By Andrew Liszewski

If someone had told me that at one point at CES I’d be holding a quarter under my ear while someone took a picture of it with an iPhone, I probably would’ve been a bit skeptical about their claim. But that’s exactly how you get ‘fitted’ for the Yurbuds earbud enhancers. Made from silicone they’re designed to attach to most earbuds like the ones that come with the iPods, mobile phones and bluetooth headsets, but their unique shape not only makes them stay in even during rigorous physical activity, but it also does a better job at directing the sound into your ear canal so you don’t need to have the volume cranked anywhere near as loud as you normally would.

And while they take a while to get used to wearing, particularly when it comes to putting them on, they’re actually designed to be more comfortable than a standard pair of earbuds. How you ask? Well in the photo above you can see a series of rounded notches on the Yurbuds. These are actually strategically positioned so that they’re not touching key nerve endings in your ear, reducing pain and soreness from prolonged usage.

But what’s particularly unique about the Yurbuds is that they come in a variety of different sizes to fit most people’s ears. And to determine what size you need, there’s an iPhone app you can download that will analyze a photo of your ear to determine the perfect fit. When taking the photo you hold a quarter just below your ear which is used as a size reference so it knows how large or small your ear is, and once the photo’s snapped it will report back the size you need to order. If you’re curious, I’m a size 5. Best of all, you can order a set of Yurbuds right now for a very reasonable $19.99.

[ Yurbuds ]

By Andrew Liszewski

In addition to bring a damn fine phone, the iPhone always seemed to me like it would make a half-decent universal remote as well, with its large touchscreen display and accessory-friendly dock connector. But oddly enough it’s taken this long for a 3rd party to create an IR remote add-on, though I guess the wait was worth it. The L5 Remote doesn’t add much bulk to the iPhone, it just hangs off the bottom, though the placement of the iPhone’s dock connector does mean you’ll have to use it upside down when controlling your entertainment center.

The accompanying app, which unfortunately is still awaiting approval in the App Store, is pretty robust too. It supports learning functionality, and since the iPhone is graced with a fast processor capturing commands from your other remotes is very fast according to their rep. The button layout is also completely configurable, with little sliding areas to hide buttons like numeric layouts that you aren’t necessarily using all the time. In fact the only downside I can see is that since using the remote requires the iPhone’s display to be on all the time (the IR dongle just sips power, and isn’t much of a drain) it will be the first remote you have to charge every night. The L5 should be available sometime in February, pending approval of their app of course, for about $40 I believe.

[ L5 Remote ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Over the last year or so, we’ve heard a lot of talk about USB 3.0. The new standard has the obvious advantage of speed over its earlier versions. While we’ve seen manufacturers release add-on cards and even motherboards equipped with these newer ports, there haven’t been a lot of drives that truly take advantage of the throughput that can be achieved. While walking the floor at CES, I came across one company that was showing off just such a product.

The new USB 3.0 RAIDDrive from SuperTalent is boasted as the first such drive to actually hit the market. Utilizing a pair of drives crammed into one case and setup with a RAID 0 configuration, this flash drive is by far the fastest I’ve ever seen. After the jump I’ve got a shot of the monitor on which they ran the CrystalDiskMark test. These numbers are in many areas higher than some of the SSD’s that I’ve benchmarked. With that sort of speed and capacities ranging from 32GB-128GB, it walks that line between oversized flash drive and undersized hard drive.

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By Andrew Liszewski

Even though it may be digital, looking through a gallery of someone’s photos on an LCD picture frame can be just as tedious as flipping through an actual photo album or sitting through a slideshow. But Casio hopes to make things more exciting?, interesting maybe?, with their new Digital Art Frame which essentially lets you apply a small collection of Photoshop-like filters to your photos. The effects include water color painting, color pencil sketch, pointillism, gothic oil painting, oil painting, pastel painting, airbrush and fauvist oil painting, and are cheesy enough to be appreciated by anyone’s grandparents.

The various effects are applied through the use of an included remote, there’s no touch screen here, and if you’re particularly happy with the results from one of the effects you can actually save them back to the memory card. The frame is expected to be available sometime in the Spring of this year, but pricing info had yet to be determined.

By Andrew Liszewski

The idea of a microwave oven or a washing machine running Android might seem like a bit much, but the company behind these two concepts, Touch Revolution, actually has a pretty clever product. Their Android-powered NIM1000 Touch Module can be integrated by an OEM into a wide range of products (hence the proof of concept microwave and washing machine on display) adding gesture-based touch controls to almost any device.

It saves a company from having to research and develop their own touch-screen hardware and software, and because it does run Android, the possibilities of what that touch screen can do are almost endless. The brief demo I saw had them loading Pandora on the microwave and playing a bit of Jason Mraz through a pair of built-in speakers.

[ Touch Revolution ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I’m still a bit skeptical about the need for a $99 monochrome device that simply provides an offline copy of Wikipedia, but I had a chance to play with the WikiReader today, and found myself utterly entranced with the random button. The device itself is light and simple, and if I had to sum up the monochrome display and touch screen in one word I would definitely call it ‘usable’, but I instantly warmed up to that ‘random’ button you can see in the lower left corner which provided a kind of a ‘word-of-the-day’ calendar experience. Now normally I don’t sit at my computer all day looking up random articles on Wikipedia to pass the time, but I could probably find myself killing a moment or two of boredom with this device.

[ WikiReader ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you’ve got a device capable of pushing a 4K signal, might I suggest picking up one of Panasonic’s lovely 152-inch, 4092×2160 Viera plasma displays? I’ve no idea what one of these would set you back, but I’m going to file it away in my ‘you probably can’t afford it and probably never will’ drawer. Unless I can find a booth giving away 152-inch tote bags that would let me discreetly slip this out of Panasonic’s booth.

By Andrew Liszewski

A lot of times at CES a company’s booth can be just as fun to play with as their products. And that was definitely the case with Kodak who had this massive interactive multi-touch display featuring a virtual river of products at their booth. Their various devices would come down a waterfall and then slowly drift their way down the river, but at any point you could grab one, drag it to the side, and pull up additional product information.

You could also simply touch the river at any point to get a cool ripple effect (isn’t that a pre-requisite for virtual water?) and at one point I must have counted 14 people interacting with the display at once, with absolutely no slow-down. It’s not always easy to make devices like printers or digital photo frames exciting, but given the crowd around this setup Kodak definitely found a way!

By Andrew Liszewski

Because of their compact size and light-weight designs, video-capable smartphones and pocket-friendly camcorders can be rather difficult to keep steady when filming. But that won’t be an issue any longer since Steadicam-Tiffen, the company that pretty much wrote the book on camera stabilization, has revealed their new Smoothee stabilizing device initially designed for the iPhone 3GS, the Droid and the Flip. Now in order to use one of the devices with the Smoothee you have to place them in a special case, but besides providing a quick-release mount, the cases are actually strategically weighted for each device ensuring the setup is always in proper balance.

What that means is that you don’t have to go through the calibration and tweaking process like you would with larger Steadicam rigs, making the Smoothee extremely consumer-friendly. Of course there will always be slight adjustments needed, but those are done with a couple of easy to use knobs that really only require the slightest of turns to put the Smoothee back in perfect balance. At this point there’s no pricing info for the Smoothee or even an ETA since it was just unveiled at CES this morning, but all you cellphone cinematographers no longer have an excuse for posting poorly shot videos to YouTube.