Hello everyone,
Christmas 07 is now in the history books, crowds have faded at the retail stores, the credit card bills from Christmas are coming in and there is still a Billion dollars in unused gift cards floating around out there waiting to be spent. Now is the time when the retail chains make their move to draw us back. Print, Radio and T.V. ads are everywhere offering us the “Holy Grail of Discounts and Deals” to get one more big rush of business before the summer slowdown gets here. So, since I have some new gadgets to review, I grabbed my backpack and hit the pavement in search of some cool products and great deals.
Who would be my target stores today? Hmm. Let’s start today with Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, Frys and CompUSA since they claim to have the perfect products for my new gadgets.
Per the majority of ads I heard and read, I headed straight to the software section to see for myself. I browsed and browsed looking for any “Hot New Items” as well as some of the "Old Guard Products" that have supposedly added some cutting edge new features. All the usual suspects were there, Nero, Microsofts latest offerings, etc.
In the software, I browsed and browsed looking for new items as well as some of the "Old Guard Products" that have supposedly added in some new cutting edge features. I saw the Neros, Microsofts latest offerings, a few newcomers doing the same old thing with different packaging. I finally settled on 3 products to try out, 123 Copy DVD Gold, Ring Factory, and the latest and greatest from Roxio.
I was beginning to feel a bit of disappointment as the few newcomers on shelf were simply the same old thing with different packaging. I finally settled on 3 products to try out, 123 Copy DVD Gold, Ring Factory, and the latest and greatest from Roxio.
Here is what I found out.
Roxio is the same as always and proved to be a huge disappointment once again, just too hard for the average dumb consumer such as myself, lots of bells and whistles on the box, but you need a programming degree to use most of the features. Thumbs down as ususal. It's a $79 product with 1 or 2 usable features, the rest are simply fluff for the packaging and marketing purposes.
123 Copy DVD Gold- We have a winner here, 123 will make backup copies of your DVD movies AS CLAIMED, it has a very sweet little feature to transfer and convert movies to iPods, PSP, Zune, Sandisk, Zen, etc. Or, if you are into the YouTube thing, 123 Gold will transfer your favorite YouTube videos to your iPod or favorite supported handheld. This thing actually worked as advertised and I have to admit, I had alot of fun with this product. I reached out to the developers of 123 they gave me a little "off the record" sneak preview of some new features being added in. Exciting is the best way to describe the future of this application.
Ring Factory- Wow, what a cool little app this is, say goodbye to paying for Ringtones forever, Ring Factory takes your favorite song or songs and lets you slice and dice it any which way you want. My only issue with this app is, I found myself creating ringtone after ringtone and forgot to go to work. Ooops. LOL. Nice job folks!!
2 comments:
It takes over 4 hours to copy a DVD. Funny how no one mentioned that. I'm taking my copy of 123 Copy DVD Gold back to Best Buy.
encoding a dvd can take anywhere from 30min to over 4hrs as mentioned by the gentleman taking his software back to best buy. The speed is impacted by the quality (greater compression generally equals faster times due to smaller files) Another major factor is computer processor speed, ram & hard drive space and transfer rates. Perhaps the guy taking the software back should consider whether or not the problem may be his computer configuration before blaming the software??
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