CES 2010: Show Floor Coverage (Part 2)
Our coverage of the first consumer electronics trade show of the year continues with highlights from the show floors, featuring brands like NVIDIA, Mitsubishi, Shuttle, D-Link, QNAP and Zotac among others.
3D Tech Zone Highlights
The organizers for CES 2010 allocated a section of the show floor for 3D technology and while the important TV brands had their own dedicated booths, there were some takers. Here were some of what we saw:
A big fish in a small pond, Mitsubishi was the clear brand name among the other vendors at CES 2010's designated 3D Tech Zone.
A trailer setup with almost complete darkness was where Mitsubishi showed off all its TVs, mostly 3D models along with a huge LaserVue, if you would know, is limited in retail and priced substantially.
Even with so many TV brands showing off 3D displays, there was still quite a queue at Mitsubishi's demo. Is there really such a demand for 3D in TV and movies? We even overheard two employees in the Mitsubishi trailer remarking that some attendees appeared to be repeat visitors.
The one and only company with a 3D digital compact camera, the Finepix Real 3D W1, Fujifilm had a smallish booth showing off this camera.
Even though the Fujifilm camera can take pictures in 3D, you can't display them easily on your typical PC monitor. Instead, special equipment like this 3D capable photo frame is required, limiting the adoption of such cameras.
Here is the 3D camera, the W1. While you can view the captured image in 3D on this camera, if you want the 3D image in print, you'll need to send it to a lab in Tokyo to get it printed. Estimated turnaround time is 10 days with a US$5 fee.
Hyundai may not have a presence in terms of televisions but it does displays too like this 24-inch full HD 3D LCD monitor (W240S) that has all the usual specs you expect from such a monitor.
A much larger 46-inch full HD 3D LCD monitor, the S465D has a 6ms response time, contrast ratio of 3000:1 and three HDMI inputs.
Along with the bigger companies doing the 3D TVs and cameras, there are the smaller ones like MicroVision here which does custom passive 3D glasses for other companies e.g. for marketing purposes.
Polaroid's Booth
Polaroid has had to reinvent itself with the advent of digital cameras. Its iconic analog cameras stopped production last year and the company now appears to be in the digital camera business, along with related imaging and display products.
When we arrived, we were initially surprised at the huge crowd gathering at the Polaroid booth.
And the reason for the crowd - Lady Gaga was at the booth to be unveiled as Polaroid's new creative director, essentially a brand ambassador and spokesperson for the company.
A full HD TV with integrated Blu-ray player from Polaroid, one of the new directions which the company has turned to in recent times.
CoolIT Systems' Booth
CoolIT Systems, a firm specializing in liquid cooling technology swept four Innovation awards at CES 2010 for its cooling products. We just had to check out its booth.
The Vantage CPU liquid cooling system features a wireless chassis monitoring and control system that automatically regulates the fan speeds, even those by third parties through a special fan node.
The Omni A.L.C has a universal plate solution that makes it reusable for different GPU models, something that's not possible for current products by adding a layer in-between that can be adjusted to fit the location of the GPU cores in different models.
Monster's Booth
For those who have keener senses than us, or a desire to aspire to the expensive things in life, there's always Monster willing to charge you the privilege.
Why a Ferrari? Beats us. Perhaps it's to show how fast Monster HDMI cables are capable of. Or that the company makes obscene amounts of money from selling them?
Monster has a cable for every occasion, often with the cables having higher rated specifications than the standard.
HP and Monster working together to provide you with the best available cables you'll need, or think you do.
QNAP's Booth
QNAP, known for its network storage device had the usual products on show at its booth.
The NMP1000 HD media streamer/player is not exactly new and while the performance and hardware is undoubted, our hands-on didn't leave us with too many positive feelings about its user interface.
The new products from QNAP are its refreshed range of NAS products, all of which now use Intel's latest dual-core Atoms (D510) for better performance and more importantly, lower power.
D-Link's Booth
D-Link had quite a healthy crowd at its booth, mostly attracted to one device, the Boxee Box.
And here is the Boxee Box and a glimpse of its rather polished interface. That's before we found out that Boxee is a software application that's free for download and is in essential a media organizer that draws on sources like the internet, your hard drive and your network drives to create an unified interface for your media.
The Boxee Box as we learnt, uses the new Tegra 2 inside, so playback of media should not be an issue, especially since the software supports subtitles and an extensive list of formats. Here you can see it has a SD card slot and a USB port.
The prototype D-Link DNS-213 is a single-bay 2.5-inch ShareCenter NAS. All you need to do is to plug it into your router and it should take care of everything else, like serving files to your other networked PCs and even over the internet. No pricing info yet nor firm availability.
Can a touchscreen make a router sexy? Well, th printer guys are doing it so why not? Personally, we aren't too sure but D-Link is taking this route with the D-Link Touch. Available by the end of Q2 for around US$360.
Shuttle's Booth
It was rather quiet at Shuttle's booth, which had its main attraction its updated multi-touch AIO. The fact that half the booth was dedicated to Shuttle's motherboard designs could be a reason too.
Now with Intel dual-core Atom D510 inside, the Version 2 of the Shuttle X50 All-in-one now comes with multi-touch too, though the other specs are quite standard and ordinary.
We also spotted a new barebones PC using the Intel H55 chipset. The SH55J2 supports both Core i3 and i5 processors with built-in graphics.
Garmin's Booth
Navigation specialist Garmin had its range of GPS navigation devices on show, along with its Garmin-Asus nuvi phones.
One year after CES 2009 where ecoRoute was first announced, how is the state of this software that helps to make you a greener (and likely save costs) driver? There's a new ecoRoute HD, which is available on the Nuvi 1260, 1370, 1390, 1490, and 1690, and has a wireless dongle that transfers crucial information like throttle position and air intake temperature to the nuvi device. The better for the software to calculate the best and green route. Or even teach you to drive in a greener fashion.
Here is the Gauge panel, which shows useful information about your vehicle. Having the vehicle in excellent condition is important to improving your mileage.
The highest end nuvi 1690 has Google Local Search integrated for the additional info like traffic, fuel prices and other real-time info from Garmin's nuLink! services. For those who need to stay connected at all time, the location enabled social networking on this device can be useful when organizing road trips among many people.
SuperTalent's Booth
SuperTalent had its mix of flash based products, from RAM to SSDs and USB drives.
This pocket sized SSD RAIDDrive from SuperTalent promises to be one of the fastest USB drives ever with its support for USB 3.0 and the built-in RAID accelerating things even further.
Some of SuperTalent's high speed memory modules for overclocking on display with their distinctive heat spreaders.
NVIDIA's Booth
NVIDIA's booth was crowded as usual, no thanks to its many 3D Vision demos. Graphics and GPU computing enthusiasts will be disappointed that the next-gen Fermi GPU is not available yet.
There's some candy for hardware fans in the form of the second-gen Tegra. The Tegra 2 features a faster ARM processor but retains its solid HD performance. No properly tested word on battery life however, and the demo units we saw were mostly tablets, not smartphones.
One of those Tegra 2 concept devices, an ASUS tablet that's in the prototype stage.
The Pegatron Neo is at least an usable netbook-like device running Android. It's extremely light and no word on availability besides it being slated for this year.
We had a Tegra 1 Mobinnova that died on us soon after reaching our labs. Here is apparently a newer version with Tegra 2 inside. The software appears to be a proprietary interface on top of Windows CE.
A 3D gaming demo with NVIDIA's 3D Surround Vision. It looks rather impressive and a fan favorite. Powering it inside however is the next-gen GPU, GF100, which presumably is Fermi or a variation of it.
Zotac's Booth
An Ion based mini-PC from Zotac, the MAG is a portable system packed with many ports and uses both dual and single core Atoms (230/330). It was released late last year.
A new mini-ITX board from Zotac using Intel's new H55 chipset, the H55-ITX WiFi has a single PCIe x16 slot, support for dual-channel DDR3 with 6 SATA ports and up to 14 USB 2.0 ports. In short, standard H55.
Meanwhile, this is a mini-DTX board for the new dual-core Intel Atom 510. The Zotac NM10-DTX has a HDMI output for 720p that seems to be unique to its design, but we'll wait to see if it can use that output properly.
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