Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

No one would ever accuse the Dash team of low self-esteem. "What the TV did for entertainment and the cell phone did for communication, Dash will do for driving." the company's Web site crows, A more accurate analogy for Dash, though, would be what TiVo did for television, that is, give consumers a greater degree of control over the media or information they're trying to manage in a contextually relevant way.

Dash plans to achieve its five-star impact rating via a portable GPS device. The portable GPS market shifted into high gear a few years ago when Magellan offered a hard disk inside of its Roadmate 700 units. Consumers no longer had to deal with cumbersome PC downloads; street-level maps of the whole country could be pre-loaded. A year later, a gigabyte or two of flash memory is enough to include street-level maps for the United States. Magellan representatives recently noted that it plans to switch completely from hard drives to flash in the next generation. The TomTom Go 910 can even hold maps of the U.S. and Europe for those leisurely drives across the Atlantic Ocean.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Earlier this week, Napster noted that it had hired UBS Investment Bank to explore options for the company, including a sale. The move falls in line with a comment from CEO Chris Gorog at its last earnings call that the company's management team did not have their "heads in the sand" regarding a possible acquisition.

They'd also likely want to reassure investors that their heads are not in the clouds or in the stars. However, the reasons are as clear as CD-qualtity music for having their heads somewhere between those two celestial entities -- around the orbit of two geostationary satellites called Rock and Roll that that deliver the XM satellite radio service. The partnership between XM and Napster, which turned a year old in July, has demonstrated why XM would be a suitable white knight to snap up the former pirate haven.

Napster would help XM on the path toward becoming a radio business, not a satellite radio business. Both XM and Sirius offer Internet-based streaming today and Sirius channels are available to Sprint cellular subscribers while XM's are available to Alltell customers. Indeed, both XM and Sirius must recoup the expense involved in operating satellites, but there are many examples of media companies that started out tied to specific technologies, among them AOL's software and HBO's early set-top boxes.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Consider companies with an affinity for cubes that offer digital audio players and you'll probably think of Apple -- progenitor of the G4 Cube and the large glass one crowning its Fifth Avenue store -- or perhaps the developers of the MobiBlu player, once the "world's smallest" that was sold exclusively at Wal-Mart for a time. But specialty retailer Brookstone also has an MP3 device that embraces the six-sided solid. Hanging it around one's neck, though, would be a feat even for Flavor Flav.

While many products exist that enable you to stream music from your PC to a stereo in another room, or to act as docking speakers for the iPod, the SongCube is one of the few shelf systems on the market that includes its own hard disk for storing music -- no tenuous streaming or PC required. Other products in this exclusive club include the aging JVC NXHD10 executive microsystem, which includes only a 10 GB drive, and Sony's NetJuke line, available only in Japan.

The SongCube's main unit is about as tall as an iPod Hi-Fi (sans iPod) and about the third of the width of one, although it's about 25 percent deeper than Apple's iPod speaker accessory -- quite compact at first glance but not, geometrically strictly, a cube. Its speakers are also unobtrusive and Brookstone even bundles speaker stands with the system. However, there's a catch. The SongCube requires the use of its floor-standing 50-watt powered subwoofer where the main power switch is located. Normally, this wouldn't be much of a drawback. However, it comes into play when loading music onto the device, as I'll discuss shortly.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

In July, I discussed the confusion that results when carriers disable Bluetooth capabilities, specifically OBEX and DUN, which were not the names of two New York City detectives on the '70s comedy Barney Miller. The column proposed that the Bluetooth Special Internet Group (SIG) step up efforts to ensure that a Bluetooth device is capable of what a consumer would expect it to do, and thus apply marketing pressure to the carriers.

That column led to a discussion with Mike Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, who noted the range of capabilities that Bluetooth has acquired. For example, relatively few consumers are aware that their Bluetooth devices can print using the wireless technology or can stream stereo music using the A2DP profile. As a result, in June the SIG developed a set of five "experience icons" that cover five Bluetooth-enabled tasks -- printing, input, headset, transfer and music.

Among the most useful in terms of carrier tampering will be file transfer, which has been blocked in the past. There's no icon for dial-up networking yet, though. According to Foley, there is still more work to do on simplifying the use of a cell phone as an untethered modem.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Watch maker Fossil was among the first companies to support MSN Direct, the smart objects technology first offered by Microsoft in a number of timepieces. Earlier this year, the company, through its Abacus brand, revisited the technology in its Abacus Smart Watch 2006.

While the watch is still on the bulky side, it's slimmed down a bit and Fossil has used a sloping profile to minimize the watch's girth. In fact, the Abacus 2006 was no thicker than a workaday Seiko men's watch I purchased last year. Other improvements include more memory and the inclusion of a year of MSN Direct service. Abacus offers the watch with a metal band that nicely complements the watch's masculine design for $179, as well as a number of leather straps. Unlike nearly any other consumer product that includes Microsoft software, it has nary a trace of Microsoft branding.

Like all of the MSN Direct watches, the 2006 Abacus uses FM radio technology to communicate updates to the device. After activating the timepiece, you choose content channels from a Microsoft Web site. The content has diversified considerably from when the watch was first launched, but it's still mostly focused on the basics, including a variety of different "faces" -- two of which I found attractive, three more of which were acceptable, and several of which were just hideous.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

In January, I wrote about my experience with PC Mover from Laplink Software, an effective solution for migrating your applications from one Windows PC to another, even (with some caveats) when those computers are running different versions of Windows. But there is another kind of migration that PC users often face, upgrading their hard drive. Unfortunately, backup applications that rely exclusively on file-based backup can't restore a working Windows installation because they don't capture what is known as the master boot record. (Apple, incidentally, notes that Time Machine, which creates browsable, file-based backups, can be used to restore or migrate to another Mac, but that Time Machine archives themselves are not bootable.)

So, in recently upgrading a PC hard disk, I tried Acronis True Image 9, a utility that can create an "image" or exact copy of one's hard drive as well as file-level backup. TrueImage automates much of the hard disk migration process, even expanding the partition on the target drive to its maximum so that your new drive is ready to go after reinstalling.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

At this week's World Wide Developers' Conference, Apple nary missed an opportunity to jest at how certain features in Vista bear similarity to those in Mac OS 10.4, recalling banners from the 2004 geek gathering enjoining the developers of Windows to "start their photocopiers." However, the copy machines at Microsoft aren't the only ones free of cobwebs. For example, a decade before Spotlight shone in Tiger, utilities such as On Locaiton provided classic Mac OS lightning-fast index-based searches. And Konfabulator, now owned by Yahoo, inspired Dashboard.

Spaces, slated for Leopard, promises to be merely the best-implemented in a long line of virtual desktops long known to Unix users and even made available as a PowerToy from those Windows wannabes. And what of Time Machine, the fourth-dimensional feature that was the WWDC showstopper? Among its predecessors are System Restore, a drably named subset of Time Machine's functionality available since Windows ME; Rewind, a classic Mac OS utility once promised for Mac OS X; and GoBack, a PC utility that was purchased by Symantec. When I first saw GoBack, the earliest of these, which debuted at a DEMO conference, I thought it was one of the most ingenious pieces of software I'd ever seen -- even without Time Machine's extraterrestrial eye candy.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

At Microsoft, we know that customers appreciate the importance of choice and compatibility. If you're in the market for a new digital media player, look for the logo that ensures interoperability with a wide variety of players from our valued partners and wretched competitors such as Creative, Samsung, iRiver, Archos and Sandisk. PlaysForSure means that you won't be locked into one company's digital media player. On the other hand, isn't that worth the convenience and elegant integration you'd get with a sweet, sweet Zune player?

PlaysForSure also means that you'll have access to the widest variety of digital music stores, so you can choose from content offered by Napster and Yahoo! Music or, for an even better experience, you can take advantage of the great integration of MTV Networks' Urge with Windows Media Player 11 -- an experience so good that we'd just as soon pass on it in favor of a whole new music management application that will integrate with our own player and store. Finally, we'll have something to compete with that company that owns MSN Music. There are also a number of excellent PlaysForSure video services such as CinemaNow and MovieLink that we're going to trounce with the service supporting Zune.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

"Hey there. Is this place new? I've been to this mall many times and never saw it before."

"Yes, sir. Welcome to The Hewlepsmark Inkjet Printer Cartridge Experience."

"No kidding. A whole location devoted to just to printer cartridges?"

"Not just any printer cartridges. Only Hewlepsmark inkjet printers. You see, after some failed early experiences with tech manufacturer-direct stores from Gateway and Microsoft, the past few years have seen Apple, Sony, Nokia, Palm, Nintendo, and now Pioneer move forward with their own retail stores. Even Dell and Samsung are using their own retail space to showcase their products. Soon we're bound to see Coby Corner, Craighead, and jWINdow Shopping. It's all the rage.

"So, we thought, as one of the world's premiere printing companies, why not develop an environment where we can really reinforce the brand identity and provide a showcase for our great variety of inkjet colors, the best printer cartridge shopping experience possible. We also have weekly seminars, like the one next Wednesday about the link between third-party refill kits and gingivitis."

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

The Xbox 360 is already considered by some to be the best product that Microsoft has ever produced. That's not surprising as it's been among the few where the software giant has controlled "the whole widget" -- choosing the processor, designing the hardware, and developing not only the operating system and user interface, but a host of licensing standards, services and infrastructure supporting Xbox Live.

In short, with the Xbox 360, Microsoft has proven that it can play the architect, succeeding at the vertical integration game that Apple has traditionally nailed with the Macintosh and iPod. Microsoft hasn't reached market share dominance with the Xbox 360 as Apple has with the iPod, but on the other hand the Mac market – while profitable for Apple -- still has a small share of the PC marketplace despite its integration advantages.

If Microsoft can succeed at producing its own videogame hardware and is widely rumored to be working on its own branded portable media player, could it succeed at, say, its own PC hardware -- that is, going beyond the keyboards and mice that it sells very successfully today? To do so, Microsoft would have to produce a personal computer that broke with today's GUI conventions and Windows application compatibility.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

For years, futurists have considered a world in which nearly everything one touches or even wears is intelligent and connected. With such a vision in mind, it's easy to poke small holes – eyelets, if you will – around the Nike-Apple "iPed" system announced last week; neither company jumps into partnerships very often. The system that the hardware and footwear giants trotted out works with only one form factor of iPod, albeit Apple's most popular and one that is well-suited to running.

The dock-connector receiver that picks up the sensor's signal protrudes from the nano and may cause problems for some carrying cases. In addition, the NikePlus online service, while slick, has no integration with dotMac, Apple's set of online services that have been a sleeper story since all the online excitement around the iTunes Music Store surfaced. And, finally, the "PowerSong" feature sounds like the kind of device that has magically reinvigorates cartoons, like spinach for Popeye, clapping for Tinkerbell or breakups for Nick Lachey. Indeed, the partnership will probably do little to move the needle of Apple's iPod market share in the short run. Most runners who have been in the market for an MP3 player probably purchased an iPod anyway, and competition for real-time data tracking as it exists in Garmin's Forerunner GPS watch is a relatively small market for now.

While the partnership will translate into more differentiation for Nike (I can see the rise of the show-modders now, cutting holes in their Dr. Scholl's to order to accept the Sports Pack transmitter), both companies suggest that these are the early days of a longer-term collaboration. Perhaps the next component will be a power fork. Dip it into a serving of mashed potatoes and it signals your iPod to play the verse of Old McDonald that describes an oink-oink here and an oink-oink there.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Last week's column discussed Slim Devices' elegant Squeezebox hardware, its versatile but complex server software, and SqueezeNetwork, the companion online service through which the hardware accesses the Pandora music recommendation service. Pandora is considered by some to be a "Web 2.0" site -- the blanket term we're all aware of referring to a startup that generates more RSS than revenue.

But Pandora's recommendation engine is the best I've tried. Unlike many others, it doesn't rely directly on the purchase behavior or music ownership of other people, be they friends or fellow customers. Rather, it leverages data from the Music Genome Project, a collaboration begun in 2000 to classify music via its attributes. In fact, some criticize Pandora for being "too good" at matching a song's style, and while there is a case that Pandora should include a control for how strictly it should match a given song or artist, users can at least create up to 100 different channels and diversify them by adding names of songs or artists to the mix.

Pandora can offer a depth of detail as to which musical attributes it chose when recommending a song. However, it doesn't seem to account for at least some important factors, such as the qualities of a singer's voice. Pandora offers a free tier of service, but access via SqueezeNetwork requires a subscription, which costs between $3 and $4 per month. The low subscription price is worth it for at least a few months, but Pandora needs to greatly expand its catalog to keep subscribers interested. Fortunately, Squeezebox owners get a three-month trial of the premium service, a $12 value.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Slim Devices' Squeezebox and Roku's SoundBridge series are the two best products in the point-to-point digital media receiver market for music. Unlike the AirTunes functionality in Apple's AirPort Express, both products allow you to navigate libraries at the point of listening and neither requires you to turn on your television to hear music as multimedia offerings from a number of other companies. Operating over standard Ethernet or WiFi networks, the third-generation Squeezebox surpasses the sleek industrial design that marked the company's freshman effort, and retains the line's reputation for excellent sound quality when used with capable speakers. The bright vacuum fluorescent display that has long characterized the device illuminates a surprisingly effective and intuitive interface, although the dearth of navigation cues in its two-line presentation can sometimes result in disorientation.

The minimalist appearance of the Squeezebox is actually a facade for a complex array of options. It's actually a client for two content sources -- SlimServer, the browser-accessible open-source server that can run on Linux, Mac OS X or Windows XP, and SqueezeNetwork, a set of Web-based content options. Much of the device's versatility can be chalked up to these sources. SlimServer, for example, has a plug-in architecture that allows the use of iTunes libraries, graphical screensavers, an alarm clock, and what may be the least fun Tetris clone ever created. It also has a large number of arcane configuration options for the advanced user.