windows version 2.0, which will be available on the Sling Media Downloads page for anyone who wants to take it out for a spin. Key features of the update include an integrated program guide, a video buffer right in the SlingPlayer client software, and centrally managed Sling Accounts.

Sling’s integrated Guide feature puts a schedule right on the user’s laptop or desktop computer, making it easy for those who want to watch live programming from their Slingbox-connected home TV to see what’s on and choose a program without the delays of accessing a distant set-top box’s program guide and squinting at text that’s traveling halfway around the world.

A live video buffer right in SlingPlayer will let users pause, rewind, or fast-forward through up to an hour of video, whether or not there’s a TiVo or other DVR hooked to the Slingbox on the other end. Those who do have a DVR can still use its capabilities, but will have the option of pausing, etc., locally, without the delays involved in remote-control signals being transmitted over the net.

Sling Accounts will allow users to store their personalized program guide settings and channel line-ups, favourite channels, and Slingbox IDs and passwords on Sling Media’s central servers. This should eliminate the need to reconfigure SlingPlayer’s settings each time it’s installed on a new laptop, office desktop, or even cybercafe kiosk.

The company says the long-awaited Clip+Sling feature, announced over a year and a half ago at CES 2007, didn’t make it into the public beta. The release of Clip+Sling, which lets Slingbox owners create and share short segments of video from what they’re watching with anyone, is still pending while the company negotiates with content owners and distributors. The 2.0 software, though, will provide the underlying flexibility the company needs to release Clip+Sling and other new features.

Sling Media is also working on a new version of SlingPlayer for Macintosh, which will bring these features to Apple’s platform, but no time frame is available for a Mac update.

Thanks to Darren over at EngadgetHD, who noticed that what everyone’s suspected would occur seems to have come to pass. TiVo has quietly removed the Series3, the company’s original HD DVR, from its offerings. Both new and refurbished product listings now include only the dual-tuner, standard-definition TiVo Series2DT, and the dual-tuner, high-definition TiVo HD.

TiVo has said that they’d be focusing further development on the TiVo HD platform architecture, so this comes as little surprise. In fact, we’ve talked about it here before. It’s a shame, though, for those looking for the premium experience offered only by the Series3, with its THX certification, fancier remote, and front-panel OLED display, not to mention larger hard drive.

Before long, we’d hope to see the stock TiVo HD kicked up a notch with its own larger hard drive; as more and more of what people watch shifts to HD channels, a twenty-hour capacity for HD recordings will seem stingier and stingier. Western Digital’s My DVR Expander external hard drive helps, and expansion kits and services from third parties like DVRUpgrade and WeaKnees are great for those who don’t mind modified hardware, but simply put, the average consumer wants to buy a standard product that’s all he or she needs.

So, as we wistfully recall the dear, departed TiVo Series3 (and as aficionados scramble to find remaining stock on store shelves or from DVRUpgrade and other online vendors with small stocks), we look forward to future configurations of the new flagship product, the TiVo HD.

It’s pointless to talk about cell phones or smartphones without bringing up the 800 pound gorilla in the room, so I’ll get that out of the way right now and say that the $99 Palm Centro is no iPhone. But at a quarter the price of Apple’s entry in the telephone market, Palm’s latest is a slim and capable update of their PDA line with one key advantage over the iPhone for some users - an actual keyboard.

Available on the AT&T and Sprint wireless networks (and expected on Verizon soon), the Centro joins the Palm Treo family of cell phones as a slimmer, sleeker entry, one we can more reasonably imagine carrying around as a phone for daily use. It’s a long time since the Motorola MicroTAC Elite seemed svelte, and too many smartphones err on the side of pretty chunky. By contrast, the Centro is narrow and easy to grip, similar in width to Motorola’s more recent offerings, such as the RAZR and ROKR.

The Keyboard’s Where it’s At — The only drawback to the Centro’s narrower design is that it sports the smallest keyboard Palm has yet offered on its handhelds. Having used a Palm Tungsten C for a while, I was used to the idea of teensy keys placed close together, but at a full inch wider than the Centro, the Tungsten has room for bigger, much more widely spaced keys. The difference is clear with sustained typing; only those with relatively small hands will be comfortable with much typing on the Centro. Even the extra fifth of an inch (about a half centimeter) of width on the Treo seems to make a difference in typing ease.

But, if you have relatively small hands or you’re dexterous with your big fingers, having a keyboard makes all the difference when composing email and text messages. I found that after a few minutes, I was pretty adept at punching out a few sentences at a time - also true with the iPhone, but even with the iPhone’s adaptive typing recognition, which guesses what you meant to type even if you miss every third letter, lots of users have said they prefer a real keyboard.

Purely Palm — Another key advantage for the Centro is its familiarity for those who’ve used Palm handhelds, often for many years or several models. Detractors say the gradually updated and incrementally refined user interface has fallen way behind, but I have to say that the Centro’s Palm OS offers a clean simplicity that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Anyone who used the original Palm user interface will immediately recognize it in what it’s evolved into; there are more icons on the Applications screen, but a few iterations ago, Palm made them sleeker and colorized them, as well as grouping them into (optional) categories for easy navigation.

As with other recent Palm handhelds, the Centro has an idiosyncratic relationship with Mac OS X, my platform of choice. The Palm Desktop software hasn’t been updated in years, but if you want to use it to manage syncing of your contacts, calendar, and other info between handheld and Mac, you can. Or, Palm’s HotSync software can now collaborate with iSync to allow users to stick with Apple’s Address Book and iCal. We suspect most Mac users will take this approach, especially if they don’t have a long-standing Palm habit.

The Centro includes a web browser and email client; neither is a spectacular example of its genre, but both are capable as handheld applications go. The web browser can display graphics but not much in the way of page layout; Palm web browsing hasn’t changed much in the several years it’s been around, though the Blazer browser is surprisingly adept at displaying Google Maps.

No Surprises — There’s not much else to say, if you’re familiar with using cell phones and you’re familiar with using Palm handhelds. (We suspect relatively few users are jumping on the Palm bandwagon for the first time by picking up a smartphone.) The audio quality is fine, the reception strength is reasonable even in fringe areas (easy to test in my basement, where the iPhone and my Verizon Wireless phone also have trouble), and the battery lasts one to three days of off-and-on use. (You’ll probably want to charge daily.)

What’s the best feature of the Palm Centro? I think it’s the ability to use the Palm OS version of SlingPlayer Mobile, the handheld version of Sling Media’s placeshifting video viewing software. With my Slingbox hooked to my TiVo, I was pleasantly surprised at how watchable both live TV and pre-recorded programs were. The delay in sending remote-control signals from the Centro to the TiVo via cellular connection wasn’t even significantly worse than using Sling’s desktop software via broadband.

Do You Want One? — There’s no question that the Centro is a capable phone, and a worthy successor to a decade of Palm handhelds. In a world with no iPhone, Palm’s Centro and Treo smartphones would be the clear alternative to the quirky Windows Mobile and the walled garden of RIM’s BlackBerry. But with Apple’s category-killer in the game, and an updated iPhone looming, the Centro will be most attractive to those with an attachment to the Palm way of life and those who just need a small dose of smartphone, i.e. those for whom the iPhone is overpriced overkill.

The Centro is most attractive of all right now, with a $50 rebate MegaZone noticed, making the phone effectively $49 instead of $99 through July 6th.

Earlier this week, The Onion posted a parody documentary video on YouTube about the “Blockbuster Video Living Museum,” as if brick-and-mortar video stores were a thing of the distant past, a quaint relic to be remembered. Video rental shops aren’t quite dead yet, but Netflix and Amazon Unbox are each having a go, in their own respective ways, of making such retail outlets obsolete.

One new edge for Netflix, which prides itself on giving customers plenty of information about their movie-watching habits, comes from a third-party developer. FeedFlix is a clever new service that takes the readily available information Netflix provides in personalized RSS feeds (your feeds will appear if you’re logged into your Netflix account) and displays that info in more digestible format.

How fast do you watch and return your videos? Are you one of those Netflix dream customers that pays month after month, hardly ever watching and returning a disc? FeedFlix will tell you how long you’ve had each disc out, what you’ve recently returned, and what’s coming up soon in your queue. None of this is info you couldn’t figure out yourself with Netflix’s tools, but FeedFlix provides a convenient summary.

Beyond the personalized report, FeedFlix offers a public link that allows you to show others what’s in your queue and what Netflix recommends for you. These links reveal nothing about your identity, unless you post the links in a way that identifies you.

As more and more people join FeedFlix, the service has been able to generate fun aggregated info such as average rental length and shipments by weekday. (Not surprisingly, about a third of all shipments go out on Tuesday — replacing videos mailed back Monday after the weekend. Thursday’s the day Netflix ships the fewest videos out.)

Whether you use FeedFlix to see if you’re making the most of your Netflix subscription, or just as a fun diversion, it’s worth trying out.

Monsoon Multimedia announced last week that its set-top TV place-shifting products will soon deliver television to Windows Mobile and Symbian handhelds, including smartphones and PDAs. New handheld applications for Windows Mobile are due this month, followed by a version for Symbian-based smartphones.

The company’s four set-top boxes already provide place-shifted viewing to Windows computers and to Nokia’s palm-top N810 Internet appliance. Like the Slingbox PRO, Monsoon’s HAVA devices support multiple video sources connected at the same time, and their high-end units can stream to multiple viewers at once on a local network, though only one at a time over a broadband connection to the Internet.

Monsoon licensed new audio and video compression decoders from On2 Technologies, Inc. in order to implement the handheld client software; handhelds pose a significant challenge for receiving decent video quality thanks to low (and often unreliable) network bandwidth and low processing power compared to home computer setups.

A beta evaluation copy of the HAVA Mobile Player for Windows Mobile (including Palm Treo smartphones based on Redmond’s OS) is available now from the company’s web site.

On Wednesday, Engadget and CNET each published an email from Sling Media Vice President of Sales Gregg Wilkes, sent in reply to a user’s inquiry about the SlingCatcher, the company’s planned hardware receiver to accompany the Slingbox line. Mr. Wilkes says the unit will not ship in the second quarter of this year, as the company announced at CES earlier this year, but sometime later in 2008. Here’s an excerpt:

Will the catcher ship in Q2? No. We are upgrading the user experience and making enhancements to the feature set. These may or may not all ship at the same time.

Will the Catcher ship in ‘08? All indications point to this happening in 2008.

The SlingCatcher hardware, which first appeared at the 2007 CES and was shown again at CES ‘08, will provide a way of watching your Slingbox from another TV, as opposed to the SlingPlayer software, which requires a computer and fast network connection; it can also bring online video to a television. See Engadget’s post or the Crave post at CNET for the full user email and Gregg’s reply.

Check out more of Mark’s recent writing at Mark_TV and TidBITS.