Other Tech

From the outset the most intriguing thing about the Apple iPhone hasn't been the phone so much as the interface: a high-resolution touchscreen on which your fingers do the talking: Tap an icon to select an application, spread them to enlarge the picture, slide your finger to move the cropped image into view, swipe the screen to reveal the next slide. It all feels so natural.

Newcomers to Sound & Vision's HDTV test reports are likely to come across some tech talk that might seem confusing or arcane at first. The truth is, video technology has become much more complex since TV started to go digital and high-def nearly a decade ago, and a side effect of all that increased picture resolution and clarity has been mounds of strange new jargon.

"X-Factors" probably aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a place to buy a home theater. But for Jared Lewis, founder of Homewood, Alabama-based Audio Video Excellence (www.avxinc.com; 205-871-7289), they set his custom installation business apart from the competition.

The iPhone has been stealing all the media buzz lately, but what about Apple's other radical offering, iTunes Plus? As I wrote in my July/August column (also available at soundandvisionmag.com), Apple and EMI have decided to sell music without any Digital Rights Management. They're charging extra for those downloads ($1.29 each vs.

Clearly embedded somewhere in America's national psyche is an obsession with getting thin. How else do you explain both the celebrity of Nicole Richie and the craze for flat-panel TVs? In fact, with the increased focus on TVs slim enough to be mounted on a wall, the environment for rear-projection HDTVs has gotten a lot tougher.

Or, to paraphrase another song: "To everything / Burn! Burn! Burn! / There is a season." Which is not to say that I recommend ignoring the heat in your grill or fireplace. What I mean is, with summer on the wane and fall on the way, there's still time to enjoy one season while getting ready for the next. And for each of these purposes, there is an iPod.