CES Day One

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Written by: Ian Markowitz

Day one of CES has proved to be quite an exhausting one as I tried to cover as much ground as possible and still haven’t seen many of the big players at the show such as Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, IBM, Intel, and others. My aim is to do separate pieces on the noteworthy products that I’ve run into at CES, regardless of how brief their posts are. I spent a majority of today focusing on the audio arena and listened in to some of the new offering several new companies are bringing into the field, and then dabbing in and out of other technology areas at CES.

My first stop of the day was with the company Victorinox, the maker of the world famous swiss-army knives. They had a few new lines of products, but the most useful to students and those in the business is their new/improved line of Presentation Master USB Flash Drive/Swiss Army Knive combos. The drives come in sizes up to 32GB and the USB drives detach from the “swiss army frame” which has a bluetooth remote for controlling Powerpoint Presentations. On top of that the USB flash drives feature a biometric fingerprint reader to secure the data on the flash drive as well as a laser pointer as the true multi-purpose presentation tool.

I also stopped by the DTS booth, which is a digital technology company which focuses on high-tech audio entertainment. They were demoing their codec for 7.1 sound on a Blu-ray setup by showing clips from Chronicles of Narnia and a music video from country group Gloriana, both were quite impressive, with crisp sound and different sounds directed out of certain speakers, but that was the aim of the booth. However, I will say the experience of listening to music through 7 speakers was quite impressive and the quality was pristine. The problem is that very few people tend to listen to music anywhere out of 7 channels.

Taser had an interesting booth where they unveiled a new service entitled “Protector” which will have almost every child and teenager on edge with paranoia, but I’ll be sure to give that service its own dedicated post later. They were also offering demos of their Law Enforcement X3 Taser, which will allow officers to taser 3 different suspects simultaneously, as well as their consumer model the C2. Both models were relatively effortless (and kind of fun) to fire, but neither are models I have any desire to be on the receiving end of.

A new company which I ran into at CES was a company called Quirky.com. What quirky does, is it allows inventors with ideas to give their products a shot at the marketplace. Inventors come to the website, pay $99 and have their idea pitched to the website community. If their ideas is picked as the best product of the available choices, then they get to see their product get patented and be manufactured. Otherwise, they receive analytics about who liked the product and who didn’t so if they want to go it on their own, they have analytics on who the product should be marketed to.

Visual Land is a company I hadn’t heard of before, but they manufacture MP3 players, netbooks, and other electronics. What caught my eye though was their netbook called the V-net. While barebones might be an understatement, at a price point of $150, I was pretty impressed. It runs on 64MB internal RAM and 4GB of flash storage, and runs Windows CE, which is not impressive by any stretch but its size and price caught my eye. They have a newer model coming out in the next few months running the android OS at around the same price point.

My reigning favorite headphone company Sennheiser announced a whole bunch of new products at CES this year, as well as a partnership with Adidas. Sennheiser and Adidas teamed up to create a new line of sports headphones which were designed with athletes in mind, including the CX680 earbuds which has “earfins” which aim to keep the headphones in your ear while running. They were kind enough to provide me with a demo pair so I’ll be sure to put them through the paces and update here soon. They also announced a new line of maroonish/red headphones specifically designed for women with a smaller ear-canal in mind as well as a unique paint job on every pair headphones so that no two headphones are alike.

Audio-technica unveiled a few new headphones which they added to their line, but most of them focused on active noise cancelling headphones. For reference, active noise cancelling is usually battery powered headphones which filter out outside background noise. One of them was the ANC7b which won the CES Design and Engineering award. The other major announcement was the unveiling of the ANC25 headphones which are the least expensive noise cancelling headphones which Audio-technica offers, retailing at $99.95.

Skullcandy pulled out all the stops for their booth, having a racecar with a racing game projected on the windshield as well as slot car races for the attendees. But more importantly were the two different headphones they were showing off at CES. One was the kick-off of a new direction for design inspiration for Skullcandy which was the unveiling of the Aviator headphones. Modeled after the Aviator sunglasses they have polycarbonate ends, shiny metalic finish, as well as headphones shaped similar to the lenses of Aviator sunglasses. Supposedly, this is a new direction for Skullcandy as they plan to model a new line of headphones after different types of optics, they will be released in the Spring and have an MSRP of $150. The other major product they unveiled were new headphones designed after a collaboration with Beastie Boys DJ Mix Master Mike. While these are geared to DJs, one of the coolest features is that when a DJ is listening to a single ear cup, a switch is flipped in the headphones to switch from stereo playback to mono playback so that if certain parts of a song are only played on one channel, the DJ can hear both when he’s trying to cue up the song. They’ll also be available in the Spring for around $250.

Lastly, there was a guy hanging out by the press room wearing what he called a video name tag. It uses an OLED screen to show movies on a magnet video screen which you can wear anywhere. As the picture below shows the colors are vivid and you can upload any video of your choice to the device, it retails for just under $200.