If you’re at CES Friday…
Come over to Lora Heiny’s monster geek/tablet/blogger meetup at the Aladdin Desert Passage shopping area at 4 p.m.
As always, my cell phone is always on at 425-205-1921. If you wanna show me a cool new toy, call me up!
Some cool new toys I saw tonight? A new Skype headset from Jawbone. A Hifi link for the iPod. Digital home automation software (that works with these switches and controls) from Echelon. Home automation is another big trend that we may see pick up in 2006. The controls are now cheap enough that I could afford them (and they are energy saving and let you do stuff that you couldn’t do before. For instance, when we got back from Europe we almost froze to death. Turns out it takes two hours to heat up our house fully after the interior temp goes down to the 30s. If we had a remote controllable thermostat we could have turned the heater on before we got home). Asus was showing off a Lamborghini laptop. Screaming performance. But hefty price (more than $3,000 they told us). And it’s no OQO. If you carried this around it’d hurt your back. iSee was showing off a cool device that you plug an iPod into. Turned your iPod into a video recorder. Here’s Doc Searls getting a look from ATO CFO Richard Wright.
CES, Day One
I’m tired. I haven’t done a mega show in years and CES is at least twice as big as when I attended in the late 80s (and it was big then). My pictures don’t do justice, but everything between me and the Hilton in this shot (I’d guess more than a mile away) is CES buildings.
Whenever I found something I thought was interesting or that I wanted to remember, I snapped a picture of it.
XM was one of the first things I saw. They had a new portable player that I wanted to remember to go back to see tomorrow.
Samsung had a wall of “plasma porn.”
My first shot of Microsoft’s booth. Wall to wall people. Everytime I went in there. Who cares about Microsoft? Oh, no one.
HD-DVD booth was packed. Why? Their first players are a LOT lower price than Blue-Ray. I’ll check out both players more later this week. The quality is stunning. I see one of these in my future.
New Motion Tablet PC is small! I think I’m gonna get one of these to make Patrick jealous.
Maxthon was showing off a new plugin that lets you blog with WordPress. Oh, oh, that’s cool! Maxthon is a cool IE-based browser (it’s Chris Pirillo’s favorite browser, and i can see why). They gave me a beta, will have to try that. If you go by, ask them for a memory key. They have a bunch under the booth with Maxthon loaded on a 256mb key. That’s cool.
The car bling-bling was out in force. At least 100 really killer cars with entertainment systems inside. Here’s Buzz standing in front of a bling-bling machine.
102″ plasma is sweet. But, at $150,000 (or more, they wouldn’t give us an exact price) this is a toy for only the Gates’ or Jobs’ to play with.
So far the winner in my decision of an HDTV screen is the Samsung HP-S5073. Comes out in June. Has noticeably better blacks than any plasma I saw at the show (they were showing it next to one of their existing models and the difference was dramatic). 50-inch. About $4,500.
But I’m saving the coolest for last. The OQO Tablet PC. That drew a sizeable crowd everytime he OQO folks stopped. This thing is tiny. Here’s a picture next to a cell phone so you can see it. I played around with it and I have serious drool factor. Vic Gundotra would kill me if I got one before him. $2,100. Available in four weeks, but orderable now.
