Hasta La Gadget!

CES isn’t all about the gadgets and the deals. Sometimes, it’s about the booth babes — and the recycling.

At the show last week, Wired.com’s video team interviewed four people for their unusual perspectives on the enormous electronics tradeshow, which brought an estimated 140,000 people to Las Vegas for a weeklong download of gadget news and wheeling and dealing.

Above, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens points out just how wasteful a tradeshow like CES is. Not once, he says, did he see a recycling bin, and trade-show goons even made him give up the water bottle he was trying to keep for reuse.

Besides conspicuous consumption and waste, another aspect of CES is the booth babes: Attractive, scantily clad women hired to hawk a company’s wares. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal looked into the business and found that, yes, there are companies you can call if you want, say, to hire a dozen Penthouse models who can talk about gadgets.

We interviewed Wired magazine publisher Howard Mittman on the rising importance of CES to the media industry. With the proliferation of tech-based media distribution platforms like the internet and the iPad, CES is turning into a must-attend show for people in publishing now too. And business is pretty good, according to Mittman.

Finally, one of the biggest stories of the show was the comeback of Motorola, a company that many left for dead a couple years ago. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein, who was at CES working on a magazine story, talks about the Android-powered return of Moto.

Videos: Annaliza Savage (producer), John Ross (camera), Michael Lennon and Fernando Cardoso (editing)

We’re used to seeing all sorts of funky motion-based games on smartphones, but here’s something a little bit different: a retro-themed desktop 3D flash game that utilises your iOS device as an accelerometer and gyroscope-based wireless controller. The objective of kijjaa! is simple: just fly your vessel around, shoot down or avoid the enemies, and pick up extra lives. Don’t worry, there’s no jailbreaking involved here — all we had to do was visit kijjaa.com/air, and then copy the code onto our iOS app to establish the link via WiFi or 3G.

There’s no serious challenge in kijjaa! — based on the app’s description on iTunes, the game’s designed with students and office workers in mind, so it’s ideal for those seeking a fun quickie during their short breaks. We’d say the hardest part is trying to dodge the ghosts that show up randomly in short notice, but what really annoyed us were the occasional control lags that popped up even over WiFi. Still, for a promotional $0.99 pricing (the 70 percent price drop ends on January 17th), this game has gone much further than most other games have, and it’ll only get better — already in the pipeline are Game Center support, new enemies, new bonuses, and achievements. Hopefully the developer will also throw in some more chiptune soundtracks as well. Demo video after the break — it kinda makes you want this on the Apple TV too, doesn’t it?

Continue reading App review: kijjaa! (video)

App review: kijjaa! (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You asked, and we’ve delivered! Once again, Engadget has teamed up with the brilliant eBoy to bring you a super-duper limited edition T-shirt which will wow and delight family and friends alike. As you can see from the image above, the new shirt is based on our CES / reader meetup graphic that’s been doing the rounds on the site, featuring nearly all of the Engadget crew toying with some real (and not-so-real) tech. The eBoy crew tells us this is their most color-heavy shirt ever produced (a 9+1 process), which is pretty nifty. We think it’s a nice companion to our CES 2011 coverage, and makes a wonderful addition to any fashion plate’s wardrobe. The shirts come in small, medium, large, and extra large, and can be had for $30US (plus $10 shipping) — but really, can you put a price on looking good? If you’d like to order, follow along after the break and use our fancy PayPal e-commerce system. Also, we ship WORLDWIDE!

Update: The last time we had shirts, they sold out in about 30 minutes. We have more this time, but still a very small quantity. If you want one, we suggest you get in fast.

Update 2: Extra large is sold out!

Update 3: We’re sold out of everything! If you didn’t find your size, there may still be some available on the eBoy site — check it out HERE!

Continue reading New super-limited edition eBoy / Engadget shirts now available! (update: SOLD OUT!)

New super-limited edition eBoy / Engadget shirts now available! (update: SOLD OUT!) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case you missed it during CES 2011, join Dan Ackerman and Molly Wood for the first-ever CES laptop talk show, where we preview the coolest new laptops and portable PC prototypes.

If you don’t like the options for 3-D content, go out and make some of your own.

That’ll be an increasingly practical option in 2011, thanks to a handful of new 3-D consumer cameras and camcorders.

Previously, you had to be a pretty serious stereophotography enthusiast to make 3-D images or video. The technical requirements for making 3-D photos have gotten lower (in the simplest setup, all you need to do is take a photo with your camera, then move it a few inches to one side and take another).

Photo- and video-editing software like Roxio now has built-in tools for making 2-D imagery into 3-D synthetically, or for fusing together two images into a single stereogram. YouTube offers tools for creating 3-D videos, and Flickr has forums dedicated to sharing stereo photos.

But it’s all going to get even easier with the advent of cheap cameras with dual lenses that can capture 3-D images on the fly. In 2011, we’ll see Sony’s 3-D Handycam and 3-D Bloggie, five cameras and various 3-D lenses for still cameras from Panasonic, a 3-D Fujifilm camera, and even a 3-D camera from Polaroid.

In this short video, I take a look at some of these technologies on the tradeshow floor of CES.

Because if you have no interest in watching Avatar again, you might still want to look at 3-D photos of your vacation to Paris.