GadgetGeek – Best of CES
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is complete for another year and has brought along lots of gadget & tech goodness. Here are some of what I feel are the most interesting tech to be announced.
Windows 7
This is the successor to Windows Vista which, as most people will agree, never lived up to all the hype. Microsoft look to be following the Apple philosophy of quick and simple for this new version of Windows. The boot up times are expected to be significantly quicker than previous versions (I hope they also address the deteriorating boot up times you get the older the installation and the more software you install). Both the UI and appearance have been slim-lined from previous versions with the Task Bar now taking on more of a MAC-OS inspired Dock feel. The software has been designed to run on a wide range of machines including cheap netbooks (Microsoft are desperate to get rid of XP and I guess this is their answer!)
The Beta is available now with the full software not expected until late 2009 or early 2010. Microsoft have announced this week that there will be unlimited downloads of the Beta software until January 24th, so go get yours now.
Palm Pre
I’ve never owned a Palm, but looking at the pictures and specs on this new one and I could be tempted. It comes with Palms first new O/S in years and looks very tasty. Its form factor is aimed directly at the iPhone and Blackberry designs with a 3.1” multi-touch screen AND a Blackberry style QWERTY keyboard. It has the standard smartphone 3G and GPS and also a 3MP camera and flash. The Pre uses the new Palm Synergy feature to bring your Outlook, Google, and Facebook calendars together for one logical view of your day. And if you have the same contacts in different places, Pre can link them together, making it easy to find the information you need.
No date yet on when this is expected on the market.
Sony X1000 Walkman
This is Sony’s latest Walkman and appears to be created as a direct competitor to the iPod Touch. It comes with a bright 3” multi-touch OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen. Which I suspect will become the standard with new screens over the next couple of years. It has Sony’s very good hardware noise reduction built into the device which will enhance the already excellent sound quality that Walkman’s have (in my view better than iPods). Sony Walkman’s have always had excellent battery life and I expect this one will beat the poor battery life of the iPod Touch, especially with that cool OLED screen. The first players will come in the 16 Gb and 32 GB sizes (sound familiar?)
Expect this in the shops sometime this summer.
Asus Eee Keyboard
Now this is different. Asus have gone and stuffed all the innards of a PC into a keyboard!
It has a large 5” touchscreen and full wi-fi capability. Just connect it to a monitor or your TV through its wireless HDMI (yes wireless HDMI – I like it). It runs Windows XP Home, includes a 1.6GHz Intel Atom microprocessor, 1Gb of DDR2 DRam and a choice of 16GB or 32GB solid state drives for storage. It doesn’t have a built in DVD player, but if you are only going to use it for the internet and email this would not be a big issue. I like this concept and hope that this works well and has good battery life. I could really see this as a nice addition to my living room.
Expect this around September this year.
If I end up getting any of this cool tech, I will of course give your a much more detailed review.
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I can’t wait to check out the Palm Pre. Finally, something that may actually get Apple to put all the features we want into the iPhone. Competition is good.
So what is the Android? That’s a bigger competitor, I think.
BTW, the keyboard is “palm-like”, not “Blackberry like” :)
I have a Palm Centro, and it’s a nearly identical (And too cramped at that) keyboard. Nice phone. I still like the Androids better, but hopefully the use of multi-touch in Pre will push them to enable that in future Android phones.
I discussed it quite a bit on the last episode of GeekiN. I rather like the way you close the apps. I like the much improved browser (Don’t let anyone tell you differently…Blazer sucks). However, the Centro keyboard is a small disappointment. Take and extra .5″ to give the buttons a bit more space. Also, the fact that the phone is meant to be rotated makes the keyboard slightly impractical at times, especially when there is no on-screen option.
I think that webOS and Android are both fine competitors, but I think that the palm pre is more so than the G1. I also think that all these platforms are building on each other. I’m looking forward to more phones having the Android OS. Although neither the Pre or the G1 seem to address portrait AND landscape with the keyboard.
If Samsung get their act together and get an Android phone out that looks cool (the G1 is hardly a looker), then I suspect Android will be the big hit of 2009 in the Mobile world. Even though Android is probably the most exciting phone O/S out there, it still needs a good body to live in.
I agree the Pre keyboard is a bit on the small side, but for a lot of users this is probably not an issue. I have stumps for fingers so I will need to test it when it comes out.
Hay, I like the look of the G1. Maybe not as nice as the iphone, but i will be getting a G1 instead of an iphone. Just gotta wait for pesky contract to run out.
That keyboard looks real nice, really like the idea of wireless hdmi, will deffinatley go check it out when it’s released.
The X1000 might be pretty cool. I think Sony’s problem is that it might be too little, too late. iPods are ubiquitous whether they deserve it or not, and consumers are moving towards multimedia+phone+internet/data devices. The OLED screen is a nice touch. Also, was a price point announced?
Personally, I”m waiting to see with what happens with JavaFX Mobile. News in May, I hope…
More competition would be a good thing.