Hasta La Gadget!

It’s a brand new day and the sun is high.

So ready yourself for yet another eight hours of TechCrunch live streaming coverage from the CES showroom floor. Yesterday was exciting, especially visiting the massive booths of Samsung, Sony, and LG. But it’s impossible that you’re satisfied.

I’m not.

Today, we’ll be hitting up the South Hall, visiting the likes of Huawei, Parrot, Qualcomm and Verizon.

The show begins at 9am PST/12pm EST, and will run until we begin our Live Gadgets Webcast, beginning promptly at 1pm PST/4pm EST. After that, feel free to get amped up about our second round of live roaming coverage, where we’ll be visiting smaller companies that populate this rarely-visited portion of the convention.

These days, it seems that the art of taking down handwritten notes is dying. Why use a pen and paper when you’ve got a tablet or ultrabook in your bag that you can use to type things up instead? There is something to be said for handwritten notes, however – sometimes it’s much faster to write down something by hand, and during big shows like CES, taking along a pen and some paper ultimately cuts down on the amount of stuff you’re taking onto the show floor.

Of course, the environmentally-minded among us might be concerned with the amount of paper we use to take down these notes, but thankfully the folks at Improv Electronics have found the answer to that wasteful issue. Say hello to the Boogie Board Sync LCD eWriter, which is outfitted with a 9.7-inch pressure-sensitive LCD screen that lets you jot down notes on the fly and then share them in any number of ways. This isn’t the first Boogie Board eWriter we’ve seen, but it certainly is the largest of the bunch.

The Boogie Board Sync comes equipped with a micro SD slot, so if you’d like to stash your notes on a card and move them to your other devices later, you can certainly do that. There’s also a micro USB port for wired transfer, but if you’re a fan of going wireless, this baby also comes with support for Bluetooth. Using that Bluetooth functionality, you can send your finished note to any other Bluetooth-supported device, whether that’s a computer, smartphone, or tablet. You can also sync your Boogie Board with a second screen using Bluetooth, meaning that what you write down on the eWriter shows up on your second screen (perfect for presentations and the like). Fancy saving your note and uploading it to Evernote to refer back to later? You can do that too.

The models we saw during ShowStoppers certainly look nice, but at the moment, they’re only in the prototype stage. Though they do feel good in the hand at the present moment, we’re expecting a few things to change as we move toward the final product, which is scheduled to be released in time for 2013′s holiday season. Hopefully we’ll get to spend a bit more time with the Boogie Board Sync soon, but for now, have a look at our CES portal for much more from the show.

Boogie Board Sync 9.7 hands-on is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
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It’s hard to believe that nine months have elapsed since we first wrote about Pebble. The smartwatch quickly became one of Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns — raising $10 million in a few short weeks — only to miss its original shipping date. We knew things were looking up when the device recently cleared the FCC and today at CES 2013, Allerta confirmed that Pebble will be shipping to its backers on January 23rd.

We spent some time with the smartwatch here in Las Vegas and came away extremely impressed with the level of polish the company’s achieved. Pebble’s most visually striking feature is its colorful multi-layer polycarbonate face / bezel, which looks fantastic. The device is incredibly light (just 38.2g / 1.35oz) but still manages to feel solid. Build-quality is top-notch — Allerta’s clearly put a lot of care into the hardware. The sides and back are black and completely sealed (Pebble is water-resistant to five atmospheres). On the right side you’ll find the up, select and down buttons, while the left side is home to the back button and a magnetic power connector, à la MagSafe. Speaking of which, battery life is rated for a lofty seven days per charge.

Continue reading Pebble smartwatch hands-on (video)

Filed under: Cellphones, Wearables, Mobile, Apple, Google

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Pebble promised some news during its CES press event today, and it’s now confirmed that, after a series of delays, the smart watch will finally begin shipping to Kickstarter backers on January 23rd. That includes some 85,000 orders in all, which will apparently take six to eight weeks to fulfil as it’s now looking at a production rate of about 15,000 units per week. The company will then begin fulfilling non-Kickstarter pre-orders after that. Eager for a closer look at what’s in store if you ordered? You can find our hands-on look at the finished device right here.

Filed under: Wearables

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[CES 2013] Three or four CES editions ago when the Android mobile operating system was still rather raw, there were already many small time hardware manufacturers who jumped aboard the Android-powered tablet bandwagon, and since Android has strengthened its position considerably, the slew of Android tablets at CES has not ceased to slow down. Case in point, the Coby MID7065, an Android-powered tablet that features Google Play as well as Google Mobile services. This bad boy will start to ship sometime in the first quarter of the year at $149.99 a pop.

What kind of hardware does it pack underneath the hood? For starters, there will be a dual-core 1.2GHz processor with 1GB RAM, WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR connectivity, 8GB of internal memory and a microSD memory card slot for expansion purposes, accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, a front-facing VGA camera and a rechargeable Li-Poly battery. Not the best tablet on the block, but considering how little you pay for it, it does seem to be worth every penny as a “beginner’s tablet” if there is such a thing. [Press Release]

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Polaroid M7 Ready For Spring Debut, Asus Transformer All In One Seen With Android 4.1 Jelly Bean,