Well, it wasn’t last year. Not by a long shot. Steve Ballmer was pretty much all business at this year’s CES Keynote, and although Robbie Bach (president of Microsoft’s entertainment division) did play some games, we didn’t get much in the way of celebrities or fireworks or nakedness anything like that. Below and after the jump, I’ve posted some pictures and videos of the highlights, including Windows 7, Windows Live services, some new Halo games, a game builder for the Xbox 360, and a prototype bendable cloud computing device thingy.
So, the keynote kicked off with a pretty awesome beatbox duel, which I don’t have video of, because honestly, what does a beatbox duel have to do with anything at all Microsoftish? But here’s a picture:
After that, we were introduced to Steve Ballmer. He talks optimism for a while, about how great Windows is and how great their position is and how great the future is and how everything is great. He complains about messages he keeps getting from random people:
Ballmer says that Microsoft wants to try and connect (or integrate) the three screens that you see each day: computer, cell phone, and television. And of course, Windows is the way to do that, specifically Windows 7 (the beta of which is available now) and a whole suite of new cloud computing services called Windows Live:
While it didn’t come up at the press conference earlier in the day, Samsung was showing off their MBP200 Pico Projector/Portable Media Player at a pre-CES event. I have to admit that the whole pocket-sized projector idea has intrigued me, and after playing with the MBP200, I’m definitely sold. Given the extra hardware on board, the MBP200 is considerably thicker than something like the iPod Touch, or pretty much every PMP currently on the market. But being able to project up to a 50-inch video onto a wall, totally makes up for it.
Besides the standard support for media files such as MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, WAV, DivX, Xvid, WMV9 Simple Profile, MPEG-2, MPEG-4; Audio CODEC: MP3, AAC and WMA, the MBP200 also supports PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, MS Word docs and Excel files, which means you can justify picking one of these up as a tool for the office. And if you don’t want everyone else in the room seeing or hearing your files, the MBP200 also has a 2.2-inch QVGA LCD display and a 3.5mm headphone jack that can be used in lieu of the built-in speaker. As for availability, “sometime later this year” is the best I could coax out of them.
That headline pretty much sums up why I’m writing about this camera. Kodak’s Z980 is nice looking, but it is yet another one of those bulky pieces of kit meant to make you feel like you’re holding a DSLR, when this is really nothing of the sort. I won’t get into why this is the case, if you’re into photography, you should know. But the $400 Z980 does have one redeeming feature: 24X optical zoom. At that price point, it’s not half bad. And it’s 12MP, in case you want to know.
There’s a bunch of other features, and it looks like an ok camera. They’re all listed in the partial press release, which I’ve pasted, you guessed it, after the jump.
Any one of the ClickFree family of products is something I actually would give my mom, or any one of the two dozen people I know who can’t backup their files because they find the process mystically confusing. Of all the products I saw at Pepcom, this was quite likely one of the most useful and with the highest mass market appeal. You just plug the device into any USB port… and that’s it. Assuming Autoplay is not disabled, the software will launch and search through your system for any of 400 different file types you’d want to backup. So it’ll find and backup any JPEGs, AVIs, MOVs, etc, automatically, but will overlook things like DLLs, system files or executables. Once it’s done, it’ll give you a report on what was backed up. You unplug it and that’s it: you have a backup.
Next time you plug it in, it will do incremental backups, meaning no dupes. You can even use it on multiple PCs, and the broken down report will tell you which files were backed up from which PC.
There are several products here. Several of them are portable drives in sizes 120GB to 500GB, and one not-terribly-portable 1TB drive. The picture on the left is the 320GB version. The product on the right is the ClickFree Transformer, which is a USB dongle-like device that sits between any old portable drive you may already own, and your PC’s USB drive, thus giving your own drive the full ClickFree functionality. The Transformer is $60.
Link to a PDF press release (because it wouldn’t let me paste without all sorts of annoying formatting) below.
This isn’t exactly new, but now that I’ve seen it work in person, I think y’all should know about this technology. It’s called HyperSpace, and it’s made by Phoenix, the people behind the BIOS of a good chunk of the PCs out there. What it does, in a nutshell, is allow you to use your PC without having to wait for it to boot. You’re about to board a plane and only have two minutes to shoot off an email, waiting for Windows to go through its rigmarole can be a pain. HyperSpace steps in with near instant-on capability, immediately finds the strongest free WiFi around and allows you to launch a limited number of programs. Should you actually want to run Windows, you can press a button and properly launch it.
It accomplishes this through virtualization, and though the company insists on calling it an “alternate computing environment”, it’s really a stripped down OS that piggybacks on Windows and exists solely to help you bypass boot ups. It is quite useful… but it’s far from free. Here comes the negative.
It comes in two flavors, one of which is pretty much useless in my opinion. And it only works on a subscription type basis. The full HyperSpace Hybrid (the version that can virtualize) costs $60 a year, or $150 for three years. The HyperSpace Dual costs $40 a year… but is not as useful since it can only be used independently of Windows. Should you want to boot Windows, you have to restart and select Windows through a dual-boot menu, hence the name.
I tend to turn my lights on when I enter a room, and off when I leave them. Sure, during the day I’ll sometimes leave them off and just let the sunlight come in, and other times I’ll sit in the dark and play games. However, if you’re the sort of person that avoids turning on most of your lights until the sun has gone down, you’ll find this timer switch to be pretty handy.
Rather than being programmed to turn on your lights at the same time every day, you program in your latitude and longitude. This way, your lights will come on exactly at sunset. At $40, it won’t break the bank, though the hard part will likely be hooking it up to your lighting.
I’m not sure why, but I can’t recall a single instance where my computer’s mouse was subject to liquid being spilled on it. Sure, my keyboard has had a drink spilled on it a couple of times, but my mouse always seems to come away unscathed. If you’re not like me and your mouse tends to get hit with water or other liquids from time to time, you’ll be happy to know that someone has created a waterproof mouse.
I’m guessing that this is aimed at people who work in a particularly wet environment, or the extremely hygienic. This mouse is completely waterproof, and can even be submerged without incurring any issues. This certainly makes it much easier to clean if you’re a germaphobe. My biggest issue is that it’s completely silent when used. Something about a silent mouse would likely drive me crazy after a short while. This Waterproof USB Mouse can be yours for just $17.
Thanks to a solid 3 hours spent in line by our esteemed managing editor David, I’ve snagged myself a prime seat at the Microsoft keynote: an aisle seat 5 rows back center. This year’s keynote is being given by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, since (as you may remember) Bill Gates retired from daily operations at Microsoft last year. It’s going to be hard for Steve to top last year, but I’m looking forward to some solid Microsoft info with more than a little pageantry thrown in for good measure.
Now, I have a couple options here… One of them is a play-by-play style liveblog kinda like I did last year. But since the internet here is really freakin’ slow, unless any of you are chomping at the bit to hear the latest news about Windows Media Server a few minutes before everyone else I think I’m going to focus on taking pictures (and video, where appropriate), and then posting all the info after the keynote ends. Sound good?
The Sony press conference just wrapped, and the one thing that really got the camera flashes popping was the official announcement for the VAIO P Series Lifestyle PC. Since it’s Sony, they of course had to come up with a different name than ‘netbook’, but between you and me, that’s what you’re getting. However, it is one of the smallest and sleekest looking ‘lifestyle’ PCs I’ve ever played with.
As Sony claims, it’s about the length of a business envelope and weighs just 1.4 pounds. And after carrying around a backpack with a MacBook inside for about 2 days now, that’s music to my ears. It’s also got integrated wireless WAN, LAN and Bluetooth, as well as GPS that doesn’t require an internet connection. (Yay!)
The high-resolution ultra-wide LCD display is great for viewing websites with minimal horizontal scrolling or resizing, and the model I played with seemed to have no trouble running Windows Vista. I’m still cautious about netbooks after my misadventures with the Asus EEE, but Sony sure puts forth a strong argument for an ultra compact laptop with this one. The VAIO P Series Lifestyle PC should be available for pre-order at the Sony Store tomorrow (North America only I believe) and at select retailers next month for about $900.
Related Tags: CES2009
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