CES Points of Interest
Well, I told you it was coming, and here it is. I kept up with all of the goings on at CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show for all of you non-techies, and here are the high points.
Creative Zen Vision: M – This little MP3 Player has some stellar capabilities. It is the iPod without the name, and with better features and functionality. Everybody is up in arms over this little device. It is really spectacular. As you can see, it has built in capabilities for FM Radio, Video, pictures, music, and recording. It is a tad bit thicker than the iPod, but it is still extremely thin. There is about 4 hours of video playback and about 11 hours of audio playback, which means that the video playback is longer on this than the video capable iPod, but the audio is actually less. So the question is, "How do they do their battery testing?" You can find some good articles out there about this great little device. There is the review over at Engadget, and then the one over at CNET as well.
Toshiba Gigabeat S Series – I wondered just how long it would be before some more portable media center devices came out, and it looks like the Toshiba Gigabeat S Series is exactly what the doctor ordered. This little guy is made to interface with your Windows Media Center PC. Its interface is familiar to those who use WMC. There will be a 30GB and 60GB version of the device. It has a built in Tuner, plays all of the recorded TV, plays Windows Media 10 DRM, and Series 2 Tivo files as well. It is a very well rounded little device. In fact, the device pleased the Engadget folks so much, they put a little video up so people could really get a good look at this device.
There are all sorts of places I could send you for more information about this thing. Engadget has a section on it. CNet has an article on it, and of course with it being a Windows Portable Media Center, Microsoft has the specs on its site.
Sony Reader – Sony always seems to have some of the coolest toys. And this is no exception. Do you ever download a PDF File and want to take it with you to read elsewhere? Do you ever go somewhere and want to take multiple books with you, but just don’t have the room? Well, the Sony Reader takes care of both of those problems. It is an e-book reader that will read PDF Files, as well as a proprietary format that Sony has created. So you will be able to read multiple books and take them with you without having to lug around so many thick hardbacks. And you won’t have to worry about battery life either. Now, here is the deal, instead of being on all of the time, it uses a technology that charges the pixels only when you turn the pages, so you actually only use the battery when you finish a page. So the way they calculate battery life is by pages. So you can read up to 7500 pages before it needs to be charged. I think that is pretty dang good. So that would be years before I have to worry about reading that much. As you can tell, I am excited about this one. Engadget has a story here and here. And Gizmodo has a little hands on time with it. And of course I have to send you to the Sony site because they have a nice little setup for this item.
iSee 360i – So you have an older version of the iPod. maybe a 4G that doesn’t have video? Well, if you buy the iSee 360i, you can watch video using your older iPod and on a bigger screen than all of the jokers who bought the video capable iPod. It even makes the iPod capable of recording video through jacks and adapters. It is a good idea to just add more functionality to something that everyone has at this point. It can be used with the iPod mini, nano, and 4G and 5G iPods. So you can check out the stuff at Engadget about it. As well as an article at Gizmodo, and over at New Launches. I want one so bad, too bad I have a 3G. So it won’t work on mine. Maybe I should get a nano after all.
Tunebuckle – This is really neat. There isn’t much to say about it really, but it is too cool. It is called the Tunebuckle. What it is is a buckle that holds your iPod Nano. You can have it on the outside if you want other people knowing what you are listening to, or you can turn it over and have the metal side facing out so that it just looks like a shiny buckle. It is a really neat concept. I mean, usefulness is that it holds your nano for you without you having to buy something to strap onto your arm or whatever. But it looks cool too. Engadget link here that also links to their official site.
Celestron Skyscout – So the question is, what is it? And the answer is, it’s a star finder. Now, what that means is that you look through it at a star and it knows what that star is and tells you about it. And not only that, but if you want to find a certain star, you go through a menu and find the star, and it will point you in the right direction to find it. PLUS, it can take you on a little tour of the best stars to see on any night you feel like star gazing. How cool is that? I want one of these so badly. How neat would it be just to go outside and look at stars and find out all about them and everything in the summertime? So check out the Engadget stuff here, the offical site is here, Mobilewhack has their stuff here, and Gizmodo is here.
Tivo Series 3 – So the question is, what is so special about the series 3 TIvo? Well, let’s see here. There are actually a few improvements that were made on this thing that are just great. So there are now 6 tuners in this thing. There are 2 standard NTSC tuners, 2 Cable tuners, and 2 Hi-Def ATSC over the air tuners. Wowzers, that is a big upgrade anyways. You can only record 2 things at a time, but that is normally plenty. Then they also added an external port for adding storage to the unit via a SATA connector. So you can just keep on adding storage onto this guy. Very cool stuff. Then the icing on top is that on the front of the machine is a display that actually tells you what is recording on your Tivo. So you don’t even have to go into the menus to find out what is recording at the time Very nice Tivo. Good improvements. That stuff and Tivo To Go are making the Tivo more and more a force to be reckoned with. Check out the PVRBlog stuff here.
Urge – Yeah, that’s right, something that is actually not a gadget. There were actually quite a few services that were announced at CES. This one is a content partnership between MTV and Microsoft that is supposed to go up against iTunes. The difference being that it is NOT going to work with iPods. So that is terrible for the ridiculous amount of iPod owners out there. But I guess you gotta cover your tail. It is actually going to have a subscription service so that you can download as much as you want as long as you keep paying the monthly fee. Whether this will pan out, I don’t know, but Microsoft has the market share on their side in terms of Operating Systems, so you never know. CNN has an article here if you want to read more.
Vongo – Yep, another content service, except this one is for downloading movies. And I would say you have heard of the Starz channels. They are movies channels, and they are partnering with Microsoft to get this off the ground. And with this service you can download the movies onto your machine and watch them without having to worry about the MPAA coming after you because it is all legal. You can either do the Pay Per View thing and just grab a movie here and there, or you can pay $9.99 a month and get
unlimited movies to watch. Download as many as you like to watch. There are some time limits to different movies, but many of them you can watch for months before they run out. It is really neat and could be the start of something. Get ready for IPTV. Watch what you want when you want it. This is just the tip of the iceberg, get ready for an avalanche. The official site is here. A news article is here about it, and a review of the service is right here.
VIIV – This is not pronounced Viv, it is actually pronounced Vive. Get used to seeing it because you will see a lot of commercials about it in the upcoming months. Now, here is the deal. VIIV is just a platform. It is not an actually chip or anything like that. It is a grouping of components that are made to work together for the good of man, or at least you. So if you have a Pentium D, D945 or better chipset motherboard, 1 GB Ram, a 300 GB Hard Drive, a dual layer DVD Burner and XP Media Center edition. So it really isn’t anything special yet, but it is supposed to be great soon. The reason I say supposed to be is because it isn’t really out using the features they are touting at this point, but it is supposed to soon. But a few of the keys are instant on and off instead of waiting to boot up, use of on-demand content, 7.1 audio, and PVR functionality. It doesn’t sound like anything special, but it is just going to be a catch phrase like a Centrino laptop. It is the same thing where certain components work together for optimized performance. Don’t expect much, but standards are normally a good thing. The official site is here. And if you want to check out some of the companies that Intel is partnering with to get this working right and look attractive, Engadget has a list.
HD DVD vs Blu-Ray – You thought that DVD’s looked good? Wait until you see these boys. These are yet another step up in the way of quality. DVD’s are at their highest point when the screen is at 720 x 480, but with these guys, they will go all the way up to 1920 x 1080, so there is a sizable difference. When you put these discs into a hi def TV, you will actually be able to watch them in hi-def. But there is a problem, there is a battle going on. HD DVD has a few companies backing them, and Blu-Ray has some behind them, so it is hard to say which one to buy when they come out for consumers to purchase. This is the same problem that was run into between Betamax and VHS. Both have their high points, but only one can win. The question is who will win? Because you don’t want to invest a load of money into a loser in this race. So I would say just wait and see who comes out on top before dropping a bundle on either of these guys, unless you are an early adopter in which case I would say to buy both. Softpedia has a good article about it.
Google Pack – You know we couldn’t go this whole time without mentioning Google. Here is the deal. Google didn’t come out with anything new really. Instead, they just streamlined their own service. Google just put all of their downloadable stuff and a few other things into one easy download, as well as adding an updater that keeps those things you have downloaded up to date. So let’s go through the list. Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Earth, and Google Pack Screensaver. Those are the Google products. But they also give you the option of adding some other items that are not Google products. Those are Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition, Realplayer, Norton Antivirus, Trillian, Galleryplayer HD Images, and Adobe Reader 7. So why would they do this? Well, the reason is that they wanted to make it simple for anyone to get the best applications out there in one place. So what I would say to do is to download all of this except Norton and Realplayer because they pretty much takeover your systems if you have them on. But all of the other applications are great and I highly recommend them. Plus Google Pack will let you know when there is a new version of any of this stuff. It is a great idea for anyone with a new computer or anyone at all really. Whenever I build a new computer for someone, I will be putting this on there for sure so that they can have all of the best software. I like this and think that you should get it. Like I said, just stay away from Norton and Realplayer. Google Pack can be downloaded here.
And those are pretty much the highlights really. If you want more information, you can go to Engadget’s CES page, or listen to their podcasts from CES which are numbers 58 through 61. There is also a great show called Digital Life TV that had some great videos from CES. They are about 40 minutes to an hour each and are free to download and watch. I highly recommend them. The ones between episodes 24 and 25 are the ones you want to watch for CES stuff, and it is pretty easy to figure out which ones that is because CES is in the title. PCMag also had some stellar coverage when it came to the whole CES thing. They even have links to the different keynotes, except for Google of course. And last, but definitely not least is InDigital. This is a 24 minute show that covers the CES stuff and is put together by some alums of G4 and TechTV. It is highly recommended and I think you will really like it, even if you don’t like the other ones.
So that is my coverage of the best of CES. I hope you learned a lot and didn’t get left out of anything. And leave me a comment or two about which one was the coolest. I would just like to know what you think.