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• By Sina Mohammadi Since its introduction in 2001, Apple's iPod media player has absolutely ruled the portable media player market. The iPod touch is the newest member of the iPod line, and gives fans an alternative to the increasingly dated-looking iPod classic. Riffing on its older sibling, the iPhone, the iPod touch is Apple's answer to those who want the iPhone's sleek design and cool features, without the phone and its contractual noose. The iPod Touch preserves the clean uncluttered look of the iPhone, along with its touch screen, sans phone. The iPod Touch puts Apple's futuristic "multi touch" user interface to work, enabling its users to navigate through their media with intuitive gestures on a scratch-resistant glass screen. Apple has also created a Wi-Fi version of the iTunes store, so that iPod touch users can access, purchase, and download music from any accessible Wi-Fi location. Most of its features may be accessed via the touch screen, so that only two buttons appear on this unit: the Home button is on its face, and the power/sleep button is situated at the top left corner. Absent from this design are dedicated volume keys, which can cause difficulties for those who are not interested in interacting with the user interface to change the volume. At 4.3" x 2.4" x 0.31" (110 mm x 61.8 mm x 8 mm) and weighing in at 4.2 ounces (120 grams) the iPod Touch is thinner and a bit lighter than the iPod classic, and fits nicely inside any normal-sized pocket. The iPod touch comes in two flavors: an 8 GB, $299 version, and a 16 GB version that goes for $399. With its limited capacity, the iPod touch might not appeal to users who like to take their entire media libraries with them on the go. However, those who want a cutting edge Wi-Fi enabled media player, and don't mind limited storage, the iPod touch is a compelling choice. It makes a simply stunning gift for anyone with mediaphilic tendencies.

• This one came from reader barrychuck, who was curious about our remote control situation. Actually, barry recommended that we check out Ricavision’s much-hyped Vave 100 remote control based on Windows SideShow technology. However, emails to Ricavision went unanswered and, given a disconnected main phone line, we think it’s safe to say that the Vave died before a unit was ever even shipped. Too bad—looked like a cool product. The Maui platform, as shipped from AMD, included a USB IR transceiver and a standard media center remote control with the same boring look as the units that’ve been around since 2005. Functional, but hardly flashy. Additionally, maintaining line of sight might be a problem for users with equipment tucked away in a rack. On the same feedback page, heltoupee mentioned using an iPod Touch as a remote. So, I went out and bought a Touch in order to test the concept. An App Store title called Mobile Air Mouse looked like the most promising solution for turning Apple’s audio/video player into a touch-screen remote. The software’s most notorious feature is tapping the accelerometer functionality built into both the iPhone and iPod Touch, letting you mimic a mouse in much the same way Gyration’s Air Mice have for years. More interesting to us, though, was that the software doubled as a track pad with four separate layouts: function keys, Web browser control, a standard keyboard, and a media-oriented layout. Right now the software works over WiFi, but we're hoping that it'll soon take advantage of the recently-enabled Bluetooth functionality on the Touch as well.  Why does the Air Mouse trump a standard media center remote? The touchpad functionality means you don’t need a mouse, and the built-in keyboard means you can do away with that peripheral, too. Granted, a $200+ iPod Touch makes for an expensive remote control, as does a $200+ iPhone with a monthly plan. For the folks who already own one or the other, though, $6 for the software through the App Store is ridiculously inexpensive coming from a world of $250 Harmony remotes. We originally ran into issues using Mobile Air Mouse with our HTPC, but the problems turned out to be related to the integration of PowerDVD 8 and Windows Media Center. Upgrading to PowerDVD 9 or using ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre instead fixed those initial speed bumps. For use with video playback, Mobile Air Mouse works well. We had a bit more trouble with the software playing back music. While it behaved well in Windows Media Player proper, it didn’t want to follow directions in Windows Media Center. Not perfect, but certainly a step in the right direction. One other downside to going this route is the lack of universality enabled by a device like the Harmony One. In other words, you’ll still need to turn on your TV, pick the right source, turn on your receiver, pick the right input, and turn on your PC. But as a replacement for the boring (and functionally-limited) Media Center Remote with which our Maui box shipped, the iPod is a suitable substitute. Kudos to heltoupee for the suggestion—this one turned out to be a real winner in the face of Ricavision’s dead Vave.

• For those of you who wondered exactly which “Pirates 2 trailer” I was testing with in the CUDA article, here it is again: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, a 71 MB, 1280x528 file (plus black bars) in DivX AVI format. Let’s say you have a thing for playing movie trailers on your PlayStation 3. I picked the 720x480 profile as a target. This should be a straightforward test with neither player supporting decode acceleration of the source and both accelerating the target. The outcome here was a little odd for two reasons. First, we finally see a slight disparity in CPU-only encode times, although a 7.6% variance on a three minute file is nothing to fret about. Second, even though Nvidia had the higher CPU-only time, it manages to scoot just past AMD on the GPU-assist score, beating Stream by 11 seconds, or 13.5 percent, and contradicting our earlier results. The next test was purposefully weighted toward AMD by selecting an MPEG-2 source, which Stream accelerates but CUDA does not, and converting into AVC for the iPod Touch. This is actually one of the more important tests because I selected a 298 MB VOB file—the trailer video from the Mr. and Mrs. Smith DVD, making this representative of performance for when you want to encode your DVD rips into H.264. We have AMD accelerating both ends of the transcode while Nvidia is only lifting the back end. The results seem to mirror this exactly. Both cards show the same CPU-only times, but whereas CUDA cuts 35.5% off the transcode time, Stream shows a 108% improvement. In my mind, this test above all others shows Stream’s best value.  Yeah, I skewed the last test toward AMD, but that doesn’t change the fact that Stream is doing something CUDA can’t.  Score: AMD 3, Nvidia 3.