The Best of CES
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CES week meant one thing: Absolute gadget overload. Here’s the best of Gizmodo’s dispatches from gadget hell, all in one place.
Monday—The Pre-Pre-Pre-Show
This is the day that the press starts to show up, and when the conference begins to assume its horrible shape. It’s not really CES, but it’s starting to feel that way.
• MSI’s lineup semi-leaked, including a dual-screen ereader and a 3D laptop. These, nt coincidentally, will be concepts and words you’ll be unbelievably tired of by the end of the week. GET READY FOR 3D EREADERS, Y’ALL.
• There was a washer/dryer with Android. Why? Why not? (But really, why?)
• And we did a little recon on the main CES building. What we found: 3D, 3D, 3D, 3D.
Tuesday—Day Zero
The show floor isn’t open yet, but the press conferences are starting in full force. This means interesting announcements! And gadget spam. But mostly announcements.
• Lenovo dumped the first true banner products of the show, with the IdeaCenter 300a ultrathin AIO, the first Snapdragon smartbook, and a capacitive multitouch netbook tablet.
• Iomega figured out how to make your entire PC portable.
• This is kind of inevitable: A 24-hour 3D channel is coming in 2011. It will show Avatar on loop, I think.
• Vizio’s aiming upscale for once, with 480Hz, locally dimming LED 3D TVs. And a bizarrely wide 21×9 TV, which is proportioned roughly like a billboard.
• A pico projector with a projection you can actually manipulate with your fingers.
• Asus confirmed their commitment to Bamboo-trimmed faux-eco-laptops, designer netbooks for the lay-deez, and ridiculous giant desktop replacements with dual trackpads. They also predicted the future, and gave it a stupid name: Waveface.
• We got to play with the Lenovo IdeaPad hybrid tablet…thing. It’s got a ton of potential.
• An HDTV in a polar bear.
• I ran Spring Design’s dual-screened Android ereader through its paces. It’s a geekier Nook.
• We heard rumblings about a multitouch HP tablet, codeveloped with Microsoft. It sounds a little Courier-y, but almost definitely not the Courier.
Wednesday—Day One
The show floor still isn’t open, but the new hardware is coming fast and hard.
• Sling unveiled three new ways to share your TV with yourself (it’s what they do!), including a USB Slingbox. Their new remote control is supremely sexy, but also only available from your cable or sat provider.
• LG assured Plasma fans that they’re still in the game, and put their LED TVs on a dangerous crash diet. Then they threw a hard drive into their top-line Blu-ray player, because nobody stopped them. Meanwhile, set-top boxes inched closer to obsolescence.
• Netgear’s new wireless-N routers can receive and share both 3G and WiMax. Meanwhile, dedicated 3G and WiMax sharing hardware inched closer to obsolescence.
• Philips’ Research Labs is making good on the color ebook reader promise, one tech demo at a time.
• AT&T will finally get some Android phones, courtesy of HTC, Dell and Motorola. They’re also getting two webOS (Palm) phones, which could mean a lot of things right now. Hopefully more that just the Pre and Pixi.
• Toshiba claims that their new cell TVs can convert 2D content into 3D in real time. It may or may not look terrible.
• Samsung’s LED TV line is pornographically thin.
• Panasonic showed us their dual-eyed 3D camcorder. It’ll be $22,000 when it comes out in Fall. Speaking of 3D!
• More Panny news, but this definitely earns its own bullet: They’ve released another mega TV, this time at 152 inches—the largest ever—and with 4x by 2k resolution and 3D support. Awesome.
• Microsoft’s Project Natal is coming in time for Christmas! Which is basically as far away as it could be, in 2010.
• Sony’s BDP-S770 Blu-ray player Has 3D, Wi-Fi and Netflix. And you can control it with an iPhone.
• We got a hands-on with with Sony’s Dash, a slick 7″ internet viewer.
• Sony—they got busy this year—also released GPS and Compass enabled cameras. So your pictures will know where you are, even if you don’t.
• We checked out the first 3D DirecTV broadcast, and it looked as good as any home theater 3D we’ve seen.
• We got the chance to flip the Motorola Backflip, the first folding Android phone. It is..interesting.
• Steve Ballmer’s keynote! The moment everyone was waiting for! There was a Windows 7 HP “slate,” but no Courier.
• We got our paws on Nvidia’s tablet, an as-of-yet unnamed, 7″ Android-running affair.
• We tried out Kodak’s Waterproof Playsport pocket cam. It might be our favorite one yet.
• Sprint is really, totally, officially launching WiMax with the Sprint Overdrive hub, allowing five people to suck down some serious bandwidth.
• We saw a laptop with a transparent OLED screen. We don’t know how useful that is, but it sure is futuristic.
• Samsung’s 3D OLED display brings us ever closer to being actually, literally paper-thin.
Thursday—Day Two
• We got a hands-on with the Skiff reader. The verdict: Kindle and Nook, get scared.
• Alienware showed off the M11X, a sub-$1000 netbook, which is about as alien to their usual line-up as you can get. We got to try it out.
• We love the slate concept from Dell (even though it sort of looks like a big iPod Touch). We got a quick look in a dark corridor. Very cloak and dagger.
• Here’s how Plastic Logic’s Que Reader felt to our hands: tall, slender, and blissful. The price tag, however? Not so slender.
• We were the first to get touchy feely with the Sling Touch Control 100 DVR remote.
• The Else Emblaze is a touchscreen smartphone David in a industry packed with Goliaths. But the underdog always has a shot, and there was a lot to like about the Else.
• We oohed and ahhed over Intel’s double multitouch, Tweet-displaying wall. Once we picked our jaw up off the floor, we shot some video.
• The new wood-bodied Polaroid PIC-1000 might give you splinters, but it works with Polaroid 1000 Instant film.
• We got the first hands on with Skype TV and it seems like it’s going to be a great way to keep in touch with your family. Whether that’s a good thing or not is up to you.
• The Palm Pixi Plus and Palm Pre Plus were announced! They’re coming exclusively to Verizon on January 25. We tried out the Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus and found that the updates were welcome, if not as extensive as we might like.
• We got to peer through the transparent-screened Samsung IceTouch PMP and couldn’t help but appreciate its utter weirdness.
• We also scoped out Samsung’s C9000 Ultra-thin TV, as well as their Wi-Fi-enabled, touchscreen, video-playing remote. It was just about as cool as it sounds.
• Haier cut the wires—all of em—on a prototype wireless TV, thanks to MIT’s WiTricity and WHDI wireless video. Freedom!
• There’s a lot of sadness going on at CES, in many different forms, but this karaoke-singing Sisyphus was doomed to sing for eternity. Or at least all of CES.
• If you only watch one four minute recap video of CES this year, make it Joel Johnson’s four minute recap video of CES.
• ioSafe burned, drowned and crushed a hard drive to show that it was tough as nails. Afterward, it worked!
• Hard drives weren’t the only things that we tried to break this year at CES. Gorilla Glass showed off their unbreakable, unscratchable panels.
• We tried out the $199 Freescale tablet and thought the UI was decidedly last-gen. One insulting example: you have to flick the browser’s scroll bar to move down a web site.
• The Lenovo Skylight smartbook, despite its frisbee form factor, showed some promise despite not being quite so smart, yet.
• With all these new 3D TVs being announced, everyone’s rocking 3D specs. Our gallery shows that some wear them better than others.
Friday—Day Three
• The As Seen On TV Hat, as seen on TV, blocks out all that boring real life stuff going on around you so you can focus on watching video on your iPhone.
• We got a real hands on with the 5″ Dell tablet, and while we’re not sure why we need it, we are sure that we like it.
• Pixel Qi’s transflective LCD display gives you the best of both worlds: full LCD color and E-Ink-esque readability. E-Ink should be shaking in its boots.
• We saw some of Pixel Qi’s promise realized in Notion Ink’s Adam tablet/e-reader, one of the most exciting devices at this year’s show.
• We took a look at Navteq’s laser-based rig for 3D mapping. Suck it, street view.
• This year, mutant camcorder rigs popped up everywhere at the convention. We put together a gallery of the most mutantest we encountered.
• We put PR people on the spot by giving them 10 seconds to shill their product in a little segment we call Justify Your Gadget .
• We checked back in with the Saddest Man at CES on video and were happy to report that morale had improved at his karaoke stage.
• Fittingly, both being things that intrigue and disturb us, Taser and Sexting are now official enemies.
• Casio’s Exilim EX-FH100, a slow-mo shooting point and shoot, is improving its tech and making us happy in the process.
• The meanest thing we did at CES this year wasn’t very mean. The press room didn’t have enough boxed lunch, so we ordered a bunch of pizza.
We do some moaning and groaning about CES and all of misery it entails, but in the end it’s still a great time to see old friends, make new ones, and, of course, check out some really exciting gadgets. Here’s Brian’s post on the happiest moments of CES.
