Hasta La Gadget!

Everyone at CES is crazily abuzz about LG’s new watch-phone, the GD910. My interest picked up when I found out that, yes, LG is trying to bring it to the US. They might make either a CDMA or GSM version for a US carrier, they said, and two major US carriers have shown some interest.

We got some hands-on (okay, wrists-on) time with the watch phone, and it’s surprisingly usable. It starts out with a transflective time-and-date display. You can turn it into an analog clock or a world clock by swiping lightly across the capacitive touchscreen. The touchscreen responds well to light touches and gestures, and it’s very precise. That’s a major saving grace when you turn to the dial pad. The dial pad is very small, but surprisingly accurate to tap on.

The phone also has an MP3 player, calculator, and stopwatch. You can talk into the phone, even having conversations while you’re holding your wrist by your side; it’s got a loud if tinny speakerphone and LG’s new DSE noise cancellation to filter out your voice from background noise, company reps said.

Like all watch phones, this is a pretty manly device. It’s unabashedly bulky, and unabashedly chrome, and I think it’s pretty much for guys only. But it works surprisingly well. More photos after the jump.

I’m here at the Palm Pre VIP lounge at the 2009 CES, where they’re serving up delicious coffee drinks and doing demos for developers. I got to ask a bunch of questions that Palm CEO Ed Colligan didn’t answer during his Pre press conference, and wanted to pass along the answers.

The Pre will have an app store, Palm reps confirmed. They’re not saying anything about the revenue share, but you’ll buy apps through an on-device app store.

Colligan said that apps for Pre were written in Javascript, HTML and CSS, which I found suspicious. Folks here at the lounge confirmed that there will be a software developers’ kit to let developers access core Pre features, and that it will be called “Mojo.” Just not yet. I did, though, talk to one of their early third-party developers, who said that everything he did before in Visual Studio he could do in Javascript on the Pre.

Going into a little more detail on Mojo, Palm folks said they’ll have a set of APIs to let Javascript programmers hit hardware features that aren’t commonly touched in Javascript apps. Will you be able to do everything – such as write to the frame buffer? No, but you’ll get access to all of the phone’s databases, unlike on the iPhone. So if you wanted to, say, write a way to integrate MySpace into the contact book, that would be possible.

Palm even said that a third party could write a Palm OS emulator for webOS, which tells me they must have some funky Javascript APIs indeed.

The WebKit-based Web browser supports streaming video in RTSP, H. 263 and H.264 formats, but doesn’t support Flash … yet. But I spoke to two Palm employees both of whom smirked when I mentioned Flash, which made me think they’re talking to Adobe right now. The browser also doesn’t have a name, though Palm will release specs soon for developers who want to make sure their sites work on the browser.

How do you sync it with Outlook without an Exchange server? They’re not saying, but it looks like it will be possible.

How about music and video? You can drag and drop it over from your PC using USB Mass Storage, or buy songs on the device using a built in Amazon MP3 Store client.

Read more about the Pre in my full story on PCMag.com.

Seeing as how the showroom floor hasn’t actually opened yet, it seems a bit early to start talking about the big trends for CES 2009. We have, however, seen a few miniature ones popping up here and there, like, say, wireless charging.

A company called Fulton has rolled out one of the more compelling examples of the technology. Last night at Digital Experience, the company showcased some samples of its eCoupling wireless power. With help from Leggett & Platt, the company has rolled out the technology in a handful of products. On display at the show last night were a power tool case and car cradle that utilized eCoupling.

PCMag executive editor Jeremy Kaplan was particular taken with the new technology. After the jump, Kaplan explains eCoupling in a video.

Well, surprise surprise: Logic Wireless doesn’t have the only projector phone at CES this year. Fresh off the plane from Korea comes the Samsung Show, a Korea-only projector phone that uses TI’s DLP technology rather than the Logic Bolt’s LCoS system to project images onto a big screen.

I got some hands-on time with the Show, but nobody I talked to knew much about it. It’s a somewhat bulky candybar-style phone. It runs a proprietary OS, and includes support for Korea’s DMB-T digital TV system. It uses Samsung’s TouchWIZ user interface, which involves a touchscreen and movable widgets.

The Show’s projector has five options: “File Viewer,” which shows movies in a large-screen format; “Album,” for photo slideshows, “Story Telling,” which appears to project animated Korean children’s stories, TV, and Flashlight, which is just a flashlight. You now know as much as I know, and pretty much as much as the Samsung PR people seemed to know. This phone will never, ever come to the US.

More details on the Samsung Show will come out later this week, Samsung reps said. Many more photos after the jump.

Two terabytes of data in your phone? Seriously? That’s what the SD Association announced today. The new SDXC card standard supports sizes up to 2TB, with data transfer speeds up to 104 MB/sec and potential future speeds up to 300 MB/sec. The SDXC specification will be released in the first quarter of 2009, the association says, which means that cards may come out by the end of the year.

“Big” SDXC cards will fit into digital cameras and music players. But the most amazing part of this news is that SDXC even applies to the sort of “micro” cards that go in cell phones. “The microSDXC card [would be] based on current SD interface for use in mobiles,” an association spokeswoman said via e-mail.

How do you file away 2 TB of data on a flash card? The SDXC standard will use the Microsoft exFAT file system (aka FAT64), which extends the venerable FAT file system to handle file sizes greater than 4 GB and more than 1000 files per directory.

Badly Photoshopped rendering above is imaginary; SanDisk has no such card (yet.)

For PCMag’s full CES coverage, go to http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,2806,2235882,00.asp.