Hasta La Gadget!

After some demo time with WirelessHD and founder John Marshall, it appears 2009 will finally be the year cable-free TV connections roll out in a big way. Expect products to launch towards the end of Q2, according to the Gefen rep on hand, their adapter will go into production towards the end of Q1 and hit shelves for about $700, while WirelessHD tech could add as much/little as 10% to the cost of a new TV like the demo units from LG and Panasonic. How well does it work for the money? Pretty well, with no untoward effects on the picture, and easily switching from source to source automatically. Walking between the display and source didn’t cause a problem but even millisecond-switching 60Ghz hardware was no match for being picked up and fumbled around by a photo snapping Engadget editor. Check out pics featuring Gefen (fear not, the final models will have RS-232), LG & Panasonic prototypes plus OEM hardware we’re likely to see soon in one form or another.

Filed under: CES, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Wireless HD hands on & recklessly-interfering originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Today, with the floor open, is the first real day of CES. By now we’ve seen a good deal of gear from the big companies, and here’s the best so far.

Palm Pre : Number one with a bullet. If we told you three months ago that Palm would own CES, would you have believed us? But this phone is for real, and from the looks of it right now, it very well could be the morale lift Palm so badly needed.

And the rest, in no particular order:

Samsung BD-4600 Blu-ray Player: Wall-mountable, networked, 1.5-inches thick, and really, really nice looking.

Samsung Luxia LED TV Lineup: Samsung loosed a whole series of ultra-thin, LED-backlit, network-connected LCDs, winning the Battle of the TV Announcements hands down.

Vizio Connected HDTVs: These Vizios stream just about everything possible over wireless-N: Amazon, Blockbuster and Netflix VOD, Pandora, Flickr, Rhapsody, plus any other Yahoo web widget.

Sony Vaio P: Sony’s Vaio P is something we haven’t seen before: a 2.08:1 aspect ratio (1600×768) on a 1-inch thick portable. Something different in the very, very generic netbook field.

Casio 1,000fps Point and Shoot Cameras: Both the EX-FC100 and the EX-FS10 bring the EX-F1’s slo-mo capture goodness to a point and shoot. Casio’s still the only folks in the super slo-mo field, and they’re continuing to kill.

LG’s GD910 Watch Phone: It was a non-working, behind-the-glass prototype last year, but one of every gadget head’s boyish dreams will come true later this year: A watch that’s a phone.

Eee Keyboard: Asus took the crazy cake with their still-shadowy home theater keyboard. With an onboard processor (of some kind), a touchscreen and keyboard and wireless HDMI, it makes perfect sense as a unique home-theater machine.

Sony Cyber-shot G3: We’re all about putting web browsers on as many things as possible, and Sony’s found another way to get one into our pants: A super-slim wi-fi-equipped Cyber-shot G3 that’s the world’s first to surf the web.

Panasonic Portable Blu-ray Player: Panasonic’s DMP-B15 is the world’s first portable Blu-ray deck. Your laptop probably doesn’t have a BD drive, but this will ensure you can watch hi-def 1080p on a tiny, tiny screen on your next flight.

And there you have it. Good stuff you may or may not be able to afford in ’09? Disappointment of disappointments? Discuss.

• Also out CES day two’s Best of the Rest.
[CES 2009]

We got a quick look at ASUS’s new Eee PC tablets today, the T91 and T101H. The netbook heritage is unmistakable — you only have to peep the 8.9-inch and 10-inch respective screen sizes and Atom processors — but the two machines offer up full-on swivel tablet functionality, and look pretty good doing it. The chiclet keyboard on the T101H is a slight improvement over the standard Eee PC keyboard on the T91 — which is a tad less firm, and with less room for distinct spacing. We found the hinge to be just alright, only rotating in a clockwise direction, and showing bit of “give.” Otherwise it’s pretty standard Eee, with ASUS’s standard march toward sexy and the deepest stack of SKUs in the industry.

Filed under: Tablet PCs

ASUS Eee PC T91 and T101H touchscreen tablet hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Monkey see, monkey do, eh? No sooner do we learn that SDHC will eventually morph into SDXC with a capacity limit of 2TB than Sony and SanDisk announce that the Memory Stick PRO / Memory Stick Micro will soon reach that same ceiling. In fact, the announcement is so new that the format doesn’t even have a name (something along the lines of Extended High Capacity, probably), giving both of the formats the ability to reach 2TB on a single card. If all goes to plan, production should get going on the new formats sometime this year, so it’s safe to say the race to a new top is officially on.

Filed under: CES, Storage

SanDisk and Sony to expand Memory Stick PRO / Micro to 2TB originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Talk about covering all of your bases. ViewSonic has unloaded a netbook, a 3D LCD and a 3D projector here at CES, but it has somehow found the time to also unload not one, not eight, but nine new digital photo frames. It’s adding in the 7-inch VFM735-52M, 8-inch VFM835-52M and 10-inch VFM1035W-52M to its SwifTouch lineup for $129, $159 and $189, respectively, and it’s also busting out a full line of 4:3 frames for those still deathly afraid of widescreen. Finally, it’s previewing a pair of all-in-one frames with inbuilt alarm clocks and AM / FM radio, both of which are on track for a Q2 release at $99.

Filed under: CES, Digital Cameras, Displays

ViewSonic goes crazy with nine new digital photo frames originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments