Cool toys for under $100

I’ve got my eye on two cool-looking toys, probably will purchase both.

One is TakeTV, another attempt at making it easy to get Internet video onto the television set. TakeTV consists of a USB drive, IR remote and USB cradle. The cradle connects to the tv through composite or s-video. It reads the contents of the USB drive and lets you navigate and play them through the IR remote. The idea is that you copy video content onto the drive at your computer, then disconnect the drive, walk it over to the tv set and plug it into the cradle when you want to watch.

The second is Eye-Fi. Eye-Fi is a SD memory card that syncs to a PC over wireless. The goal is to auto-sync the card periodically so that the content automagically appears on my computer without having to muck around with popping cards in and out of the camera.

Both solutions could be winners or losers, it’s going to boil down to workflow. But they’re simple and cheap, so we’ll see.