It’s a big week for Sling Media, which will be at both Macworld Expo in San Francisco and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, showing off their latest video placeshifting hardware and software. The big news from Sling at the Macworld Expo is that they’re demonstrating an upcoming version of SlingPlayer Mobile for Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod touch handhelds, and a new web-based SlingPlayer for Macs that will enable HD streaming to the desktop or laptop.

We’ve been looking forward to SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone since Sling showed an early prototype to Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) attendees last year. SlingPlayer Mobile promises to put our home television experience in the palm of our hands, with full support for changing channels on your home set-top box, viewing and pausing recorded content on a TiVo or other DVR, and select new programs to record. The company says they’ll submit a finished version to Apple for release in the online App Store later this quarter, and pricing is yet to be determined.

For Mac users, Sling will be showing off the new SlingPlayer for Mac HD, a web-based version of SlingPlayer that will be available on sling.com. The player will support Safari and Firefox web browsers on the Mac OS X platform when it’s released later this quarter as part of sling.com, and will support streaming HD content to a Mac desktop or laptop computer from Slingbox PRO-HD hardware.

These Apple-centric announcements follow the recent release of a new SlingPlayer Mobile for Windows Mobile Professional and Standard devices, with support for fifteen new handsets and four new screen resolutions. The software is $29.95 for U.S. users, and is available as a free 30-day trial for those who wish to try before they buy. Last week, Sliing also posted a public beta version of SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry handhelds, officially supporting several BlackBerry Bold, Curve, and Pearl models with 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity. The company says users may also find BlackBerry smartphones with slower connectivity such as AT&T’s EDGE Network will stream video successfully, but Sling will only officially support 3G and Wi-Fi connections.

We’re expecting more news from Sling Media at CES later this week, and we’ll keep you posted.

Welll, in just under 10 hours I should be on a plane to Las Vegas, NV for CES. The show properly is Thursday-Sunday, but there are press events Tuesday and Wednesday which I’ll be attending. During the show itself I’ll be splitting my time between working Sling Media’s booth and trying to visit other vendors as a blogger. As is usual for me, my first victim, er, target of the show will probably be TiVo. Since I’ll be working half the show my time for seeing the rest is cut in half, but I’ll try to do what I can.

Going into this CES I’m not sure what the big deal is going to be this year, if there is one. The economy is down and I haven’t really felt any particular buzz about any given area of the market. HDTVs get bigger while getting thinner and faster (refresh rates). We may see some interesting 3D technologies which will start to enter homes in the next few years. Palm is expected to announce Nova and new hardware, but I’m not excited. I was a die-hard Palm OS user for many years, since 1998, and still carry a Treo 680. But after five or more years of waiting for Palm OS 6 Cobalt Nova I just don’t feel that inspired. I’m already focused on Android as my next likely platform, and it would take a lot for Palm to sway me. Even if they produce an incredible OS, they have an uphill battle ahead to win over developers. I don’t think they have a real chance at this point to gain significant market share. And without that the developers won’t come – and the apps really make the platform.

Going forward I think the mobile market will effectively be, in no particular order, Windows Mobile Professional, BlackBerry, Symbian S60, iPhone, and Android. The original Palm OS is the walking dead, and I don’t see Nova/Palm OS II carving out enough market share to be viable. Symbian UIQ is effectively dead as SonyEricsson and Motorola have pulled out and the Symbian world is focused on the S60-based open source effort. Windows Mobile Standard (aka Smartphone) is rapidly dying as Professional-based touch screen devices move into the lower end of the market where Standard used to focus. I expect Android, which is basically just coming into the market, to post the biggest gains as more devices land. I think the LiMo/LIPS effort will falter and expect to see some of the vendors who have been working on it switch to Android. I think those five platforms will provide the bulk of the smartphone market, anything else will be a small niche.

We’ll probably see more tru2way devices on display from a number of vendors this year, but I don’t know that we’ll see anything revolutionary in that market. I’m hoping TiVo may be showing off their ‘Series4′ tru2way-enabled model, which they’re believed to have been working on for a while. And they may be showing their new DirecTV software, which I expect will be running on the HR20/21/22 DirecTV DVR Plus hardware. I’m not expecting anything else major, maybe some new content partnership announcements and perhaps plans to bring TiVo to more countries. (I’m surprised they haven’t re-launched in the UK yet with the DVB-T model actually.)

The past couple of years the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD fight provided some interest. But that was effectively over with CES2008, and officially ended when Toshiba threw in the towel in February. There aren’t likely to be any big announcements in the Blu-ray world, aside from more content partnerships like LG adding CinemaNow and YouTube to Netflix on their players. Maybe someone will be showing off higher density disc or 3D content concepts.

I’m hoping to be surprised by something at the show, something just unexpected. If you know of something I should be on the look out for, do let me know. And if you’re going to CES drop by the Sling Media booth and say hello. I believe I’m on the afternoons of Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, and on Friday morning. I’m also scheduled to present for Sling Media at CntrStg on Saturday. Frankly I’m nervous as hell about that. It has been years since I’ve done a presentation or talk at a tradeshow and never at anything as big as CES.

OK, off to finish packing.

TiVo Blog has uncovered another TiVo-related iPhone application, DVR Shows. DVR Shows will show you a list of the programs your TiVo has recorded, by connecting to it over the network. (So if you’re away from your LAN it won’t work, or you’ll have to open a port to your TiVo on your router.) The $0.99 cent application allows you to check what’s waiting for you on your TiVo without firing up the TV and TiVo to check. TiVo Blog has some screen shots as well.

PC World’s Gadget Freak column is coming to an end after a five year run. And in his farewell post, Gadget Freak columnist Dan Tynan calls out the five best gadgets he’s encountered over the course of writing the column:

The best gadgets have certain qualities in common. They solve difficult problems simply and elegantly. They’re constantly ahead of the curve, adding new features before you realize you need them. And most important, they put you in control of your own digital destiny–so that you can make the decisions about what you want to do and how you want to do it.

Dan’s top five gadgets are: Apple iPod and iPhone, TiVo, iRobot Roomba, Sonos Sound System, and Nintendo Wii.

Seems like a respectable list to me. I would probably have few different choices, but each person has their own needs. TiVo would certainly be on my list as well, and probably my iPod.

TiVo Blog brought to my attention a new application for the iPhone. It adds a TiVo photo server application to the iPhone that allows you to view photos stored on your iPhone on your TiVo over the network without first moving them to a PC or Mac. The app’s creator, Chris Lundie, is also posting in TiVoCommunity. The app is just $0.99 in the iPhone App Store. And TiVo Blog has posted a number of screen shots.

iTWire has a great post about the blog coverage of the TiVo and iPhone launches down under. It is a bit of meta-blogging, blogging about blogging. And I couldn’t agree more with that they have to say. A pitfall a lot of tech blogs fall into is forgetting the target market of the products they’re covering and making the mistake of reviewing them from the perspective of a tech geek and not a normal end user. This tends to lead to negative reviews as geeks are looking for loads of features. I know I’ve fallen into that myself. We tend to want all the bells and whistles and can be disappointed when something isn’t there, losing sight of the features that are there that will appeal to the target market (which is rarely the geek market). More succinctly:

Members of the digerati seem to be so immersed in the digital lifestyle that they often forget they’re not the average user. Just because something doesn’t meet the needs of the digital elite doesn’t automatically make it crap.

That’s been happening with some of the coverage for the launch of TiVo in Australia. Since some of the networking features won’t be rolled out until a future software update a few of the tech blogs have been fairly negative about the Australian TiVo. But they’re ignoring the features the TiVo will have as a DVR, well above and beyond other DVRs in the market. And even without all of the additional features, it will have some of them which is another advantage. As iTWire nicely put it:

I agree that waiting for extra features is frustrating but, purely as a Personal Video Recorder (which is its primary purpose), Australia’s TiVo will be very impressive straight out of the box. Much of the criticism seemed to come from fanboys of other high-end PVRs, plus Seven and Nine-haters who were venting their spleens.

Yes the lack of ad-skipping is annoying and just reinforces the fact that Australians get screwed by the local networks. Yes the networks are bastards for withholding EPG data and dragging IceTV through the courts. That doesn’t change the fact that the Australian TiVo is a great solution for the average man on the street, if not power users. Some media centre owners believe the world is conspiring against them, but they have to accept the fact that media centres aren’t for everyone and the average person doesn’t want a computer in their lounge room.

The same article also talks about similar negative blog coverage regarding the Australian launch of the iPhone. Local cell carrier Optus is offering 100MB to 1GB of data per month on its Australian iPhone plans, which a lot of geeks feel is too little. But for many users that’s plenty for checking email via IMAP, a little web browsing, etc. You’re really a heavy user to need more than 1GB/month – lots of video streaming, etc.

Ever since the Apple iPhone hit the market, people have been asking for a version of SlingPlayer Mobile for the platform. To date Sling has only expressed their desire to support the platform when it is possible to do so. But with the Apple WWDC kicking off this week, they’ve been showing off a bit of what they’ve been up to, and a number of blogs have coverage:
Engadget (video)
Gizmodo (video)
Zatz Not Funny (video)
PVR Wire @ TV Squad
Ars Technica
Macworld
NewTeeVee
Electronista
jkOnTheRun
The Mobile Gadgeteer
Crave
CrunchGear
AppleInsider
Mobility Today
Gizmos for Geeks
9 to 5 Mac
I4U News
Gear Diary
Download Squad
Unwired View
GottaBeMobile
Nerd Beach
Brighthand
Geek.com
SlingCommunity

And I’m sure there others that I haven’t spotted.

Dave Zatz posted this video to YouTube:

Note that this is a proof of concept, a technology demonstrator, and not the SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone that will eventually be released. This was an engineering project written for jail-broken iPhones to characterize the performance of the platform and ensure that Sling could deliver a high quality customer experience on the iPhone & iPod Touch platforms. This allowed Sling to gain experience with the platform while waiting for the SDK to be released. The official SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone will be written using the SDK and sold through the iTunes App store like other official iPhone/iPod Touch applications. At least that is currently the intent.

If you’re attending the Apple WWDC this week you can get a look at the proof of concept application first hand. Sling Media Product Manager Vicky Shum will be at the Starbucks at 120 4th Street, San Francisco (across from the Metreon) between 10:00 and 16:00 (10am and 4pm) on Monday, June 9th running demos.

Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Sling Media.