Hasta La Gadget!

We’re still more than excited about USB 3.0, but those of us expecting it to reach promised transfer speeds of 5000Mb/s this year are overly optimistic.

According to a TD Daily interview with a representative of the USB Implementers Forum, when USB 3.0 devices hit shelves in late 2009, we can anticipate transfer speeds of only 1200Mb/s. That’s roughly a quarter of USB 3.0’s potential, though still more than double USB 2.0 max speeds. So USB 3.0 will still be faster (and more power efficient) than current USB tech at launch, but it won’t be fully hulked out just yet. [TG Daily and image]

Everybody is launching networked TVs it seems, but Vizio’s “Connected HDTV” sounds killer: Built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi, with every service you’d want: Amazon, Blockbuster and Netflix VOD, Pandora, Flickr, Rhapsody, plus any other Yahoo widget.

Not there, you notice is Hulu. BUT, Vizio says they’re in “deep talks” with them. So Hulu, directly integrated into your TV, looks likely. The connected platform runs on Yahoo widgets and Adobe Flash Lite, and you can develop your own widgets with Yahoo’s SDK. It’ll start in two TVs this fall, eventually expanding to Vizio’s entire XVT line. Not all of the services were up and running, but overall, it looked and performed well—easy to use, and not intrusive.

The crazyass QWERTY slider remote, on the other hand, might not be so simple, but it’s fully Bluetooth 2.0 compliant, meaning you can do more than control your TV with it.

VIZIO ANNOUNCES NEW AND EXCITING “CONNECTED HDTV” PLATFORM WITH
WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY (802.11n)

– VIZIO’s “Connected HDTV” Platform gives HDTV viewers unprecedented choice and access to
Internet-based content streamed directly to their VIZIO HDTV without the inconvenience and expense
of a PC or set top box.

– VIZIO’s “Connected HDTV” Platform provides a fully customizable and dynamic entertainment
experience with built-in wireless (802.11n) to access on-demand movies, music, news, weather,
sports, gaming and social networking services.

– Content and service providers are rapidly expanding and now include Accedo Broadband, Adobe®,
Amazon®, Blockbuster®, Flickr®, Netflix®, Pandora, Rhapsody® and Yahoo! ®

LAS VEGAS, NV (CES) and IRVINE, CA – – January 7, 2009 – – VIZIO, America’s TV and
Consumer Electronics Company, announced today the unveiling of its “Connected HDTV”
Platform, which enhances the HDTV viewing experience by bringing personalized
entertainment, information and social networking content into the viewer’s living room. With
unprecedented choice and control of web-based and local content from a wide range of popular
content providers and services, including on-demand movies and music, news, weather, sports,
gaming and social networking services, this platform will be integrated as a key feature into
VIZIO televisions shipping to retailers nationwide this Fall 2009 in time for the busy holiday
season.

VIZIO’s “Connected HDTV” Platform is designed to compliment TV viewing. At a single touch of
the VIZIO customized remote control, viewers can access their favorite Internet content from the
easy to navigate on screen display, without interrupting the TV program they are viewing. With
built-in wired and wireless (802.11n) networking, VIZIO televisions with the “Connected HDTV”
Platform will provide true plug-and-play connectivity right out of the box.

“In our recent report on the future of the television, Evolution of the Television – From Passive
Consumption Device to the Entertainment Center of the Home, we noted, ‘The television has
evolved from a passive consumption device that received limited over-the air programming, to
the entertainment center of the home where multitudes of activities come together,’” stated
Nathan Safran, Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. “While broadband set top boxes that deliver
content into the home are interesting because they establish a new way of delivering content to
the television, they have had limited appeal because of the up-front equipment outlay and
because content has been restricted to a single partner. However, when streaming media
capability is integrated directly into the network enabled television, it becomes a game changing
proposition, and is the next step in the evolution of the television, as it eliminates the equipment
outlay for the set top box and gives the viewer a broad range of content to choose from.”

“As consumer demand for content and information grows exponentially, we want to address
what our customers are increasingly looking for – the ability to enjoy their favorite content and
services from the comfort of their living room easy chair,” said Laynie Newsome, VP Sales and
Marketing Communication and Co-Founder of VIZIO.

Paul Gagnon, Director of North America TV Market Research at DisplaySearch also noted, “In a
hyper-connected world, TVs will start integrating more completely with the various sources of
available content. According to a recent study DisplaySearch conducted, 22% of respondents
wanted access to web-based information and more than 31% already watch movies from on-
demand services.”

Along with the expectation of anywhere, anytime access, consumers crave variety and the
freedom to choose from a wide set of entertainment and information sources. “Our ‘Connected
HDTV’ Platform is a key element of VIZIO’s Consumer Ecosystem, which places the VIZIO
HDTV as a focal point, allowing viewers to seamlessly connect to information and entertainment
sources that they want, when they want them,” said Matthew McRae, VIZIO VP. “The platform
also provides an unprecedented opportunity for Internet-based service providers to develop and
deploy innovative applications to a large consumer audience.”

VIZIO’s “Connected HDTV” Platform will incorporate the Yahoo! Widget Engine, which provides
an open platform enabling a new class of Internet services, called TV Widgets, to thrive in the
TV environment. The platform will also include support for Adobe Flash LiteTM, which will
enable developers to deliver rich applications, content, and video over the Web to the television
itself.

Leading popular content and service providers are working with VIZIO’s “Connected HDTV”
Platform to bring a very wide variety of entertainment, information, social networking and other
applications to consumers, including:

Accedo Broadband (www.accedobroadband.com) — Accedo’s popular casual gaming service,
Funspot®, allows viewers to play a variety of fun games from the comfort of their favorite
armchair. Games include Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, Sudoku, and QuizzMaster.

Adobe (www.adobe.com/flashplatform) — Adobe Flash® Player and Adobe Flash Lite are on
over 98 percent of connected computers and more than 800 million devices, and deliver more
than 80 percent of Web videos worldwide. Both players are part of the Adobe Flash Platform
and ensure that content and applications are presented consistently in the format users want.

Amazon Video on Demand (www.amazon.com/vod) — Amazon Video On Demand plans to
make its massive selection of over 40,000 movies and TV shows available to users of VIZIO’s
“Connected HDTV” Platform, providing users with the total on demand entertainment solution.
Using the VIZIO television’s built-in Internet connection, Amazon Video On Demand plans to
give customers the ability to browse, shop and instantly watch everything from hit new release
movies to classic movie favorites and individual TV episodes and seasons.

Blockbuster OnDemand (www.blockbuster.com) — One of the nation’s leading digital movie
services, BLOCKBUSTER ONDEMAND makes thousands of titles, including the newest
releases, available for rental and purchase. The service is available on an a la carte basis, no
subscription necessary, and includes content from the major Hollywood studios as well as more
than 30 other studios, television-content distributors and foreign and independent content
providers.

Flickr (www.flickr.com) — Flickr, a Yahoo! company, is one of the world’s leading online photo
and video sharing communities where people explore, find and manage pictures and video clips
of life’s daily moments with friends, family and the world. The Flickr TV Widget helps users
make their favorite photo content available to the people who matter to them. Consumers can
view, share and organize photos with friends and family or check out what interesting new
photos were recently posted by others — all in the social setting of the living room on their large
flat panel television.

Netflix (www.netflix.com) — Since launching its streaming functionality in January 2007, Netflix
has grown its catalog to more than 12,000 choices of movies and TV episodes to watch
instantly on the TV via a number of Netflix ready devices. Netflix members pay as little as $8.99
per month for unlimited instant streaming and unlimited DVDs from a catalog of more than
100,000 DVD titles in more than 200 genres.

Pandora (www.pandora.com) — Based on the Music Genome Project begun in 2000,
Pandora’s personalized Internet radio and music discovery service delivers personalized
playlists built from a database with over 550,000 songs analyzed by more than 30 trained
musicians and assessed against nearly 400 distinct musical attributes.

Rhapsody (www.rhapsody.com) — Rhapsody’s award-winning digital music service gives
consumers access to more than six million songs on their PC, on their portable device and in
the home. Now, VIZIO “Connected HDTV”-enabled users will have living room access as well to
Rhapsody’s extensive music catalog, professionally programmed music channels, personalized
recommendations and thousands of themed playlists.

Yahoo! — Yahoo! provides the best of the Internet in perfect harmony with the simplicity and
reliability of the television. The innovative Yahoo! Widget Engine, which will help drive VIZIO’s
“Connected HDTV” Platform, will offer VIZIO customers an enhanced viewing experience by
bringing to market a new class of interactive applications called TV Widgets. Initial Yahoo! TV
Widgets available will include Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Finance, soon to be
followed by Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Video. Yahoo! Video puts a wide range of news, sports,
lifestyle, and entertainment video content in one place for users to enjoy on their TV via the
Internet. Additional well-known content providers already developing TV Widgets for deployment
include CBS, Showtime®, TwitterTM, The New York Times® and MySpace®.

By collaborating with leading content, service and technology partners to create a truly
compelling and personalized user experience, VIZIO sees its new advanced platform as part of
its continual evolution to deliver consumers more of what they love. “The quality of the platform
partners that we are attracting validates our approach. Our partner list will continue to expand,”
stated Matthew McRae, VIZIO VP. “This platform offers innumerable opportunities given VIZIO’s
hefty HDTV market share and growth expectations for the future.”

Whether you’re attending CES in Vegas this week or are just curious about what to expect from our coverage, you need to be prepared. Here’s our guide to everything from press conferences to strip clubs.

For the Readers at Home:
CES is taking place now through the weekend in Las Vegas. We’re rolling in with a large crew, as usual, ready to attack the press conferences and booths like locusts on crops. If you’re watching from home:

Press Conferences
These are the times that you can expect big news to drop. We have loads of embargoed news releases that we’re allowed to post right when these start, so even in the cases when we aren’t doing liveblogs, check in for all the news from each particular company.

Wednesday
8am PST/11am EST – LG
9am PST/12pm EST – Monster Cable
9am PST/12pm EST – Netgear
10am PST/1pm EST – Toshiba
11am PST/2pm EST – Audiovox
12pm PST/3pm EST – Sharp
1pm PST/4pm EST – Cisco
2pm PST/5pm EST – Samsung
3pm PST/6pm EST – Panasonic
4:15pm PST/7:15pm EST – Sony
5pm PST/8pm EST – Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer keynote speech

Thursday
8:30am PST/11:30 EST – Sony’s Howard Stringer keynote
11am PST/2pm EST – Palm
1pm PST/4pm EST – SanDisk
2pm PST/5pm EST – WirelessHD
4pm PST/7pm EST – Blu-ray Disc Association

We have all sorts of other interviews and meetings schedule as well, so news will be dropping all throughout the week in addition to these times. But really, you should be setting your alarm for all of these so you don’t miss a single iPod dock or digital picture frame. (Actually, if you stick to Giz, you’ll miss ALL the boring ones.)

Volume of Posts
CES causes us to go into severe posting overload, doubling the number of posts we do each day. If you’re the type of person who refreshes the site every 5 minutes while you try to avoid the soul-crushing dullness that is your job, this is good news for you. If you’re the type of person who logs on once each day to catch up, well, you might want to check twice per day.

Luckily, our new design allows for more posts on the front page than before, but you may need to go back to page 2 in the morning to stay caught up. Because you seriously don’t want to miss when Chen inevitably posts that infernal video of me dancing again, that bastard.

For those going to be at CES:
You poor bastards. Well, we’ve been going for a few years now, so we’ll humbly offer up advice on surviving the show and the city based on our experiences.

Hotels
The Gizmodo crew has stayed in the Imperial Palace in years past due to the fact that it costs about $15 dollars a night and is about to fall down. It’s worked out fine since the location is great, right on the strip with a monorail stop that will get you right to the conference center. This year, however, we’ve upgraded to the Wynn, which is somehow cheaper than the IP (seems like a bad sign for both of them, doesn’t it?). But really, most of these casino hotels are the same unless you’re some kind of high roller, which I’m assuming you definitely aren’t. As long as you’re near a monorail stop, getting to the LVCC is a piece of cake.

Buffets
Every casino has a buffet, and it’s usually an awesome way to eat an unhealthy amount of food without breaking the bank. The standouts are definitely the Bellagio’s and the MGM Grand’s, both of which offer up super high quality food (the MGM had a mashed potato bar last year, but I think they’ve since removed it for some bullshit reason).

If you’re stuck in Vegas until Sunday, hit up the buffet at Harrah’s, which offers an all-you-can-drink champagne brunch. It’s only right to fly out of Vegas completely hammered, isn’t it?

Restaurants
In addition to buffets, nearly every casino has a restaurant helmed by a celebrity chef. They run the gamut price-wise, but if you choose carefully you can spend way less for a great meal than you would at these chef’s NYC or other locations. For example, Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in the Venetian has entrée’s in the $25 range, which meals at his NYC and SF restaurants run $250+ per person. Wolfgang Puck also has like half a dozen restaurants at various hotels, with prices all along the scale.

If you’re looking to go all out, Joel Robuchon has two restaurants in the MGM right next to each other. L’atelier De Joel Robuchon will run you $125 per person, if you’re a cheapskate, while the even fancier Joel Robuchon can run you upwards of $385 per person before tax, tip and booze. It’s the best and most expensive place in the city, and is where we will be eating on Friday night. Brian just doesn’t know it yet.

Gambling
All the casino floors are basically the same, and it’s about choosing if you’d rather lose money in an Epcot-like approximation of New York, Paris, Venice, Rome or just in a general tacky room with no windows.

If you’re looking for cheap tables, hit up O’Shea’s. They have beer pong tables and the food court features Taco Bell rather than Thomas Keller, so you know what you’re getting into here.

Gizmodo’s favorite blackjack pit is the Dealertainers pit at the Imperial Palace, as it’s the only place on the strip that you can play with the worst celebrity impersonators ever as your dealers. If you haven’t played blackjack with a Filipino J. Lo impersonator, you haven’t truly experienced Vegas.

Hanging Out
We’re planning a Gizmodo reader meetup in Vegas on Thursday night. The details are still being ironed out—and we will likely be dead tired by then—but prepare yourself for a great opportunity to get hammered with us. It’s more fun than it sounds, I promise! But a word of warning: No matter what Mark Wilson claims, he’s not an accredited masseuse. Don’t believe his lies.

Weather
Vegas is in the desert, so look for the days to be warm and the nights to be pretty cold. It should be in the low 50s in the daytime, but temperatures will drop at night, so bring some warm clothes in addition to your party guy floral print shirts and short shorts.

Pranks
They might seem like a good idea at the time, but you’ll really want to make sure they are before going through with any pranks. Just trust us on this one.

AVN
AVN, the porn convention, takes place at the Venetian over the weekend at the end of CES. It’s insane. The date for registration has passed, but there is on-site press registration (as well as a day open to the public, full of all the creeps that you can imagine would go to a porn convention). What to expect? Well, there are booths for various porn production companies featuring porn stars hanging out in skimpy outfits. (No nudity allowed, however—see the next section for that.) On the fringes, there are loads of booths for various products, from terrifying sex toys to Egyptian cotton sheets.

It’s worth experiencing at least once, although it will fill your soul with an infinite sadness, so be warned.

Strip Clubs
Just get in a cab and ask to be taken to Treasures. They’ll know where to go.

Depression
This year’s CES promises to be one of the most sad CESes in recent memory thanks to the current recession. I mean, all of these companies are going to be reeking of desperation, as they’re perfectly aware of how few people are interested in spending $2,500 on a non-essential TV when they can barely afford to feed their families.

Luckily, you’re in Vegas, so you’ll be able to drink the sadness away out on the street. Just try to prepare yourself emotionally for what promises to be a downer of a week. But hey, at least there will be some open bars, right? We’ll make the most of it together. [CES 2009 Full Coverage]

As our warriors move from the beachheads of SF to the trenches of LV, here’s today’s recap, and reminder that the war week is far from over:

It’s been the easiest thing for everybody in the universe to say that Apple’s Macworld 2009 keynote lacked not just Jobs but luster. We did feel a distinct absence of a Jobsian ZOMG hover-board-that-shoots-lightning-bolts reality distortion, a surge that is always followed by inevitable grumbling anyway. But the speech by able stand-in Phil Schiller wasn’t without genuine news…

• Those who enjoy their iPhoto couldn’t help marvel at the new features, including real bonafide face identification and new useful geographical organizing tools.

• People who hated last year’s iMovie overhaul are now starting to realize that it might have been a necessary step in a whole new approach.

• We finally got the 17″ MacBook Pro that had been projected for so long, though with a truly Apple-flavored twist: a long-lasting but non-removable battery.

• iWork got some improvements, but more importantly made its first lunge toward the cloud—for better or for worse.

• iPhone owners got the chance to impulse-buy songs directly over AT&T’s 3G network (and even the EDGE network, at their own peril).

• And DRM—the reason I started buying all music from Amazon—finally got the boot, though under the condition that the four major record distributors get to charge higher prices on their tastiest licks.

It was an eventful day in the Apple-verse, even though Steve sat it out. But Macworld has come to an end (perhaps for all time), and we’re already up and running at CES! [Macworld 2009; CES 2009]

This one slipped even below Jim Goldman’s rumor radar: The Apple Keynote Beer Goggles. Judging from today’s snoringfest, I won’t be surprised if they make them obligatory for every event in 2009.

Many people are bashing the Philnote because it was a bore and there were no new new NEW toys. In reality, the keynote wasn’t very different from many other that Steve Jobs did in the past. I remember some who were mostly the same: Endless software demonstrations plus a hardware update here or there. In fact, I think there were even worse keynotes, like that time when an endless parade of third-party software directors came on stage to show their support to Mac OS X. It took me several Guinness pints to get over that one.

So given what he had to present today—and I’ve to say that I love the new iPhoto and iMovie—El Schillerino did quite a good job. But even while he was good, apparently he’s not Steve Jobs and people weren’t as enthusiastic as when El Esteban is on stage. I don’t know what’s going to happen when Jobs finally retires from Apple, but maybe the key for success goes through free beer for everyone at the door. And probably free pizza too. [Image based on the original beer goggles from Urban Spectacles via Dark Roasted Blend]