Today, I got even more excited after seeing the new Guitar Grip accessory that will be included with the game. It adds four Guitar Hero buttons to the side of the DS (by connecting to the Game Boy slot). So you strum the guitar using the stylus and touchscreen on the DS and you use the Guitar Grip to play the “notes.” Interesting approach, I think.

Photo courtesy of GameSpot

No word yet on the tracklist (other than naming Nirvana, OK Go, and No Doubt as confirmed artists) or the release date (other than Q3 2008). GameSpot has the trailer for the game, which shows the Guitar Grip in action.

The man, the myth, the legend… oh, and Freddie Wong, too.

Turns out that Freddie Wong, the #1 Guitar Hero player in the world, was helping Microsoft promote Silverlight. After playing him in a qualifying round, I was invited to play him in the finals at the main Microsoft booth on the trade show floor. As you can see in this video, it turns out that Freddie is actually pretty good at Guitar Hero. I hung in with him pretty well, hitting 97% of my notes, and ended up finishing third (he hit 100% of his notes). Watch the video of our battle on Vimeo.

Not deterred by my defeat, the next day, I entered another Guitar Hero competition. This one was sponsored by AMD in the BlogHaus. I ended up faring much better without that pesky Freddie Wong being there and took first place.

My prize for winning the AMD SXSW Guitar Hero Challenge ended up being pretty sweet. It is the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 video card, which Scott Carroll from AMD claims is the fastest video card on the planet. It features dual GPUs, 1GB of onboard RAM, and a custom paint job. It even came in its own black carrying case, which the TSA screeners had a blast with at the airport.

Now I feel like I need to put together a gaming PC, but I don’t think the PC version of Guitar Hero would really push the limits of the card :)

Pinnacle has created the PCTV HD Pro Stick to turn your desktop or laptop into an HDTV. Considering that the resolution of most newer PC monitors is equal to or greater than the 1280×720 required for 720p HDTV, it makes sense to leverage those displays to deliver HD.

The package includes the USB tuner dongle, remote, and antenna.

I decided to test out the HD Pro Stick for a few weeks on my 18-month-old laptop. I figured that would give me a chance to try it in a variety of places, plus it would allow me to see how it performs on “older” hardware.

The good

Picture quality
I was pretty impressed with the PQ from the HD Pro Stick. My laptop screen is 1440×900 and my video card has 256MB of RAM. I was able to run smooth, fullscreen HDTV with no problems. I found the default settings a bit too sharp; however, that was partially due to how close I was sitting to the screen. As with all HDTV displays, the farther back you sit from the screen, the better it tends to look.

OTA reception
The antenna picks up local HD channels pretty well. We live in the suburbs of Louisville (10-15 miles away from the nearest tower), and I was able to get all of our local channels with the HD Pro Stick’s antenna.

Portability
When paired with a laptop, you can easily take HDTV with you on the go.

I took the Pinnacle HD Pro Stick with me to Austin for SXSW this week and was able to get local HD channels in my hotel. This turned out to be very helpful since my hotel room had an HDTV, but it was connected to SD cable.

I also used the Pinnacle HD Pro Stick during recent severe weather. We had a tornado warning in Louisville a few weeks ago and I used my laptop and the Pinnacle to keep up with our local weather reports while we were hiding out in our basement.

The bad

The software
The bundled software application was not very good. I struggled with it for a couple of days before switching to Windows Media Center. Unfortunately, if you don’t have Windows Media Center, you’re stuck with the bundled app.

The antenna base
The base of the antenna has a magnet on it. I am assuming that this is to keep the antenna from tipping over when you have it extended. The problem is that this is supposed to be a product you use around a PC. So your hard drive and any flash media you have nearby are at risk of being damaged or erased by placing the antenna too close.

And what if you want to take this on the road with your laptop? Is it safe to stick the magnetic antenna base in your laptop bag? I didn’t want to take a chance to find out, so I stuck it in my suitcase when traveling to Austin this week.

Regardless, it seems like a curious choice. Why not just weight the bottom of the antenna if you concerned about it tipping over? Adding a magnet seems to create more problems that it solves.

The remote
The range on the Pinnacle remote isn’t very good. In fact, I’m not sure that I got it to work properly more than a couple of times. Don’t know if it was a range issue (even though holding the remote next to the dongle didn’t seem to help) or an interference issue or just a bad remote.

The bottom line

If you own a laptop with Windows Media Center or if you just don’t want to install a PCI-based card in your PC, the Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick is a good way to turn your PC into an over-the-air HDTV. It retails for $99; however, I’ve seen it online for as low as $49 recently. At that price, you can’t go wrong.

EA is offering free replacements for anyone who got a bad guitar; however, that would mean shipping it back and waiting for a new one to arrive. I figured it would be easier to fix it myself.

The whole process took about five minutes, and the only tools needed were a regular-size Phillips screwdriver and a small Phillips jeweler’s screwdriver.

Step 1: Remove the 16 screws on the back of the guitar
There are 16 screws that line the edge of the guitar’s plastic case. You’ll need to remove each of these to get inside.

Step 2: Remove the back of the guitar
With all of the screws removed, the back of the guitar easily lifts off.

Step 3: Tighten the screw holding the microswitch in place
The downward strum problem occurs when the microswitch that registers each strum gets loose and fails to make contact with the strum bar. If your microswitch isn’t making contact, simply loosen the screw slightly, rotate the microswitch counterclockwise, and then tighten the screw back down.

You will need the small Phillips head jeweler’s screwdriver for this step.

NOTE: There is a microswitch on each side of the strum bar. To fix the downward strum problem, you want to tighten the one ABOVE the strum bar.

Step 4: Reattach the back of the case
Replace the back of the case and tighten the 16 screws you removed in Step 1.

Step 5: ROCK!!!

That’s it! Your Rock Band guitar should now strum properly in both directions.

However, while we can admire the technical achievement, it is impossible to ignore the shortcomings of the MacBook Air in terms of the hardware sacrificed for the sake of space and power consumption. At a price tag of $1,799, consumers should expect much more.

Specifications

Our Apple MacBook Air is the standard $1,799 model, which is made up of these parts:

• 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
• 80GB Parallel ATA Drive running at 4200 rpm
• 13.3-inch widescreen LED backlit display (1280-by-800)
• 802.11n WiFi (draft specification)
• Bluetooth 2.1
• 2GB RAM (not upgradeable)
• 1 USB port, 1 mini-DVI out, a headphone jack
• Weighs 3 pounds

With hardware like that you are limited to a notebook that can surf the Web, check e-mail, and play an occasional video. In other words, basic computing and not much more.

And while those aren’t bad specs for a $500 notebook, they just don’t cut it for one that is retail priced at $1,800. Those are the kind of hardware specifications I generally expect to see in Sunday’s newspaper ads for HP or Dell notebooks. Those notebooks are good for general computing and cost a lot less than the Apple MacBook Air.

Take note that the Air also does not have an optical drive. This is by design — the Air was built to take advantage of an increasingly wireless world (according to Apple’s marketing).

So if you want to watch a video, you’ll have to download it. Of course you could buy the MacBook Air SuperDrive for a mere $99, which will play CDs and DVDs and allow you to install software. But again, for the price tag I would expect an optical drive (the notebooks from HP and Dell have DVD burners). I would also expect a Gigabit Ethernet port just to keep my network connection options open.

Not all bad news

But the verdict on the Apple MacBook Air is not all bad. What you do get for your $1,800 is a great looking, albeit small, LED display with a high resolution and a battery life approaching five hours under normal Web browsing conditions.

You also get a light-weight and extremely thin notebook that is easy to carry around. With Bluetooth and 802.11n WiFi, wireless connections are a snap. However, there is no support for 3G wireless, which would have been a nice feature for a notebook that emphasizes the benefits of a wireless world.

Your $1,800 also gets you a notebook that will score style points with the commuter crowd or the gang at Starbucks, that is, if you are into that sort of thing.

Bottom line

The Apple MacBook Air is quite a technical achievement. The extraordinary thin shape and crisp LED display are fantastic and deserve praise. But the rest of the hardware specifications leave me scratching my head. Considering the small, slow hard drive, the lack of an optical drive, the lack of an Ethernet port, and the minimal interface ports, the MacBook Air is just too expensive for what you get.

For $1,800 I can get a darn good gaming notebook (NoteMagix C90 Ultra from Velocity Micro) and for about a thousand less than that I can get an HP or Dell that can handle my needs for basic computing. And if all I need is a device to surf the Web, check e-mail, and download and watch an occasional video, I think I’d rather have the iPod Touch. The Apple MacBook Air seems to be filling a niche market that doesn’t really exist.

My friend and consumer electronics veteran Jeremy Toeman takes a look at why Apple chose to go the upgrade route rather than the revamp route.

Now that the MacBook line has beefier specs, would you consider switching from a PC? If you already own a MacBook, do these upgrades make you want to pick one up?

The Eye-Fi wireless SD card is designed to eliminate the headache of transferring photos. It uses your home WiFi network to get the photos from your camera to your PC. If that wasn’t cool enough, the Eye-Fi card will also upload your photos to one of twenty online photo sharing sites including Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket.

The Good

Packaging
I love it when a company makes the unboxing experience fun. Drobo does it. Slingbox does it. And the Eye-Fi does it.

To open the Eye-Fi packaging, you pull a tab on the right side of the box and the card and USB dongle slide out the left side of the box. It’s very cool effect. I showed it to half a dozen people and everyone wanted to play with the box.

Obviously, the packaging isn’t the most important feature; however, it provides a great first impression.

Pull the orange tab on the right and the Eye-Fi card slides out on the left.

Setup
Setting up the Eye-Fi card is very simple. You put the card into the USB dongle, then plug the USB dongle into your PC. The dongle has all of the necessary software stored on it, so all you have to do is run an .exe file.

After the software is installed, you open up the Eye-Fi Manager app and configure your WiFi settings. You can also configure which online photo sharing site you want to use. The whole process takes about 2 minutes. Once you’re finished, you don’t really need to mess with the app again.

The Eye-Fi Manager app shows you which photos have been transferred to your PC and which ones have been uploaded to the web.

Ease of use
Once your settings are configured in the Eye-Fi Manager app, you don’t have to think about your Eye-Fi card again. After you take photos with your camera, the Eye-Fi card will automatically offload them to your PC and upload them to the web. There are no buttons to push to initiate the transfer. Very simple.

Price
The 2GB Eye-Fi card retails for $99. I consider that very reasonable for the convenience it provides. Plus, 2GB is a pretty generous storage capacity for most people’s needs. You can store over 1,000 5 megapixel photos on a 2GB card.

The Bad

There wasn’t really anything “bad” that I found while testing the Eye-Fi card; however, there were a couple of minor issues worth mentioning.

Camera needs to be on
The one thing you’ll need to get used to is the need to leave your camera on during the transfer. I always switch my camera off after I use it, so it took a couple of days for me to remember to leave it on for a minute or two after I was finished shooting. Otherwise, your photos won’t get transferred.

Some camera have an auto-off feature if the camera is idle for too long. You may need to disable that feature to make sure it does automatically power off during the transfer.

Video files don’t get transferred
If you use your camera to shoot video clips, the Eye-Fi won’t transfer those files from your camera to your PC. I almost accidentally deleted over a dozen clips of our kids from the card because I assumed all files would get moved over.

The Bottom Line

If you hate transferring photos from your camera to your PC or, more importantly, if you have relatives who always call you when they screw it up, the Eye-Fi card is perfect for you. Throw in the integration with online photo sites and it’s well worth $99. I’ve already got it on the Christmas lists of a couple of people for next year.

At least the death of HD-DVD was relatively quick. It took just about six weeks from Warner Bros’ announcement at CES until Toshiba’s announcement today.

I will be interested to see how Microsoft responds. Sony is selling PlayStation 3s with built-in Blu-ray drives for around the same price as XBOX 360s without any high definition optical drive. I can’t see them putting a Blu-ray drive in the 360, but who knows.

So which would you rather have — a Playstation 3 or an XBOX 360 with an internal Blu-ray drive?

The Loc8tor Lite can track up to 4 items

We are always misplacing things in our house, so I jumped at the opportunity to give the Loc8tor Lite a try. The unit comes with the remote control and two tags that you attach to the items you want to track. For my tests, I attached one to my wife’s car keys and one to one of our TiVo remotes. The tag is a little bulky for the remote, but it gets the job done.

Includes the remote, two tags, a magnetic holster for the remote and accessories for attaching tags

When you lose a tagged item, simply turn on the Loc8tor Lite remote and press the corresponding button for the item (the Loc8tor Lite includes a handy sticker to remind you which items, like keys, are assigned to which buttons). The tag on the lost item starts to chirp and the small light on the tag starts to flash. At the same time, the remote indicates how close you are to the object with a combination of a lighted meter and a series of beeps. As you move closer to the item, the light meter goes from red to green and the remote beeps more rapidly.

I have been using the Loc8tor Lite for a couple of weeks now and it really does a great job. We have a two-story house and I am able to find items between floors easily. I even put things at the opposite end of the house on a different floor and the Loc8tor Lite was able to lead me right to them. It was pretty impressive.

It’s actually pretty fun to find a lost item. For the first couple of days that we had the Loc8tor Lite, my kids would hide items just so they could find them with the remote.

The only negative I have found is the volume of the tracking sound effects on the remote and the tag. The sound on the remote overpowers the chirp from the tag. So when you are within a few feet of an item, it can be hard to pinpoint its location because the remote is beeping too loud. I’ve found myself covering the speaker on the remote with my thumb to try and muffle it.

If you (or someone you live with) has trouble keeping up with their keys or cellphone, the Loc8tor Lite is definitely worth the $79.99. Just don’t lose the Loc8tor Lite remote or you’re out of luck :)

So, for those keeping score at home, 4 of the 6 major studios have gone exclusively Blu-ray. Blockbuster rents only Blu-ray in its stores (it still has some HD-DVD via its mail order offering). Target offers only Blu-ray players in its stores. And now, Netflix has vowed to phase out HD-DVD as well.

Now I know how all of the customers of Sony’s previous failed formats (UMD, Betamax, MiniDisc, etc.) feel.

[UPDATE: Best Buy has also jumped on the Blu-ray bandwagon. It will begin promoting Blu-ray as the format of the future beginning in March.

So does HD-DVD have any chance for a rebound or is this the last straw?