By David Ponce

As mentioned yesterday, media players are popular this year at CES. This is LaCie’s Mini HD, a “Full HD WiFi Media Center in a DVD-Sized Footprint”. Sporting a 500GB drive, the box will playback an array of formats on your HDTV. Loading content onto it is done through USB or network, be it wired or not.

It’ll be available later this quarter for $300. Keep reading for the full press release.

LaCie today unveiled LaCinema Mini HD, the all-in-one Wi-Fi High Definition media center. Its amazingly small and stylish design packs a big punch, bringing your HD movies, photos and music collections to your widescreen TV in full 1080p resolution.

LaCinema Mini HD bridges the gap between the computer and entertainment worlds in full HD quality. Featuring built-in high-speed 802.11n Wi-Fi, LaCinema Mini HD brings a DLNA® media player and server to your home without wires.

Transferring content to the LaCinema Mini HD is easy through the bus-powered USB connection for maximum transfer speeds, or by connecting the drive to a home network. Users can conveniently load files wirelessly from their computer or via the Ethernet connection.

“The new LaCinema Mini HD offers a full-featured media center by combining high storage capacity, compact design, and seamless store-and-play functionality,” commented Salem Tirane, Digital Home Product Manager. “Users will benefit from large HD video format compatibility and the convenience of built-in wireless N streaming.”

Playing movies is as simple as connecting the included HDMI video cable and selecting the wireless network. The drive is instantly ready to play content stored on its internal hard disk, attached USB drive or networked PC, Mac, or NAS (network-attached storage).

LaCinema Mini HD renders full HD 1080p movies in uncompromising quality on TVs and makes any movie, photo or music file accessible at your fingertips. Thanks to an extensive list of supported codecs, LaCinema Mini HD permits seamless playback of MKV, AVC, DivX and many more files on TVs. It is even possible to display album cover art and to create music-accompanied slideshows.

Encased in the latest minimalist design from Neil Poulton, LaCinema Mini HD is a fusion of art, simplicity and technology that can fit perfectly into any TV setup. Since it is also easy to carry, LaCinema Mini HD is ready to play back entire digital libraries anywhere, whether at a friend’s house or at a holiday party.

Availability
LaCinema Mini HD is available in a 500GB capacity in Europe and will be available worldwide later this quarter through the LaCie Online Store, LaCie Reseller+, and LaCie Corner, starting at the suggested retail price of $299.99.

Lacie would like to offer you some free cloud storage to back up your data and make it accessible to you and your friends anywhere, anytime. It’s called Wuala, and you can get as much of it as you want. Really. Infinite cloud storage, for free. Absolutely free.

Well, sort of free.

Kinda.

Okay, so it’s not totally free. But you don’t exactly have to pay for it, either. Wuala (it’s pronounced like “voilà”) functions by transforming your local storage into cloud storage for someone else. Here’s how it works: if you want a gig of cloud storage, you donate a gig of your local hard drive to the Wuala cloud. Wuala will dump a bunch of data onto your drive, and in return, you’ll get up to a gig on Wuala. Unlike most cloud storage solutions, Wuala itself isn’t a bunch of servers somewhere, but rather a bunch of users who have donated drive space to other users. Your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, and it’s stored in several different places (like a big distributed RAID system), so it’s safe. Essentially, you’re just trading storage with other people, and Wuala is managing everything.

Now, this does mean that you’ve got some random stranger’s files on your computer. They’re encrypted, so you can’t DO anything with them, but I could see being bothered by having a bunch of random crap sitting on one of my drives. Plus, if random stranger dude wants to get at his stuff, it’s going to cost you bandwidth. Since the storage network is distributed, it’s not a big deal, but again, it’s the principle of other people using your resources that I could see being mentally problematic, even if it does make a lot of practical sense. The other catch is that this system collapses if everybody shuts their computers off, so unless you leave your computer on pretty much all the time, you won’t get a 1:1 trade for your storage.

Any way you look at it, Wuala is an interesting communal storage idea. You can try it for free from Wuala.com, and it comes bundled with Lacie’s hard drives and flash drives, including these durable little flash drives shaped like keys:

The key drives start at $20 for 4 gigs and are available at 32 gigs for $100.

[ Wuala ]
[ Lacie USB Keys ]

By David Ponce

We’ve written about Philippe Stark a few times before. He’s an influential French industrial designer who’s gotten involved in the design of an endless stream of consumer products from juicers, to teddy bears and now hard drives. Partnering up with LaCie, he’s helped develop these drives with an interesting design. The desktop drives have a customizable touch-sensitive surface allowing you to launch preselected applications based on how you touch them. They comes in 1TB or 2TB sizes ($129 or $249) , and also feature the Starck Signature LED (a “+” sign, since the man likes to spell his name S+arck) which glows green or orange based on activity. There are also portable versions of these drives in sizes 320-500GB, with prices starting at $99.

[ Desktop Drive Product Page ] AND [ Portable Drive Product Page ] AND [ Interview With Starck ] VIA [ Uncrate ]