Snow in slow motion. Just great!

This flood was no match for this train. Lets go surfing in Brazil!

HTPC fans will need to take a look at this new ultra compact keyboard with a fresh branding from MSI. The tiny text’er friendly keyboard is made to remotely control PCs and act as a mini keyboard, mouse and media remote. Sporting a wireless connection and USB interface the remote works like many of the others we’ve seen. Favorite contenders have added touchpads and trackballs to take the place of the mouse albeit somewhat clumsily or reverted to more full sized keyboards with no mouse. The MSI entrant has an accelerometer within that is able to turn the mini keyboard into an air mouse as well. Borrowing none of the precious keyboard real estate is a huge win. The all internal mouse interprets tilting the keyboard up and down, left and right as mouse movements. Left and right buttons are shoulder mounted on the keyboard, like the all too familiar game controllers they will like lie next to on your couch.

The wiley mouse acts as if it is being controlled by a laser pointer that is invisible to the naked eye. The accelerometer has made amazing strides replacing the sad gyroscope system that completely failed to take off, mostly due to the obscene amounts of power that gyroscopic systems consume. The mini keyboard commands a bit of a premium over other models at about $108 but anyone who really needs a seamless controller experience. Expect it to leave Germany for the rest of the planet in the coming months.

[ MSI ]

These days computers are becoming more and more of a media hub for users to watch movies or television shows on. For awhile I’ve switched between a handful of media players including VLC, KMPlayer, and GOM. All of those are excellent in their own way, and now I think I’ll also have to add SPlayer to the list. On top of supporting the wide array of media types that the others do, SPlayer is fast.

The best thing about SPlayer is hands-down the simple interface. As you can see in the screenshot above it’s nice because all of the buttons are overlaid on the video when you move your mouse, and there are no visible menus to distract you. Not only that, but there is a minimalist mode (pictured above) that gets rid of the minimize/maximize/close buttons that are typically at the top of a window so that you get a very clean viewing experiencing without needing to go to full-screen mode.

As expected SPlayer also integrates with Windows 7 nicely. One way it does that is to show the progress of whatever you’re watching in the Taskbar icon, and I’m hoping that in an upcoming release it will also some basic jumplist support (for things like recently played movies). Thanks to some out-of-the-box jumplist functionality in Windows 7, however, you can always drag a file onto the SPlayer icon to have that particular file pinned to the jumplist menu. Whenever you select that video from the list SPlayer will immediately open and start playing it.

And I can’t forget to mention the performance, which is rather incredible. Starting up SPlayer takes about a second on my machine, and to start playing a video all I have to do is drag the file somewhere in the window. In terms of memory usage SPlayer uses about 5MB when sitting idle and around 36MB when a movie is playing. That definitely falls within the range of acceptability.

Everything about this app feels snappy, clean, and well thought out. I give the developers a lot of credit for the attention to detail that ensures users will have the best experience possible. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t already.

[ Get SPlayer ] – Windows only; Freeware