Foreign Perspectives

It used to be that a TV was just that but these days they’re generally entertainment centers to a greater or lesser extent.

First there was the video plugged in. To that we’ve successively added DVD players, surround sound, Blu-Ray players, PVRs and games consoles making the TV merely a display system for a whole host of things these days. That’s made for quite a jungle for most people and also made the original TV cabinet none too appropriate.

In practice what you need to do is rethink the whole entertainment centre as exactly that these days. Moreover, it’s best to work on the assumption that you’re going to be connecting even more devices to it within the next few years ie buy something that has the space to add a few other gadgets to it rather than start out with it packed.

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We were doing quite well over the last few years. The xbox broke down each year and ended up getting replaced with a new one.

The breaking down was a nuisance to be sure but since it happened within the year the warranty was reset. Thus the next year when it broke down again we’d nothing to pay to get it fixed, or rather, replaced.

However, this time it kept working a little too long so it was outside of the warranty period so there was going to be a charge attached to have it fixed. That’s pretty reasonable: after all, you can’t expect the warranty to continue forever, can you? The problem is that the charge to have it repaired is almost as much as the cost of buying a new one which is a bit crazy although probably to be expected given the relentless falling in the cost of electronics with the rising cost of repairs of such things (even when it’s possible at all).

What this has done though is have us look around at what games consoles are around these days and the overall mix of games available for them. Frankly the unreliability of the xbox has put us off that. On the other hand the, so far, dependability of the PSP has us looking seriously at the playstation 3 which also has the advantage that it works with the PSP and can share some games too.

Early days yet and I guess that we can put the decision off a little bit not that we’re into the nicer weather.

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This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Powermat. All opinions are 100% mine.

It doesn’t take long these days before you have something of a jungle of chargers for all the electronic devices that we collect these days.

It’s a major nuisance too. Not only is there the business of keeping track of the various chargers and matching them up to the device but there’s the nuisance of finding somewhere to plug all the chargers into. Few of us have houses designed with the massive number of power sockets that we’d ideally need to have these days.

That’s, of course, if you can even find the chargers in the first place. Sooner or later one is sure to go missing and the cost of these things is way out of proportion to what you might think they are. The snag is that they’re all specifically designed and branded for just one product. Thus, for example, to buy a charger for my Sony Reader costs a whole lot more than the charger for the PSP yet in fact they’re actually identical except that one says it’s a Sony PSP charger while the other one is a Sony Reader charger.

However, these days there’s a better solution which comes in the form of the Powermat charger. This basically is a specialised power block specifically for portable electronic devices. It’s slightly more sophisticated than that though as it charges your devices without them needing to be plugged in (you attach a custom receiver to each of them and just set them down on the charger).

Much neater than the jungle of cables and not that much more expensive than buying a couple of normal chargers.

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