Hasta La Gadget!

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to use our photos of Ballmer’s CES keynote as source material. Man, do you guys love Photoshopping Ballmer.

First Place — Umadsarah Unicornsaintreel (??)
Second Place — Burrito Tech
Third Place — Derrick Villalpando

We swung by D-Link’s booth at CES to check out its upcoming SideStage USB-powered monitor, hoping to see the thing in action and get some more details ahead of its release. What we found was quite familiar looking, to say the least. D-Link was disappointingly just demoing a Nanovision, but was quick to point out this would not be the product destined for a full US release sometime this summer. That new display will still be produced by Nanovision, but will be modified to better suit our market, graced with a different logo, and cheaper, too. No firm price yet, but the company is targeting sub-$100, which sounds good to us.

Filed under: CES, Displays

More details on D-Link’s upcoming 7-inch SideStage USB monitor originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Logic Wireless released the first Pico projector embedded inside a phone last week at CES 2009.

At first glance, Logic’s Bolt (no relation to Usain) seems to present a dilemma for the early advocates of the Picos, like myself. Do they dump their cool new accessory, as well as their favorite phone, in favor of the super-integrated phone or should they wait until a bigger phone maker gets in on the game?

For now, the answer should be fairly easy. Keep your Nokia or iPhone and keep using the new Picos for entertainment purposes. If you want to use a projector for office presentations, get one of the slightly larger, non-pico projectors. Buying a new phone with Windows Mobile just because it has a projector is not a good enough reason to spend $600 on it (though it is $100 with a two-year contract.)

Plus, the larger companies will probably come out with their own embedded Pico versions by next year.

But if keeping all of your devices to a minimum is most important to you, the Logic Bolt offers plenty of attractive options in one package and it deserves an good look. It works with a variety of GSM networks and comes with a 3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and a GPS receiver. The phone also has a responsive 2.4-inch LCD touch screen (at 240 × 320 pixels) with a slide keyboard, and most relevant in regards to the projector’s idea as an office assistant, is packed with Windows Mobile software with PowerPoint, Excel, and Word.

The projector itself pushes out images up to 64-inches, though previous experience tells us that even with its 640 × 480 VGA resolution, it’s likely to show up a bit faded.

Still, no other phone can claim all of these features into a phone at the moment and it should receive plenty of attention for that reason alone.

I filed a story, just barely meeting my deadline. Before rushing to
another press conference I looked down at my iPhone to see I had 44
missed calls. They were all from the same number.

He left one
voicemail. It was a public relations flack asking if I was willing to
meet with his client at the Consumer Electronics Show. His voice
trembled with desperation: "I spoke to you before the show," he said,
"and I was wondering if you could reconsider."

I had already
politely said "No" to this gentleman prior to CES, because his client’s
company wasn’t relevant to my beat. Apparently that wasn’t enough, and
neither was calling me 44 times: My phone rang again. It was the same
number.

I can’t blame him for trying. CES is the largest, most
significant technology convention in the United States. It’s where the
greatest innovations (such as the VCR, CD and DVD) see the light of day
before they descend into our living rooms, pockets and cubicle desks.
And it’s equally the most stressful, frustrating week for anybody in
the tech industry, including the companies exhibiting, the PR professionals
representing them, and the journalists reporting on the convention.

Don’t
get me wrong: Just being at the convention is an opportunity no one
should take for granted. It’s the situation that’s conducive to
emotions running high. At CES this year there were more than 2,500 tech companies and
20,000 new products. The convention is held in a center measuring 1.7
million square feet, or about two square miles. And there are a few
thousand journalists and bloggers scurrying around the show floor
snapping photos and writing up whatever they found interesting.

Of
course, that adds up to multitudinous levels of ruthless competition.
The companies are competing with each other for the attention of buyers
and investors. Public relations professionals are competing for the
attention of journalists to gain exposure for their clients. And
journalists are, of course, competing with each other on getting scoops.

It’s
the one week where incessantly calling a person’s cellphone is somehow
accepted protocol. It was a week where I found myself pushing through
and fighting with other journalists just to snap a photo of a brand new
laptop. It’s a week where PR flacks, who normally recite only bland, positive
statements, have the nerve to call a reporter’s boss to scream about a missed meeting.

That week 12 of us — Dylan Tweney, Daniel
Dumas, Annaliza Savage, Jonathan Snyder, Eliot Van Buskirk, Joe Brown,
Mark McClusky, John Ross, Michael Lennon, Priya Ganapati and Charlie
Sorrel and I — completed a mental and physical marathon, speed walking
mile after mile to press conferences, meetings, keynote speeches and
product launches. We shot pictures, taped videos, punched out news
stories and chowed down meals when we had minutes to spare. Every day was a 12 to 16 hour day of work.

There are a few compensations: Getting to see great new products at the moment they see the light of day is a thrill. Hanging out with your colleagues and competitors over a friendly drink is a rare treat. And enjoying the top-notch cuisine of Las Vegas, when the schedule allowed, also helps take the edge off the stress a little.

But it
was the one week where none of us felt human. To sum it all up in five
words like I did in a radio interview over the weekend: "It was a
living hell."  But I’d put it down in my book as one of those experiences that
Christians would call "soul building."

Congrats, guys. We did it.

Top photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com. Bottom photo: Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com

Last week, the entire Gadget Lab crew spent the week in Las Vegas covering North America’s biggest gadget trade-show, CES, and gambling away our huge blogger’s paychecks. And while there were a (very) few great new products (Sony’s NotBook, Palm’s Pre) there was also a lot to hate. Read on to find out the worst of CES 2009.

Tote-Tards

This is a curious species first identified by Wired.com videographer extraordinaire John Ross. There are several categories of visitors to CES – exhibitors, buyers, press, bloggers (officially a separate caste — see below) – but there is one unofficial group we have named tote-tards.

Who are these people? Tote-tards collect free bags. Almost every stand has a free, logo-emblazoned tote bag in which to carry all the other tat that gets handed out at the show. The tote-tards take a curiously matryoshka-like approach, stacking the bags inside the bags in some kind of recursive nesting horror, as seen above.

Ross characterizes the typical tote-tard as middle aged, usually part of a couple, and inexplicably non tech-savvy. It seems like they treat the show as a visit to a theme park (actually not far from the truth) and have no interest in anything but the bags. I was asked about my rather neat press bag (since discarded) and sent the gentleman to the press office (which cannot be entered by mortals), 500 yards away. Cruel, true, but it was for his own good.

And if they registered before November 1st 2008, they got in for free, beating the $100 fee thereafter:

The nominal registration fee helps ensure attendee quality at the International CES.

Below is an atypical tote-tard. See how he smiles!

Blogger Drive-Bys

Bloggers and press get different colored badges, and bloggers can enter the hallowed "Blogger’s Lounge", home to free food (great brownies) and comfy couches. But because the badges are a different color, we’re an easy mark, even from a distance. I got jumped on several times by desperate marketeers, eager to show me their latest tat in hope of mainlining it into the carotid of the CES news flow:

"Hey, blogger! You’re a blogger, right? Take a look at this, buddy!"

This is, as you can imagine, gets rather tiresome. I took to feigning inebriation to get away, a quite easy trick given the amount of drinking practice we got at the CES evening parties.

Carpets

Yes, carpets. Given the already jetlagged and hungover fug of confusion most people are in when traversing the halls of the Vegas Convention Center, this carpet design is unforgivably cruel — but it gets worse.

It seems that the unofficial contest between high-end exhibitors this year was conducted down on the floor, within the pile of the carpet — the plusher the better.

So deep was the pile in the Casio stand that when we shot a video about the new Exilim FC100 and our esteemed video director Annaliza Savage asked me to step to one side to better see the cheerleaders in the background (check the video), I landed on the carpet and immediately began to sink. I had to warn  our camera guy (the aforementioned Ross) to slowly move the camera down so I wouldn’t slip out of shot.

Hygiene

CES is a mess of germs, and every time you shake somebody’s hand you become a carrier at best, and a victim at worst. Wired.com editor Dylan Tweney brought his own virus-soup with him, and was therefore likely the Adam and the Eve of anything catching at the show, but the amount of skin on skin is also a big health hazard.

We countered this with a bactericidal hand cream in the Wired Nerve Center. As I spent more time out in the halls than back at base, I adopted a different tactic: Upon meeting somebody new, I fake-sneezed into my hand. Bingo! Nobody wants to shake that.

While the CES ground crew do a great job of keeping things clean (way better than at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, for example), the attendees do their best to thwart this hard work. The photo above shows what they were up against. By the way — the only reason I escaped the mens’ room after taking photographs is because my Converse offered a grip on the wet, slippery floors that an executive’s shoe just can’t match. And talking of executive’s shoes:

The Good

It wasn’t all bad. CES is a great place for us to get our hands on the hardware we usually don’t see so we can better write about it. It also offers a concentration of tech bloggers unknown elsewhere. Thus we were able to hang out with the folks from BoingBoing Gadgets, Engadget, Gizmodo, Crunchgear and the UK’s Shiny Shiny among others.

We’re bitter rivals in print (pixels?) of course, but in the dingy confines of the Treasure Island hotel bar, we were one big happy family. A drunken family in which not one of us could work out how to hook up a Netbook running Windows XP to the hotel network. Professionals to a man (or woman).

See all the Gadget Lab coverage of CES 2009 here.