The glitz of Las Vegas is combined with the frenetic urgency or companies looking to create buzz for their latest product or application. Launch parties, press conferences and impromptu meetups are combined with formal exhibitions on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center and various area hotels. Navigating the show is a challenge and that’s even before you get a glimpse of your first gadget.

During this year’s event, one colleague walked 50 miles in three days – according to his pedometer. Another writer amassed about four hours sleep in the course of five days in town. And I practically wore through my iPhone, digital camera and ballpoint pens amassing info on the cool stuff at the show.

While being onsite can certainly wear you out, the only real way to see, touch and operate the newest gadgets and consumer technologies is to be there.

FYI, CES is about 30% concepts, 60% actual products that are at market now or will be introduced in the next few months, and about 10% leftover crap that came out already but is being pimped anew to the 5000 journalists and bloggers onsite.

Enough background on the show. Let’s hop behind the wheel together and take a tech tour of this year’s CES.

Auto Tech

You’ve seen the commercials. Mary is locked out of her car and OnStar is able to unlock the vehicle from afar. OnStar has now partnered with Chevy to introduce a mobile app that allows Chevy Volt owners to manipulate their car from wherever they choose using just their smartphone.

They can unlock doors, adjust interior cabin temperature and even regulate the charging. Imagine being able to tell your car to charge at 1AM instead of 9PM just by touching your smartphone. Cool stuff.

Phones in cars can cause danger. To that end, ZoomSafer has a service for smartphones that limits texting or talking when you’re driving. If the GPS inside your phone is going more than 15MPH, certain functions are disabled.

There are ways to get around the settings in case you’re in the car with a colleague and they need to use the phone. But company spokes people say their product is a good way to keep teens off the phone when driving and the best way to keep all drivers from being distracted.

The coolest distraction I saw in the car arena was FLO TV from Audiovox. This is actual television programming in the car. It fits into car headrests and will soon be in cars right from the dealer.

It’s like flying on JetBlue, but in your car. No, it’s not available for installation on the driver’s side of the car.

Visually Amazing

The big news at the show was 3D Television. Everyone seemed to have one of these cool monitors – in sizes up to 60 inches or so – and hundreds of people could be seen on the show floor wearing odd glasses.

The technology is coming fast and Samsung’s partnership with Dreamworks and Technicolor will present consumers with 3D BluRay discs and lots more 3D entertainment in the home. Other manufacturers include Sony, Panasonic and others.

What viewers should know before they buy, is that 3D is still in its tech infancy. You still need the funky glasses and you still won’t feel like you did if you went to see Avatar in an IMAX cinema. But that’s coming. Maybe next year.

Special Zones

In the past couple of years, CES has started to feature elements that are taking the real world into account. For instance, they introduced a Kids at Play and a Senior’s Summit last year, and for 2010 they brought in a Mommy Tech area and a zone for Lifestyle Technology.

These areas focus on gadgets for specific audiences and sometimes that’s where you find some cool innovations. Keeping safety as a focus, a lot of organizations are trying to address safe listening levels.

AblePlanet, a company that used to develop hearing aid tech, has introduced headphones that allow users to balance sound across the ear cups. That means if you already have some hearing loss in one ear, you won’t blow out your other ear by turning the music way up in both ears.

With the sliding balance adjustment, wearers can choose to up the sound in one ear and keep the other sound low. Their new line of headphones also feature a modular capacity so you can use headphones with aftermarket boom microphones for gaming or making Skype calls.

TuneBug – a partner with NXT – introduced a device earlier this year that doesn’t even put earbuds or headphones on your ears to share sound. Their Vibe device takes sound from your MP3 player, iPhone or any device that has audio out and operates as a speaker when placed on any firm, sound-reflective surface.

The Vibe’s technology is now being incorporated into models called the Shake and the Quake. The former allows bicyclists, skateboarders and others to put the Shake on their helmet and experience a cone of sound around their head. This cone doesn’t block out ambient noise so auto traffic, screaming parents and other alerts can be heard without difficulty.

The Quake is going to be a model with a little more oomph – designed for the motoring enthusiast. So scooterists, jetskiers and others can get that same sound cone around their helmet while still remaining safer than if they had headphones on.

Other special zone tech devices include: medication reminder machines that dole out pills for forgetful patients; GPS personal locators for parents who want to avoid putting a microchip in their kids but still want to know their whereabouts; safe surfing technology to keep the Internet a little more manageable for youngsters; and GPS add-ons for your iTouch to make it useful for geocaching or finding yourself.

Other Fun

Aside from the tech zones, car tech and traditional MobileMag fare, there were certainly the left-fielders of CES. These are devices that make you smirk a little, smile a lot and sometimes shake your head. A quick list includes:

The AR Drone – a remote-controlled quadracopter that is maneuvered using your iPhone

Osmosis chargers from PowerMat, Duracell and CaseMate

Victorinox Swiss Army knives with biometric fingerprint scanners on the flash drive

Customizable headphones

OtterBox durable iPhone, BlackBerry and smartphone protection

Wristbands that hold your smartphone or iPod

and so much more.

To get the real feel for CES, you should really go visit the event yourself. But if that’s not possible, stay tuned here throughout the year for more tech news on the gadgets we think are cool. Then watch closely as we cover national and international tech shows – where we’ll bring you fascinating recaps of all the tech you may have never thought of.

The post CES 2010 Wrapup: Sights, Sounds and Reflections appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

When Cowon’s W2 info was leaked last November from the Bluetooth certification page we basically learnt all we needed to know, except for; what it looked like. The company has just thrown up a teaser page for the product.

The W2 shows as clean and sophisticated, with a brushed metal frame, two sleek buttons on either side of the screen and three tiny LED status lights at the top. Cowon’s W2 is a MID device, powered by an Intel Atom processor, which might have a few snags running Windows 7.  It’s a bit chunky, with a wide bezel and a more depth than anticipated, but we do expect it to be comfortable once we get it in our hands.

They haven’t provided the full specs yet, but here’s a few we do know;

W2 Features

• 4.8″ Touchscreen LCD (1024 x 600 resolution) screen
• Intel Atom 1.33GHZ CPU
• Windows 7
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Speakers all built-in
• USB/USB-mini, Ethernet Port/Monitor Out – via cable
• Component/Composite Out – via cable

Not really much to go on so far. Updates will follow when we get them.

Source:  daprevie

The post Cowon W2 REVEALED; Touchscreen, Windows 7 and chunky appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The device is about the size of a netbook; it’s all metal and it actually felt quite heavy in our hand. Both screens are 10 inch multitouch displays that interact the way two monitors would on a dual-display setup. It ran a little sloppy; it’s obviously running some beta software, but the digital keyboard was easy to pull up and had a haptic-like feedback when typing on the bottom screen. For a very early build it is quite impressive. MSI actually plans to bring it to market within the year.

Source Engadget

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Instead of forcing you into an unnecessarily bulky case, Powermat is now offering swappable batteries. You simply pull out the OEM battery from your chosen device and switch it for one of the Powermat ones. From there, you can place your phone (or whatever) onto the mat and it’ll charge.

This obviously won’t work with the iPhone and iPod, since they don’t have user-swappable batteries, but it should work for most other devices. Powermat says that the batteries will be made available for HTC, BlackBerry, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson phones.

The receiver cases are still going to kick around, but they’ll be changed for silicone version instead. The Powermat chargers themselves will be offered as Powermat 1X, Powermat 2X, and Powermat 3X, corresponding to the number of charging spots each one has. There’s also a Powermat 3X Netbook that’ll charge a netbook and two other gadgets.

Source: Gizmodo

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They weren’t quite as forthcoming with the exact details regarding each individual handset, but AT&T did provide more general information about what to expect. More specifically, we can expect a few exclusive Android smartphones.

The expectation is that one of these will be a variant of the Dell Mini 3i, as well as an Android phone from HTC and a Motorola MOTOBLUR handset. The Moto will likely be similar to the Droid that is already being offered through Verizon, possibly nullifying those attacks that the carriers have been exchanging.

In like manner, Sprint is currently the only US carrier that does the webOS thing with Palm, but that is changing too. AT&T says that webOS is joining their fold too, so we may be seeing US-friendly GSM versions of the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi. Then again, we could be seeing an exclusive AT&T Palm smartphone too.

Just as it does with Apple’s App Store, AT&T fully intends to support Android market and the Palm webOS store for all of your random application needs.

Source: Mobileburn

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On the surface, you may think that the Ear Vibe is little more than another stereo headset, but it hides a skull-rattling difference. Apparently, this is the first headset “that vibrates to the beat of your music.” Yup, it has an extra bump for your thump.

I always thought that speakers were essentially vibrating to produce their sound in the first place, but the Technocel Ear Vibe goes further by literally vibrating itself “when your tunes hit the low frequency bass.” There’s also a microphone for hands-free voice calls.

Expect the Technocel Ear Vibe to sell for $29.99 when it hits retailers on January 15.

Source: Technocel

The post Technocel Ear Vibe Stereo Headset Vibrates Too appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

I didn’t touch down in Las Vegas until after Unveiled was over, but I did catch up with one of the attendees to ask him about this product. Apparently, a company called Parrot has developed this AR Drone with the AR standing for Augmented Reality.

There’s a camera mounted to the front of the AR Drone and this feed is streamed over to your iPhone or iPod touch. Yes, you can use your cell phone to control it and you get a first-person view. What’s even cooler is that you can have an augmented reality dogfight with another AR Drone.

You’ll see your opponent for real through the camera, but you can shoot a virtual missile at him too. There is no physical projectile shot, but if your opponent is “hit” with the virtual one, it takes damage and dips down a little. Cool stuff!

Then again, I have a burning suspicion that the peeping Toms in the audience can come up with a different application for the AR Drone. I’ll leave that up to your imagination.

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