CES Unveiled event provides a high-energy opener
If CES is a banquet, CES Unveiled -- the opening press event -- is like a tasting menu personally selected by the head chef. You'd expect the most luscious morsels, and possibly a bit of gastronomic overload by the end of the evening.
This year's go-around was no exception. Such events, at which a selected group of vendors show their shiniest new toys to the people most hungry to see shiny new toys, have a tendency to feature a beauty queen -- one product that's both interesting and irresistibly photogenic. Only at a tech show would the beauty queen look like Wall-E, but there it is: The cherry-red Minoru Webcam, propping itself "on its elbows" atop a monitor, attracted crowds so large that it was hard at times to approach nearby booths, let alone the 3D webcam itself. The $90 gadget includes five pairs of 3D glasses for your viewing pleasure.
Beauty pageants require a Miss Congeniality, too. The product more likely to help others (or other gadgets at least) feel good about themselves is surely the Powermat, a deceptively simple-looking item that's got some fancy stuff happening behind the scenes. Essentially, it's a flat, highly portable charger -- slip your gear (phone, MP3 player, laptop, gaming device) into an RFID-chipped sleeve and lay it on the mat, and the sleeve and mat will communicate to ascertain what the gadget is, how much juice is required, and when it's charged. (Yes, wireless charging; think magnetic induction. Your electric toothbrush is likely to use it.)
You will need a sleeve for each gadget, and those will run $20-$50 apiece; the pad itself is expected to go for $100. In exchange, you not only never have to deal with wall warts again, you won't have to figure out which wart goes with which gadget. Congenial indeed.
Tiny, lively netbook-sized portables made a splash Tuesday night, especially since one of them arrived with a king-sized escort in tow. Lenovo debuted the 11-pound Thinkpad W700DS, a dual-screen desktop replacement aimed at folks who appreciate the productivity gain a second monitor can provide. A Lenovo representative relayed a statistic from Gartner that says employees experience a 5% gain in productivity when they get a laptop... and a 45% gain when they get a second monitor. (The math as it relates to the W700DS is left as as exercise for the reader.) The entry-level version of the machine starts at $3600 and can go as high as $9000; Lenovo representatives say they fully expect most such machines to be carefully specified for high-end corporate uses.
The secondary screen on the Thinkpad is exactly the same 10.6" screen as that on its cute sister, the Ideapad. The smaller Lenovo is netbook-sized, weighing in at a svelte 2.4 lbs., but sporting hard drive sizes more customary in standard notebooks (80-160 GB). When available, it'll turn up with a multitude of case colors and, it's expected, a list price of about $350. Lenovo reps say they'll be offered online first, with brick-and-mortar retail sales a possibility down the road.
Just down the row of booths, Asus also had a tiny wonder to show -- the much-awaited tablet version of its popular Eee PC. (Digression: An Asus rep informs your long-suffering correspondent that in-house, they pronounce their netbook's vowel-rich name as eee-pee-cee; "otherwise you sound like you're calling dolphins." Noted.) Look but don't touch for a while, Eee fans; company reps are being deliberately vague about ship dates (they "believe there's a very good change it'll ship during the first half of the year"), pricing, and even the OS to be eventually offered. (The unit we saw appeared to be running Windows.) They're more forthcoming about features, including a built-in TV tuner and GPS; they're also happy to show the 3D touch interface currently in development. The machine will have a 10.1" screen and weigh about 2 lbs.
Beauty-pageant contestants like to espouse good causes, and we saw two promising products that have a serious green lean. Arizona-based iGo showed a surge protector and a laptop charger that promise to handle power more intelligent than current models on the market, simply by recognizing when a gadget is through charging and not pushing any more power at it. That may sound trivial, but iGo quotes stats that say around $80 billion is wasted every year by wall warts and the like that just don't know when to stop (the dreaded "vampire power" problem). Their tests indicate that the new gadgetry may use as little as 20% of the power of traditional units.
Impressive, but check this for counter-intuitive: earth-friendly disposable batteries. We're eager to test a set of Fuji EnviroMAX alkaline batteries, coming this spring to, if Fuji's ebullient staff has anything to do with it, pretty much anywhere you buy your batteries, and for about the same price. The company says the batteries contain no cadmium, no mercury, and no PVC plastics; they can be tossed out in the regular trash and will simply degrade in landfills, releasing no toxins to the environment. (As Fuji's Jeff Kreidenweis put it, "not that throwing away is great, but if you're gonna throw it away you want it to go away.")
Even the packaging's made with recyclable materials -- paper, yes, and PET plastics, commonly used for soda bottles and the like and very easily to reclaim. What's their secret? Secret, of course -- but the use of iron and a much-purer-than-usual silver-dioxide solution are key to the process. Stay tuned for more when we get our hands on them; in the meantime, Fuji's posted more information.
Other stars sparkled in pageant fashion -- some for pure poshness (Blaupunkt's Internet car radio, the first on the market and expected to be available during the second half of 2009 -- or, if you prefer yours pre-installed, in certain vehicles unveiled for the 2011 season), some for unusual talents (Krown's fascinating tablet-based Sign Language Translator, "coming soon" as they say), some for evoking thoughts of an emergency cheeseburger (Samsung's unnervingly thin bezel on their 46" Digital Information Display panel, which measured no much than half the width of a pinky finger).
But for a certain sort of geek, one of the night's unsung stars is all about the stars: Meade's new ETX-LS LightSwitch telescope, the first ever that's fully automated. Switch it on and step aside; the built-in GPS knows where you are, the clock knows what time it is, electronic compasses calculate elevation and trigger slewing to a reference star, and the CCD imager examines what it sees and pinpoints its aim.
The $1299 beauty knows about 100,000 celestial objects and contains 60 video presentations and 500 audio narratives describing what's up there; the latter are provided by Sandy Wood, the beloved voice of public radio's "Star Date." And since the system knows exactly what's on display at any moment, it can provide a hourly guide to exactly what's most worth viewing this evening. (We were assured by Meade representatives that even the viewing is plush, with Advanced Coma-Free optical design making the most of the 6" mirror and 1524 mm focal length.) Your job? Find a star party, bring a warm jacket, and try not to cry when you think how fussy and hard your hobby's mechanics used to be.