CES 2010 DAY 2: A Day of mobile phones, Cameras, E-book readers and a Green World
CES 2010 is going on in full swing at the beautiful location of Las Vegas, Nevada in USA. Although, Day 2 was not quite as thrilling as the opening day, it still had its share of announcements and product demonstrations.
HTC Smart finally saw light after months of speculation. The most interesting fact about this phone is that it does not run any of the traditional operating system –Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android. Rather, it runs on BREW MP-Based interface. It calls itself a smart phone and provides most of the features, at a fractional price. It has a 2.8 inch touch screen, 3 MP camera with flash, 3.5 mm jack and a MicroSD card slot. Palm also announced that it would be releasing upgraded version of its WebOS phones- The Palm Pre and Palm Pixi , and has quite cleverly added just a “Plus” at the end of the two. The Pre Plus is almost like its predecessor look wise except for the removal of the hard button for closing applications. We guess that closing applications on it will be like on Pixi , tapping the gesture bar will close the application. The Pre Plus will also get a 16GB memory ( Double than the last one) as the number of application for WebOS rise. The Pixi claimed to be the slimmest touch screen QWERTY keypad phone in the world, till the Pixi Plus beat it. The Pixi Plus finally has Wi-Fi support. Palm also announced Video recording to Pre and Pixi through a firmware update. The user will not be required to install a new hardware like the iPhone 3GS. Intel also displayed the first smart phone based on its Moorestown platform for mobile devices. CEO Paul Otellini showed GW990, which will be made by LG electronics and will run on Moorestown- and Intel Atom based processor. It has a 5 inch screen which supports the playback of 720p HD video. It supports multi touch on the Linux based Moblin OS. It is capable of multi tasking draws up to 50 percent less power in the idle state.
Day 2 again saw importance being given to cameras with Panasonic launching six new Lumix cameras. The models are very sleek and pack high on Mega pixels and performance. Samsung also unveiled its CL80 OLED touch screen camera. It has 14.2 Mega Pixel resolution, Wi-Fi connectivity and 3.7 inch QVGA AMOLED touch screen. Sony also launched the DSC-HX5V range of pocket cameras. In a first, Sony has managed to pack 1080i Video recording capabilities in a pocket camera. It boasts of 10x zoom and GPS. It also makes use of the newest connectivity feature in the camera market-TransferJet. It allows user to transfer data by bringing two cameras close to each other.
MSI also launched its much hyped dual screen notebook which the company likes to call an “E-book reader.” It runs on Intel’s Atom-Z series processor on Menlow MID Platform, which enables it to get the thin and light design. Both screens are 10-inch capacitive and the device has Windows 7 Home Premium. It uses an SSD for storage. Spring also demonstrated its E-book reader running on Android platform. Interestingly, it has a second, smaller colored screen for web access. It comes with a steep price tag of $399. Plastic Logic also announced its QUE proReader calling it not just an E-book reader but as ‘Mobile Professionals’. It has a screen dimension of 8.5x11inch is is 0.33 mm thin. But the looks come with an unreal price tag of $650.
Day 2 also saw the launch of something which interested people very much. It’s, surprisingly, not any hardware but a peculiar piece of software. The Iomega vClone is a software which clones your entire PC to an external storage device. When you plug the drive in any other computer, you load your PC in that computer. Being synchronized, the changes you make in the secondary computer will be applied when you run it on the primary computer. The only thing that can deter this technology for becemoing a revolution is the fact that it is only compatible with Iomega Hard Drives.
Although the Copenhagen climate meet didn’t do anything to control environment degradation, our favorite companies look all set to embrace environment-friendly and energy-efficient devices. This year has a showed us quite some “Green products” like the Sony Ericsson Hazel phone, Dell OLED laptops, the next generation of Tegra processor, that has 8 independent processors and delivers a 10% faster performance than a smart phone and consumes 20% less energy than a PC, among many others. In fact, this CES has a dedicated Sustainable Planet Area which houses more than 30 exhibitors. This area provides a chance for exhibitors to display world-changing technologies which benefit the environment in any way. This environment-centric approach may be partially due to a survey conducted by Samsung, which says that 45 percent consumers are more likely to buy products from energy efficient companies(Though 60% of them said that it was due to lesser strain on their wallets and had nothing to do with environment concern). Direct Energy launched a touch screen product called Home Energy Master, which has a dashboard that tells which appliances are using electricity, when and how much is it costing them. It is also programmable to allow user to switch off appliances during peak times, and has support for internet access for social networking, movies and music. The device will be tested late this year, and promises consumers to bring down their monthly bill by 25%.
As the event ends on January 10, we expect a big bang on the last day.