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CES 2007

January 15th, 2007

Another year begins and to kick it off, I usually start out by attending the Consumer Electronics Show. Here’s a look at what the expect this year in tech.

Audio

Last year introduced its True HD sound and this year it was DTS’s turn to release their HD surround sound, . While Dolby offers one standard for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, DTS offers a higher bitrate for Blu-ray Discs.

Digital Imaging

Since personal digital photos and movies have become a big market the last few years, there are more and more products available in this area.

has an impressive digital picture frame that will soon become a normal item in people’s homes. Offered in four different models, the full-featured version has a 10-inch diagonal screen with a 16×9 resolution of 800×480. It includes built in memory of 128MB but has inputs for other memory cards and USB devices. The best part is wireless capabilities that allow you to display pictures and play movies from your computer or your Kodak Online Gallery (if you have one). It even comes with a remote for navigation instead of placing any buttons on the frame itself.

For movies, consumers can now afford to go HD with camcorders like the latest Handycam from Sony. It retails at about $1400 and is packed with features. It even doubles nicely as a digital camera at a decent 4.6 megapixels in the 16×9 format.

A great new product is LED backlit monitors. I took a look at the latest SyncMaster from Samsung and was quite impressed at the clarity and brightness of the image. This will no doubt become the new standard for monitors and TVs.

Home Theater

The product everyone has been waiting for since the release of HD-DVD and Blu-ray players is here. The hybrid player for both formats. LG’s BH100 works great with both formats, but favors Blu-ray slightly by not including access to the HDi interactive layer that HD-DVD discs have which means features like picture-in-picture commentaries and bookmark sharing are not available.

If you’re tired of the HD DVD format war, you may be more interested in IPTV and its future. believes that with IPTV you won’t even need to get an HD DVD player. “The future will be televised downloaded (and viewed at your convenience)!” The IPTV capability will be included in the next version of the Xbox 360 which will surely include a bigger hard-drive (although nothing has yet been said about it). You can get more information from one of Microsoft’s own soon-to-be IPTV channel, ‘10‘.

Gaming

Not much in the area of games, the PS3 and the Wii came out before the holidays and PC manufacturers are coming out with their gaming machines as both Desktop PCs and Laptops.

Mobile/Portable

Another big market is phones with all kinds of glitzy features. And this year there were more of them than ever. No exception ofcourse is the Apple announced at the other show taking place ‘coincidently’ at the same time as CES, MacWorld.

The Skype VOIP phone was also big with many manufacturers coming out with various models.

Other

And ofcourse, this is that the Microsoft’s Windows Vista is finally released. In fact, at the end of this month along with the new version of Microsoft Office.

Another interesting product from Microsoft that uses some of Vista’s capabilities is the Windows Home Server which makes a networked central storage device easy to setup and use for everyone’s digital library of photos, music and videos. It also gives remote access through a customized online domain and backups up all computers that it’s connected to (wirelessly ofcourse).

And finally, a revolutionary technology was announced… Wireless Power. It works from a transmitter that can be plugged anywhere. The radio frequency, called Powercast, is transmitted over a small area to give continuous power to any small device that has batteries equipped with a Powercast receiver.

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