Erik D. Jones’s Blog

We managed to cover the Concourse, North Hall and Central Hall.  Tomorrow we still have South Halls 1,2,3 and 4 to go.  So lots of ground to cover!  There was a really neat portable hard drive enclosure which won an innovation award at the show.  It has a built in ASIC chip that encrypts the data as it’s being read using either AES-128 or AES-256 encryption.  The key is stored on a smart card which can be removed from the device.  The hard drive itself is any standard 2.5″ SATA drive.  This was one of the most innovative and slick products I’ve seen.  As long as one stores the smart card away from the drive, the data is secure.  Since the data is read/written encrypted, the drive can even be removed from the enclosure and the data is still protected.

While everyone had 3D television technology to show off, Samsung had one of the only prototypes that we saw that didn’t require any polarized glasses.  The image did appear in 3D but text was difficult to read and as my head moved parallel to the surface of the TV only certain sectors were in focus correctly.  Other sections of the display had a distorted and out-of-phase appearance.  Yet I believe this was the most innovative 3D technology on display.  3D television still requires active polarized glasses and special content–not revolutionary folks!

Canon didn’t have anything particularly new and exciting except a new “Mr. Wizard” like science display to show off their high definition video equipment.  Sony had a few new products I didn’t see last year including the new “W” series ultra-thin netbook with 1024×768 resolution and 7 hour battery (with the extended and thicker battery) and a brushed metalic packaging.  Sony also introduced its “Bloggie HD Camera”–a small portable camera likely targeted at the tens of thousands of regular video bloggers on the Internet.  The packaging was slick and the video quality looked really great.  If I were buying a camera to capture those familial moments, I’d definitely consider this camera for that purpose.

Samsung had out done itself at this year’s show with an amazing display of LCD displays.  Besides 3D television, their ultra thin (less than 1/4″) AMOLED televisions were extremely impressive.  I suspect that televisions like this will need to turn to using wireless base stations for their inputs as the sets themselves are thinner than a standard HDMI or RCA connector fitting!  No sense building an ultra thin television if you have to bolt on a fat appendage just to get your inputs feeds to it, right?

There were lots of toy like gadgets as there always are, particularly with the Asian gadget manufacturers.  I think my favorite so far this year was the replica Star Trek Enterprise with a built in turntable on the saucer section (for those of you who don’t know what a turntable is… well.. yeah..)

Parrot Inc won an innovation award for the Parrot AR Drone–a four propeller UAV with a camera on top.  The novelty is the device is controlled from an iPhone application that doubles as an interactive game.  The application receives the video feed from the flying drone and overlays targets that you shoot at from the iPhone game.  I haven’t seen this one up close and personal, but will get to that tomorrow in the South Hall.

Another big theme at this year’s show is induction power technology.  If you own a SonicCare toothbrush made in the last 4 years you already benefit from this.  This uses Faraday’s Law whereby an electric current can be generated at right angles to a changing magnetic field.  Anyway..Techy stuff aside, PowerMat’s booth increased 4x in size this year and there were many smaller competitors sprinkled throughout the Tech Zone.  Most of them are producing replacement battery cases (PowerMat) and/or “skin” cases to protect and wrap around your device.  These cases or replacement backs then make contact with the battery and/or charging points on your device and have built in magnetic coils designed to work with the induction “mats”.  This type of stuff is not revolutionary, but is long overdue for personal electronics.  It’s nice to see that the popularity, interest and commercialism is improving as is the packaging and technology.  I will be looking for devices like this for my electronics over the coming years.

Netbooks are nothing new, but this is the first time I saw a netbook made by Kohjinsha that had fold out dual screens!  I wasn’t allowed to touch it to see how it folded, but it looked pretty neat.  This was on display in the Microsoft booth along with dozens of other devices running the starter edition of Windows 7.

With all the advances in display technology, there were significant innovations in mounting technology.  Sanus, a leading audio/video wall mount manufacturer, and others have started a trend with auto-articulating mounts.  These mounts are equiped with small servos to tilt or even fully articulate your LCD television into any position you want at the touch of a remote!

South Hall will have a lot of innovative computer technology so there will be a lot more to report tomorrow regarding netbooks and the like.  Overall the tablet explosion I was predicting was fairly benign.  So far the only tablet I saw was the hybrid netbook/ebook reader made by Casio.  Ebook readers are still very uninteresting to me until color becomes pervasive.

Pictures will be posted at the end of the show on Sunday!