Night before last was the annual CES Unveiled, a press-only party where journalists got a preview of the best of the upcoming products featured in the show as well as the winners of the Innovations 2005. The room was a bit small, but there were plenty of interesting finds, if you could squeeze past the huge crowd.
AMD was showing off the latest laptops powered by their AMD Mobile Athlon 64 Processor. They had a Sharp Actius AL27 running the AMD 64 2700+, with a 15″ XGA screen, and a 60GB hard drive, Dual Format DVDRW, USB 2.0 ports and Firewire, and hecka other stuff, all in a small laptop that weighs just 6.5lbs. It looked a lot like an Apple iBook, which is probably why the booth babes liked it the best out of the bunch.
For the guys, they displayed the latest Ferrari notebook by Acer, also featuring the AMD 64. Race-inspired, it features the sleek carbon fiber look and same red paint and badge featured on the coolest car brand we’ll all never get to drive.
Nice to see these 64-bit processors hitting the market, but it’ll be nicer once Microsoft starts shipping the 64-bit version of their Windows OS to take advantage of all the extra power.
Top PC Gamer Johnathan ‘Fatal1ty’ Wendel teamed up with ABIT Computer Corp. to design his own line of gaming hardware. I was skeptical of the idea about teaming up a gamer and a motherboard manufacturer and asked him how much input he actually had over the engineers in designing his own line. Turns out Johnathan isn’t into just sticking his name on a product. He was very down to earth and said ABIT flew him out to Taiwan, where he met with the engineers, looked at their initial ideas, killed a few of their ‘mistakes’ and even added some things that they hadn’t thought of.
At $250 retail, these boards aren’t the cheapest, but they certainly provide a lot of bang for the buck, even if you’re not a professional gamer. He suggested losing the on-board sound, choosing to go with an included professional sound card because he felt on-board audio suffers from feedback and poor quality audio that off-board sound cards solve. He also suggested dual Gigabit LAN ports on the board, as well as extra on-board fans and some pretty neat cooling innovations. Already the easiest over-clockable Intel motherboard, I can’t wait to see what he does with the next generation ABIT boards coming out later this year. With the built-in LEDs (to placate the modding crowd), it seemed a bit bling-bling for me, but with solid performance and damned good looks, it’s definately something to look at if you’re planning a PC build.
A pretty cool idea for dog lovers is the GlobalPetFinder, a GPS location collar for fido. Last year, I saw one of these for kids, but this seems like the best utilization of the idea. The collar is water resistant, and works in North America and Europe. You set a boundary area that they can roam within and if they escape that boundary, the device alerts you and sends constant alerts to a two-way wireless device of your choice (PC, Cellphone, PDA, etc.). It’s a very cool idea. At $13/month, it’s not cheap, but very worth it for people who have ever lost a pet before.
Probably the goofiest thing we saw was the HotSeat Solo, a self-proclaimed gaming ‘chassis’ that looked like Frankenstein decided to throw together a gaming lounge chair from PVC pipe (but it’s really made of steel), a Recarro racing seat, and some 5.1 surround sound speakers. At $399, I think it’s way over-priced and under-engineered. Putting a ‘babe’ in a bikini pretending to play videogames while sitting in it doesn’t exactly convince me that it’s comfortable, but then again, that’s my opinion.
