Syabas has established a concrete ship date for the Popbox. The media hub should ship on July 23. It was originally due to ship July 4, but the company had decided that the software to go with the firmware "wasn’t quite where we wanted it" and held off for nearly three weeks. Pre-orders had already begun in May.
Syabas preluded CES today with its most ambitious media hub to date. The Popbox replaces the Popcorn Hour as the flagship media hub and revolves around a major, much more polished interface overhaul designed by Moxie's inventor and former Microsoft executive Dewey Reid. In addition to showing visual thumbnails of virtually everything and universal search, the interface has applets known as Infopops that show weather, Twitter feeds and other data whenever the viewer pauses what's playing. As with the previously available Popapps, new Infopops can be added over time.
Roku late Sunday gave its Internet media players a boost in the form of the Channel Store. Now considered an open platform, the avenue lets content producers of any scale implement their own video services. The service also brings major content providers such as Facebook's photo service, Flickr, Mediafly, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT; relative newcomers like blip.tv, FrameChannel, Motionbox and MobileTribe are also onboard.
