whdi

While our various gift guides and roundups have provided plenty of really great holiday ideas, there are always a few worthy products that get left out.

During the past few weeks, Scott and I have frequently found ourselves at each other's desks, eyeballing cool accessories for laptops and other mobile products that we never got around to reviewing, but nevertheless deserve a nod.

These include portable laptop desks, wireless video connections, and even a few bags and cases, and prices run from a few bucks to a few hundred.

Check out our odds-and-ends collection in the gallery below, and if you have a great gadget stocking-stuffer idea, let us know in the comments section. … Read more

Knowing I was going to Las Vegas for CES, my friends said, "Have fun!" The truth is, friends, fun, whether or not the kind that stays in Las Vegas, is not the first thing one can expect from covering CES. It's always a lot of work.

I did have fun seeing my colleagues all in one place, however, especially those from the East Coast, whom I don't get to see very often. Now that we've all returned home or are on the way back, here are the things in the networking and storage categories that are sticking with me from the show.

In the networking department, faster is the main theme, and this is true for both wireless and powerline networking. Powerline networking is now pumped up to support 500Mbps by adhering to the latest IEEE 1901 standard  (up from the 200Mbps of the HomePlug AV standard). There were several 500Mbps powerline products announced at CES this year, such as the Trendnet TPL 401E and Netgear's XAVB5004.

Networking vendors also introduced the first hybrid wireless routers that have built-in support for powerline technology, such as the WNXR200 from Netgear.

Wireless networking this year is seeing many vendors moving to the three-stream standard that offers a throughput speed of up to 450Mbps (as opposed to the 300Mbps of the popularly used dual-stream standard). Examples of these are Netgear with the WNDR4000, Trendnet with the TEW-692GR, and D-Link with its HD Media routers.

On the client side, the three-stream wireless standard is supported by Intel's Centrino N-5300 and Centrino N-6300 Wi-Fi adapters. These two Wi-Fi chipsets, also known as Intel's Ultimate N Wi-Fi Link family, can handle all standards of Wi-Fi, including the three-stream standard. Trendnet also released the first 450Mbps gaming adapter. In the future, networking vendors will also release USB adapters that support this higher speed.

D-Link's HD Media routers, by the way, are the first that sport an SD card reader, and some of them are also the first with built-in USB 3.0 to support faster network storage performance.

Speaking of USB 3.0, most storage vendors have now moved to this standard for their external drives. This is a natural move, as USB 3.0 offers a speed that's easily 10 times that of USB 2.0 and is backward-compatible with all previous versions of USB standards. External drives are now also getting tinier, and many of them now are also based on solid-state drives. Examples of these are the GoFlex Slim from Seagate, Verbatim's Titan XS, and the i-Disk Rex 100 from Pretec.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Amimon, which is the strongest supporter of the Wireless Home Digital Interface display standard and announced the Asus WAVI earlier this week, demoed at CES 2011 a variety of solutions through which WHDI-enabled devices could potentially change the way we interact with indoor entertainment.

Similar to Intel's WiDi and Sibeam's WirelessHD, WHDI is a technology that allows devices to connect to a HDMI TV wirelessly and transmit audio and video at full HD quality (1080p). The strength of WHDI is the fact that it has almost no latency and, therefore, other than high-def movies, enables interactive applications, … Read more

LAS VEGAS--You want to connect your desktop computer to a big-screen TV so your gaming can go big, literally? Now you can do that, and more, wirelessly.

Amimon, a prominent member of the Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) consortium, together with Asus today announced the WAVI 3D wireless PC-to-TV package. This kit is the first of its kind to enable consumers to wirelessly connect a desktop PC to a TV with support for 3D content.

This means you now can enjoy 3D PC video games as well as 3D movies on any 3D-capable HDTV, using the PC as the player.… Read more

It's predicted that 2011 is the tipping year of networking, where more electronic devices have built-in networking capabilities than computers. And this isn't a surprise; over the past few years, more and more home entertainment devices, such as flat-screen TVs, media playback devices, game consoles, and so on, include an Ethernet port. Others use USB Wi-Fi dongles to connect to a wireless network, and many even come with a built-in Wi-Fi adapter.

As more and more devices in your home scramble to find ways to connect to one another and to the Internet, the wireless network might … Read more

There are currently a few ways to display a computer's screen on the big TV wirelessly, including Intel's WiDi (which is part of Wi-Fi Plus), WHDI, and the upcoming 60Ghz Wi-Fi.

I've always been skeptical about the viability of these solutions when it comes to displaying high-def and interactive content, especially after seeing how Netgear's Push2TV, which is based on Intel's WiDi technology, shows a significant amount of lag, making it impossible to play games.

However, Amimon's recent demonstration proved that WHDI could seriously change the way we think about indoor entertainment. Amimon is … Read more

The future in which you can display your laptop's content wirelessly on an HDTV is getting closer.

Amimon, a member of the WHDI consortium that makes Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) chips for wireless HDTV connectivity solutions, announced Tuesday that it has been picked by Asus to power the upcoming WiCast EW2000 PC to TV connectivity kit. This means Asus' WiCast kit will use Amimon's WHDI technology to enables users to wirelessly connect their computers to their TVs. Asus also announced that it has joined the WHDI consortium.

WHDI is an emerging wireless technology that offers wireless alternatives … Read more

When you want to connect a device such as a game console or a Blu-ray player to a TV, the most common way is with an HDMI cable. If you have a few devices, that makes a big clutter behind the TV.

Soon this can be avoided with the introduction of products that support Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI), which is one of the technologies that allows audio/video devices to connect wirelessly while offering the same quality as HDMI cables.

Right now there are also other solutions, including WiDi, WirelessHD, WiGig and the upcoming Wi-Fi 60Ghz. However, WHDI … Read more

It's going to be a while before you can take advantage of the new 60Ghz Wi-Fi technology to connect your Blu-ray player to your TV wirelessly. To get similar high-bandwidth wireless connectivity between home entertainment devices soon, however, there's an alternative.

Amimon, a member of the WHDI consortium and a developer of wireless HDTV solutions, announced Monday that it has surpassed half a million units in sales and orders for its 1080p Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) chipset. This suggested a very strong demand for the technology and it is expected that the first WHDI-enabled products will be … Read more