Sony said this week that the Dash device, which it announced in January, a kind of wi-fi connected portable cross between an alarm clock, a TV set and a digital picture frame, will shortly have Netflix connectivity.
The Dash is dubbed a personal internet viewer and has a 7 inch touch screen and was always coming out around April in the US, for around $199.
It’s rather a clever, but unfinished device which has a 7 inch color touch screen (800 x 480) which is great for bedside video, better than say a phone or an iPod, but perhaps not so good as an iPad. But it is memory constrained in that it has just 256MB of memory, so it’s not for using outside of wi-fi streaming range. There are 1,500 applications, which was once a lot, but by iPhone standards is now very low. But it includes news sources, calendars, weather, sports, social networking and internet radio.
Sony also offers its Bravia Internet video platform to provide content so it was always going to end up with Neflix we thought, and you can view YouTube, listen to Pandora, or other web sites such as the Sony owned Crackle. There is a Navteq app but it relies on you keeping it where it is registered, because it doesn’t have GPS (we don’t think).
We would expect the announcement of the Apple iPad to force Sony to take another long hard look at this device and introduce a portable version of it, with memory and potentially with PSP gaming thrown in. But sometimes Sony doesn’t quite realize what it’s got when it comes up with a good idea.