The 2009 Honda Accord is available in sedan and coupe body styles. The sedan comes in LX, LX-P, EX and EX-L trim levels, while the coupe comes in LX-S, EX and EX-L trims. The base LX sedan comes standard with 16-inch steel wheels, keyless entry, full power accessories, cruise control, a tilt-telescoping steering wheel, fold-down rear seats and a six-speaker stereo with a single-CD/MP3 player and an auxiliary audio jack. The LX-P sedan adds 16-inch alloy wheels, auto up-down front windows and a power driver seat. The coupe's base LX-S trim includes the LX-P's equipment with the exception of the passenger-side auto-up window and power driver seat, and it adds an in-dash six-CD changer.Upgrading to EX trim nets 17-inch wheels and a sunroof for both body styles, while the EX sedan gains the in-dash six-CD changer and the EX coupe gets a premium stereo system with a subwoofer. The EX-L trim level adds leather upholstery, auto-on headlights, dual-zone automatic climate control, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, heated front seats and satellite radio. The EX-L sedan nabs the premium stereo system from the EX coupe, while the EX-L coupe gets the power driver seat.
The lone option is a navigation system. It's only available on EX-L models, and it includes voice-activated controls and Bluetooth connectivity.
It's digital photography's very own catch-22: You can't e-mail a full-size 10-megapixel photo to Aunt Carol, because many ISPs don't allow file attachments that large. But when you resize it to a slim, trim 1-megapixel image, it's too small to print at anything bigger than wallet size. When Carol tries to print it out at 8 by 10, she calls you up to complain that the photo is a pixelated mess.
The solution? Don't try to e-mail digital photos at all. Instead, there are ways to share those photos without the hassle and confusion of e-mail.
In the early days of office computers, networks were somewhat unreliable. Sometimes the easiest way to share a file was to copy it to a floppy disk and walk it across the room--hence the term sneakernet.
These days, simply handing someone a disc with a file on it can sometimes still be pretty convenient. Windows lets you copy your photos to a CD, for example, and filling a disc with photos is not a bad solution. But burning discs is needlessly complicated. It's even easier to drag your photos to a USB flash drive. These drives come in capacities that vary from large to enormous, and they've gotten almost ludicrously inexpensive. At PC World's Shop & Compare, I found 8GB flash drives for as little as $20. That's awesome, when you consider that a CD-R has a maximum capacity of just 650MB.
If you're sharing photos with someone farther away than down the hall, consider putting your photos on a Web site instead. I use Flickr.com, for example. You can visitmy personal site or the official Digital Focus Hot Pic winners gallery to see some examples. I love Flickr because there are no limits on how many photos you can store there, or what maximum photo size you can save. If you use the free version of Flickr, you're only limited to uploading 100MB in a given month.
To share photos with friends or family, upload them to Flickr, then let people know how to get to your Flickr page. Once there, they can click the All Sizes button above a photo to get to the download page, such as this one from my Flickr page.
Do you like the idea of storing photos on the Internet so certain people can get to them, but you don't want just anyone to be able to browse the photos? Well, you could turn on the photo sharing site's privacy mode; Flickr, for example, lets you mark your photos as private, which limits access only to people you specify. You could also store them at an online storage service. Think of these services as hard drives located in the clouds that you can access anytime or anywhere you have an Internet connection. And anyone you give access can get there as well.
Microsoft's SkyDrive is a superb example of this sort of "cloud storage." After you get a free Windows Live account, you can store all sorts of files--music, photos, documents, whatever--and share them with anyone you choose.
I find that SkyDrive can be a handy way to safely back up my photos when traveling--I can use a laptop to upload images from my camera to SkyDrive, and then they're conveniently waiting for me when I get home. The only downside is that you're limited to 5GB of storage space.
Finally, imagine having your very own Web server at home. I'm not talking about a huge, noisy mainframe operated by a team of guys with clipboards and pocket protectors. Imagine a tiny, virtually silent PC that you can tuck in a closet and control via a Web browser from other PCs on your home network. A computer like the HP MediaSmart Server, running Windows Home Server, does all sorts of cool stuff, like automatically backing up all the computers on your network and providing shared hard drive space to keep communal files for all your family members.
But the coolest thing Windows Home Server does--at least for photographers--is host a real live Web server. Just tell Windows Home Server where your photos are, and it displays them all in a photo browser that you can share with friends and family. You can share the photos for downloading as well, making it possible to host our very own little photo sharing site from the comfort of your living room. And armed with a home server, you'll never have to worry about strangers downloading your photos or the photo sharing site going offline right when Aunt Carol needs it.
Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.
Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.
This week's Hot Pic: "Let There Be Light," by Howard Meyer, Plymouth, Michigan
Howard writes: "I used a wide-angle 18mm lens and exposed the shot for 2 seconds. The fireworks were set off on the fourth hole of a local golf course... I found the processing to be a challenge because the fireworks were grossly overexposed, and the landscape was underexposed. I found the Recovery and Fill Light tools in Adobe Lightroom to be indispensible.
This Week's Runner-Up:"Thunder Rolls," by Les Rhoades, Dulles, Virginia
Les writes: "A couple of weeks ago, I was riding a motorcycle around Lake Thun [in Switzerland]. I had just been hit by a passing rain storm, and as I looked across the lake at the famous pyramid-shaped Niesen Mountain, I could see another front pushing over the top. ... I used a Canon 40D and a tripod to keep the camera steady with my heavy 28-300 zoom lens. I also had a circular polarizer mounted."
See all the Hot Pic of the Week photos online.
Have a digital photo question? Send me your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself. And be sure to sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.
Nick Mediati, PC World
The latest iPod Nano combines the larger screen of the third-generation Nano with the slender design and vibrant colors of the second-generation models. Taken as a whole, the fourth-generation iPod Nano marks the further evolution of an already-strong media player, but it will disappoint anyone who was expecting a complete overhaul.
The 8GB model sells for $149 ($50 less than its predecessor), and the new 16GB model comes in at $199.
The iPod Nano is almost identical in height and width to its second-generation grandparent, bucking the wider-but-shorter design adopted for the third-generation model. When I saw the new iPod Nano, the first thing I thought of was the flash-based Zune from Microsoft. The screen's portrait orientation means you must turn the Nano on its side to play video; but since the Nano now has a motion sensor, the video orients itself properly depending on how you hold the Nano. Turning the unit on its side for video works well, though not as well as it does with the iPhone or the iPod Touch because having the screen on one side and the navigation wheel on the other makes the iPod Nano seem out-of-balance.
The iPod Nano has a slender, tapered design. At its thickest point, the iPod Nano is 0.24 inch thick--a barely perceptible 0.06 inch thinner than the previous model. The new iPod Nano is also about 0.5 ounce lighter than its predecessor. The latest version also ushers in brighter, more vivid case colors--a departure from the muted tones of the previous generation. Since the Nano itself has a curved face, the glass that covers the screen is curved, too; during normal use I didn't notice any distortion caused by the curved glass cover.
Audio sounds adequate through the included earbuds, though you may want to upgrade to Apple's forthcoming, step-up $80 earphones or to a high-quality pair from a third-party manufacturer.
You have good reason to upgrade your headphones: According to our tests, the latest iPod Nano improves its audio output as compared with its predecessor, jumping up a notch to receive a rating of Superior on the PC World Test Center's suite of audio tests. The Nano, together with its new Touch sibling, are our new leaders in our audio output results.
If you have used an iPod before, you won't notice any huge differences in the latest iPod Nano's interface; the new version retains the familiar menu system and wheel-based navigation. Apple did, however, introduce some cosmetic changes to the menu system, primarily so that it works better when used in a portrait-screen orientation. The biggest change involves the Now Playing screen, which displays album artwork at full-screen size, with the song's title and artist information in a narrow strip along the bottom. From a functional standpoint, the Now Playing screen doesn't bring much innovation to the table, but it does look more attractive.
The new iPod Nano incorporates Apple's Genius algorithm, which enables you to create Genius playlists. Hold down the center button while at the Now Playing screen, or while selecting a song, and a floating menu will pop up. When you select 'Start Genius', the Nano will generate a Genius playlist on your iPod, just as iTunes does. Save the playlist, and it will remain available on your iPod; then, the next time you sync your iPod with your computer, it will add the playlist to iTunes. As I mentioned in my review of iTunes 8, Genius playlists are spot-on when it comes to identifying music that goes together well.
One new and welcome feature is the ability to create voice recordings. You'll need a separate microphone adapter--or a pair of headphones with a microphone, likethe ones that Apple will soon be shipping. This feature was missing from the third-generation Nano. Still missing, from all iPods: an FM tuner.
The most gimmicky of the new iPod Nano's features is the ability to translate physical shaking into a shuffled playlist: You can shuffle the Nano by shaking it, and you can reshuffle the unit by shaking it again. I found that mastering the shaking motion was a little tricky: I had to shake it reasonably hard to get shuffle mode to kick in. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to test whether shuffle would inadvertently kick in while carried on a jog or worn at an aerobics class. The feature may be useful if you're out walking and want to switch to shuffle mode without fiddling with menus--but you may get a funny look or two. Shake-to-shuffle might be fun to show off to your friends, but I don't see it as much more than that.
Once again, Apple put together a great media player with the new iPod Nano. New/old shape aside, however, it is a fairly minor update with only a couple of interesting new features. But like iTunes 8, the new iPod Nano doesn't venture far into previously unexplored territory that might have made it a must-have device. If you are looking for a new media player, the fourth-generation iPod Nano certainly merits consideration, but if you already own an Nano--especially a third-generation one--you may want to think twice before upgrading
