Dave Weinstein, Gizmodo’s Special Correspondent for the Consumer Electronics Show, contributes an excellent report about the best gadgets he saw there:
LAS VEGAS — As each year ends there’s a small section of our populace that starts to get really excited about upcoming events. Is it the coming of the new year that’s got them smiling like school children on the way to a candy store, or is it the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that’s held at the beginning of each January? CES usually heralds the arrival of new home entertainment gear, but in recent years, this has expanded to all sorts of home and portable technology products, including flat panel televisions, wireless networking, personal video recorders (PVR), home theater PCs (HTPC), and a plethora of handheld devices. This year’s CES didn’t disappoint, in addition to a huge amount of new breakthrough products, there were glimpses of the components that will be showing up as part of next years gadgets as well. Here’s a few of the interesting product and technology areas that were shown this year.
Flat Panel Television
(From left to right: LG’s 52″ 1920×1080 HD, Samsung’s 54″ 1920×1080 LCD, and LCD Sharp’s 37″ 1280×720 HD LCD)
The competition is heating up as just about every company that makes TVs is posturing to make the transition from CRT based products to plasma and LCD ones. Interestingly enough, although 2002 was a breakthrough year for Plasma displays, with breakthroughs in both quality and price, there wasn’t any new Plasma technology announcements at CES. There was however a flurry of new activity in the large LCD area. Both LG/Philips and Samsung showed prototype full resolution HDTV displays in the over 50″ category, and Sharp showed 37″ high resolution LCD TV that’s shipping now. It seems that LG is likely to win the race to release a full resolution HDTV (1920×1080) with product scheduled to ship 2004Q1, with Samsung stating that they are considerably more than a year away from bringing their 54″ LCD display to market.
(Left: Sanyo’s 15″ OLED prototype. Right: Toshiba’s 57″ 1920×1080 LCoS Rear Projection TV)
In addition to the LCD displays shown at CES, there were additional technologies displayed. Sanyo demonstrated a 15″ Organic Light Emitting Diode Display (OLED) as well as a fairly high resolution 2″ OLED display to be used in mobile phone and portable mpeg players. OLED technology is a promising future technology that may someday replace LCD and plasma technology as the best choice for large flat panel displays. Don’t hold your breath waiting, it’s not likely that there will be a 40+ inch OLED display until 2007-8 or later.
Another interesting TV was Toshiba’s 57″ 1920×1080 LCoS rear projection unit. Toshiba chose to use liquid crystal on silicon technology to produce a high resolution display at a relatively reasonable price (MSRP $8999, with street prices around $8000). LCoS differs from normal LCD displays in that instead of having the liquid crystal shutters deposited on glass, it’s deposited directly on a silicon wafer (which acts as a mirror), so instead of light being shined through a traditional LCD panel, it’s reflected off the LCoS one. LCoS benefits are that it allows for smaller pixel sizes (hence higher resolution) and the electronics that control each pixel are under the silicon mirror layer (instead of along side the pixel cell), which virtually eliminates the screen door effect that is common to LCD front and rear projectors. Toshiba’s 57HLX82 is available now.
Want a HDTV PVR? Look to the sky…
Both DirectTV and Dish Network announced combination PVR/Satellite Receivers at CES this year. Both companies are trying to get a jump on Digital Cable TV providers that will start shipping new Scientific-Atlanta boxes powered by Digeo’s Moxi software that they acquired last year.
Of these products the Dish PVR 921 looks the most promising, with an expected release date of 2003Q2, the software development team on site at CES was confident that they’d meet their expected delivery date of late June or early July. The 921 sports dual tuners as well support of recording OTA HDTV content (the unit is fully capable of recording 2 satellite stations and an OTA HDTV station simultaneously.) The unit demonstrated included advanced software for conflict resolution, a 14 day electronic program guide (EPG) and support of direct connections to high resolution displays via a DVI-D connection. The unit contains a 250GB hard drive that can hold approximately 40 hours of HD content or 250 hours of SD content. In cursory tests, the EPG responded more quickly than any other that I’ve seen (by at least a factor of 2) and the UI was consistent with previous recorders manufactured by the company. The price for the unit has not yet been set, but should be in the $1000+ range. Apparently I wasn’t the only one impressed, the Dish PVR 921 won a “Best of CES” award.
With a soft shipping date that will be sometime near the end of the year, the DirectTV HD-TiVo is less impressive than it’s Dish counterpart. Although the unit has TiVo’s wonderful user interface, and adaptive recording capabilities, it only sports one satellite tuner, and on OTA HDTV tuner. To make matters worse, even though there are two tuners, only one may be used at a time (presumably to keep the UI simple and consistent) which makes it impossible to watch one show while recording another or to record two shows simultaneously (both features that are part of the current standard definition Direct-TiVo). TiVo has yet decide the size of the internal hard drive, or any pricing targets, which is expected for a device that isn’t slated to ship for nearly a year.
So what happened to Moxi? They hit the scene at the 2002 CES with the award winning Media Center product that looked poised to redefine the PVR and set top box markets. Well, the company was acquired by Paul Allen’s Digeo, and has refocused the Moxi technology on the Digital Cable space. The company has announced a deal with Scientific-Atlantia to build Media Center boxes that connect directly to cable TV systems, so don’t expect to see them back in the Satellite-PVR business until long after their cable products have shipped. Chalk it off as another casualty of the busted tech bubble.
Throw away those old unnetworked PDAs, there’s a whole new breed coming.
(From left to right: B-Squared’s Power Handheld, Sharp’s Zaurus C-700, Samsung’s i500 Palm Phone, and Samsung’s i700 Pocket PC phone)
In the PDA arena, Samsung stole the show with two new hybrid phone/PDA devices that combined the best features of mobile phones with the features of a Palm or Pocket PC based PDA. The Samsung i500 Palm CDMA phone is a 66MHz Dragonball based Palm device that runs Palm OS version 4.1. The interesting part of combining these two types of devices is that the device can act as a fully network connected PDA that exploits Verizon’s new 1xRTT data services. This means that you can use your phone to browse real (not WAP) web pages, check e-mail or run any other of hundreds of network capable Palm applications and games, all at a full 144kbps. This is quite a step up from last generations speeds of 9.6kbps (which is the maximum data speed for IS95B). Samsung’s other new device, the i700, is Pocket PC with integrated camera and CDMA phone. Microsoft as two versions of software for PDA/phone combos, the first is the Pocket PC Phone edition (which is what the i700 uses), which is meant for devices that are more PDA than phone. The second is SmartPhone 2002, or SMP2002 (which the upcoming i600 will use), which is meant for devices that are more phone than PDA. Expect Samsung’s i600 SMP phone to be officially announced at CTIA in March, but you can get a sneak peak of the device (which is similar in appearance to the i500) here.
Although HP showed their newest iPaq device (the h5455 and the h1910), they were both eclipsed by two innovative PDAs that featured high resolution 640×480 displays and keyboards in the same size package as the now venerable iPaq form. The first is a reference platform built by the folks at B Squared. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the company, they’re the actual talent behind Windows CE. Their Power Handheld Reference Design features a 640×480 display SD card IO (SDIO), and a fully retractable QWERTY keyboard. Late in 2002 Sharp shipped their C-700 Zaurus in Japan, but CES marks the first look at the device with an English language version of the OS and UI. Sharp uses a modified clamshell design with a screen that can be flipped around so that the display covers the keyboard and the device looks like a standard keyboard-less PDA. Both the B Squared and the Sharp devices allow wireless networking using SDIO and Compact Flash 802.11b cards (respectively) and included full browser, e-mail and synchronization software. Too bad we can’t go out an buy them now!
In addition to these products, Sony also announce their newest Clie device, the NZ90, and revealed a few more details about the Sony-Ericsson P800 smart phone. Sony’s new NZ90 Clie is a bit thicker than it’s predecessor, the NX70, but features a few extra bells and whistles to make up for it’s added bulk. The two major new feature of the NZ90 are a 2M pixel (1600×1200) digital camera, and a new removable battery. This is the highest resolution camera ever integrated into a PDA, so it will be interesting to see how well the device fairs versus the slimmer, and less expensive, NX70 Clie. The best news from Sony on the PDA front at CES was the acknowledgment that their P800 smart phone will finally ship in the US through AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile by March 2003. Additionally the company stated that there will be CDMA versions for SprintPCS and Verizon ready for Christmas 2003. It seems that Sony-Ericsson thinks that the CDMA version of the P800 would make a great stocking stuffer, I have to admit that I agree. Even with the large selection of options I think that the P800 looks like the best combination phone/PDA device that we’ve seen to date. Expect that the GSM version will be available from AT&T and T-Mobile for under $600 with service activation of credit.
Other interesting technologies and oddities
(From left to right: eMink’s Internet PayPhone, the MouseRug Mouse Pad, La Crosse’s Home Weather Station)
In addition to the hard technology advances that always arrive at a CES show, there’s always a few novel gadgets that seem to show us as well. eMink displayed there new Internet PayPhone a novel combination of a touch screen browser and a traditional payphone. If you need a new mousepad, the MouseRug might be for you, the company has copied classic rug designs from a variety of sources (including the Library of Congress) to create a simulated woven rug for you to mouse over. And finally the folks at La Crosse Technology have recently released a new line of personal wireless weather stations. For about $80 you can purchase the WS-7078UF Wireless Forecast Station which gets you a clock with wireless connection to the national atomic time standard. indoor and outdoor temperature, and a personal weather prediction for your home and surrounding area.
