Microsoft slashes Zune price to $200: According to this post from someone on the Zune team, this is just part of the normal product cycle, dropping the price by 20 percent. Uh, yeah, just like Apple keeps dropping the price on the iPod--oh, wait, no, they keep increasing the features (and occasionally moderately dropping the price). You drop price when supply is high. The same blog entry says customer satisfaction is 94 percent--right, those 94 Microsoft employees who bought them are happy, while the six non-Softies are not. (Zune, you may recall, has Wi-Fi built in, but can't synchronize or purchase music over Wi-Fi; neither can the iPhone.)
Iogear is first out of the gate to ship Certified Wireless USB using ultrawideband: The new standard allows up 480 Mbps at short ranges using UWB. The certification means that Iogear's gear should work with other manufacturers' items. Practically speaking, however, this first device is a hub and dongle combo that doesn't need to work with anything else. You plug in a dongle into a PC and plug in USB peripherals into a four-port USB 2.0 hub up to 30 feet away, although at that distance speed drops to closer to 100 Mbps. It's priced as $200, which seems like a price in search of a buyer. It works only with Windows XP SP2.
so new UWB hardware wont work on Linux/Mac?
[Editor's note: Not yet. It's unfortunately driver based instead of what was once billed as being a USB shim that would simulate existing USB gear and make the wireless part transparent. I expect that Apple will enter the UWB market when it matures slightly. Linux folks will have to find a chipmaker well-disposed to its approach, which is likely.-gf]