Sling Media Ships Slingbox Pro HD along with an Updated Player

If you’re a Sling fan like I am, then you’ll be excited to hear that Sling has started to ship the Slingbox Pro HD. The Pro HD hardware allows you to stream high def content in HD. While the regular Slingbox will stream your HD channels, it doesn’t offer HD quality. So the Pro HD is a welcome addition for HD fans. If you’re confused over the different versions of Slingbox and what each one offers over the other, you should check out this comparison guide on Sling’s website.

Along with the new hardware, there is a new version of the SlingPlayer Windows software available. Version 2 adds support for the new Pro HD hardware along with an updated interface, live video buffer, and the new SlingPlayer Guide. The new software doesn’t require the Pro HD hardware, so feel free to download it and run it against your existing Sling hardware. You can see more details about this release, along with screenshots over at Sling’s website.

Would You Purchase a Group of Applications?

Paul from MoDaCo, is asking for input from readers on your level of interest in purchasing a group of applications bundled together. The expected retail cost of the bundle would be around $200, but the bundle price would be about $50. Assuming there’s 10 applications in this bundle, some quick math would give us an approximate price of $20 per app. So if there’s more than 3 (2.5 to be exact) applications that you would have purchased in the bundle, then the rest of the apps are essentially free.

This could be really good for new Windows Mobile users who don’t already have any of the applications in the bundle. Or for anyone looking at picking up a couple new applications at a discounted price. The down-side is that the developer is getting a new customer but at a fraction of the revenue that they normally would have had. So if even a tenth of these new customers contact the company for support, the newly found revenue is gone. Of course, the increased customer base is always beneficial.

I’m certainly interested in a good deal. I just hope the companies that signup for Bundle.One @ MoDaCo are offering worth-while applications. I’ll be watching what happens.

Update #4 On The No Reboot Challenge – Crisis Adverted

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted on my status in the No Reboot Challenge. First off, I want to welcome another site – Mobi – gas – mic, to the challenge. As I’ve said before, it’s great to see such a wide reception for the challenge within the community.

I had a close call on rebooting last week, the worst part is, it wasn’t intentional. I was slipping the phone into my pocket and I wasn’t paying too much attention to what I was doing. I ended up missing my pocket and the phone fell towards the ceramic tile floor. Luckily, it bounced off my shoe and came to rest gently, or somewhat gently, on the floor. When I picked it up, the battery door had slipped pen, but not enough to fall off and allow the battery to escape. Needless to say, I have been much more careful about the handling of my device since this event.

My recent trip to New York also presented a little problem (besides the thumb issue). Typically I would swap SIMs from my Canadian Fido SIM to my US AT&T SIM. For obvious reasons, this just wasn’t an option. So instead, I just dropped my AT&T SIM into a spare phone and used that instead. I put my regular phone into flight mode and locked the keypad until I returned to Canada. Disaster adverted.

I started this challenge over a month ago (August 19th) and to-date I haven’t had a single issue with the memory management of my Windows Mobile 6.1 device. No reboots, no crashes, no odd behaviour. It’s pretty clear to me that Windows Mobile is and can be a stable OS. 1 Month down, and many more to go.