CES

Posted January 24th, 2008

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was pretty impressive
this year! I saw enough cool stuff to keep me blogging all year long. There
were many trends that are going to be popular this year, including the
elimination of wires. I’m talking wireless HD signals, wireless digital music
to any room in your home, wireless home network and so much more. Also, there
were a few companies doing this whole voice-mail-to-text translation thing, SimulScribe

It’s not a 100-percent-new concept, but it’s pretty cool.

Going green through better battery power was big, and of course the unofficial winner of the HD DVD war, Blu-Ray, definitely made some buzz around the show.

Now for specifics. First was a pretty rad, umm, I guess I’d define it as a technology, called Jook. It’s basically attempting to become a universal MP3-player accessory that will let everyone, regardless of the player they’re using, stream tunes to the peeps around them, as long as they too have Jook-enabled headphones, ear buds, or whatever. Great concept! Think about it—you can actually all be rockin’ to the same song as anyone within a 10-meter radius. The music is completely uncompressed, and the system supports stereo sound.

People were buzzing about the new product from Texas Instruments, the Pico Projector. Basically it’s a tiny 1.5 inch DLP movie projector that can beam DVD-quality images onto any flat surface. The rad thing is that you can actually attach this bad boy to an existing cell phone … so you can be the life of the party! Plan on seeing this tech incorporated into cell phones out of the box next year.

The Squeezebox
Duet from Logitech is next up. This device allows you to stream your digital tunes to any room in the house. A base attaches to whatever source your files live in—at my house, it’s in my bedroom on my desktop. The other portion attaches to my great speakers in my living room, as well as the Net. Through the magic of Wi-Fi you can walk around with this pretty amazing remote that has a color screen with album art and info, accessing your tunes as well as over 10,000 online music stations. Rock on.

Alienware kinda blew my mind with the unveiling of this insane-looking gaming
monitor that’s curved. It’s sick. The gigantic wraparound DLP rear-projection monitor has an amazing-looking image, and because the game is literally all around you, you really feel like you’re in the game! Sorry, you can’t score one till later this year … way later, I bet.

Last but not least, my favorite piece of swag was hands-down my Qualcomm circuit board that is also a notebook. It’s made of two pieces of circuit board that are wrapped in see-through plastic. The paper in it kind of bites, because pages kept falling out once I flipped to the next one, but I love how heavy the little thing is and how the pen is just the right size for my tiny fingers.

I lucked out this year by getting to go to the show. It was truly eye-opening and got me pumped for what’s to come this year. I look forward to sharing it all with you. OK, gotta jet. Keep coming back—it works if you watch me work it!