ces

Ultraportable laptops are usually pretty sharp-looking, but dressing one up in a leather-covered chassis is even better. Taiwanese PC maker Asus has had leather laptops for a couple of years now, but the latest version, called the U2E, packs in plenty of high-end computing features on top of the slick looks.

This 11-inch notebook weighs about 2 pounds and features a 32GB solid state drive, which helps with weight and heat, as well as power consumption. The LED backlit display also consumes less power and allows the screen to be thinner than traditional LCD screens.

The built-in Webcam offers an … Read more

LG's booth at CES is gigantic, it just goes on and on including every CE gadget under the sun. It's classily decked out with designer furniture and glossy white and black plastic and glass everywhere (kind of like their products actually). They are definitely using design as their ticket into the big leagues (and presumably bigger margins), a great example of using design to pull up a brand.

This is small-d design though, for the most part - very nicely executed styling and materials and finishes, but broadly speaking they are styling treatments of existing form-factors, not real … Read more

Wandering the CES floor among the audio exhibits, with no particular destination in mind, several things caught my eye.

Radiient cofounder Jano Banks, who helped invent HDMI, demonstrated the company's Roomcaster wireless speaker technology. Most such speakers use the 2.4gHz band, which is subject to interference from household devices like cordless phones and microwave ovens. Roomcaster uses ultra wideband (UWB), which operates over a broad spectrum and is less subject to interference. The demonstration featured an HDMI video connection and Roomcaster-enabled wireless speakers, and the sound was clear with no discernable latency against the picture. So far, Roomcaster'… Read more

If you have a long memory, you might remember the Invisio Q7 bone conduction Bluetooth headset that was announced almost two years ago. Well, it's January of 2008, and after two long years, the Q7 is finally a reality. Invisio had previously focused on the professional headset market for the military and emergency services, and the Q7 is one of its first few consumer-focused headsets designed for extreme environments. Of course, its obvious competitor is the Aliph Jawbone, which doesn't quite have the bone conduction technology of the Q7. The Invisio Q7 promises real bone conduction without the … Read more

It may have taken them a little while, but Samsung has added optical images stabilization to its upscale NV line of compact cameras. As has become a bit of a trend, they are offering it in conjunction with digital image stabilization, which boosts ISO to help keep shutter speeds fast in an attempt to minimize blur due to subject movement, while the optical IS does its best to counteract blur to due to your shaky hands. Samsung has dubbed this combination Dual Image Stabilization and includes it in all of its new NV models, except the NV4, this year. All … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Acer and Gateway don't have a whole lot of news here at CES--aside from a few new gaming desktops and a laptop--but it is new that they are here as one. Their combined logos were everywhere in their displays.

The transition since Acer's purchase of Gateway late last year for $710 million is nearly complete, the company says. The same person--Rudi Schmidleithner--now runs both Gateway and Acer's American business unit.

While Acer declined to give many details about the coming year, it did hint that it's going to be a busy one. While … Read more

The DJ is getting off easy these days. As more DJs turn in their turntables and record crates for laptops and external hard drives, the entry point for aspiring DJs has become both more attainable and more portable. Swedish start-up Tonium intends to shrink the digital DJ rig even further with a handheld product called Pacemaker.

At its heart, the Pacemaker is an MP3 player with 120GB of storage, USB 2.0 connectivity, and both headphone and line-out connections. What makes the Pacemaker unique is a set of touch pad controls that allow professional DJ techniques such as crossfading, filtering, … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Why do the organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TVs from Sony measure only 11 inches across? Because large OLEDs are really tough to make.

While praising the OLED format during a press conference here with a few reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday morning, Sony executives acknowledged that producing large OLED screens in large quantities remains a work in progress. OLEDs now are mostly used in cell phones, which have small screens.

"The difficult challenge with the larger screen sizes is improving the yields. There are a lot of complications, many more than with LCD," said … Read more

They're not the highest tech at the show, nor are they the easiest to find--I tripped over a couple in the furthest reaches of the exhibits--but I find myself intrigued by a couple of handheld digital microscopes I encountered while killing time before a meeting. These gadgets connect to your system via USB and allow you to capture megazoomed (albeit not terribly high-resolution) closeups of life's minutiae.

The first, from well-known Celestron, seems like it'd be a great gift for the child prodigies in your life. Reasonably priced at $139.95, the Handheld Digital Microscope can record … Read more