The Palm Pre is the big winner here at CES with an incredibly innovative new phone design that some think may resurrect Palms flailing business in 2009. CNET has awarded the Palm Pre the prestigious best of show award for 2009, and so far there are no bad reviews of this device to my knowledge. As Treo users we are obviously excited to see if the Palm Pre shows better stability than what we’ve suffered with Treos, but this phone looks so good it’s clear it’ll be my next model as soon as Sprint carries the Pre.
Kelly Miyahara is on Jeopardy’s clue crew. Behind her is the elaborate set on which Jeopardy is filming their tournament of champions as well as some celebrity jeopardy segments. Filming is all week here at CES Las Vegas for March TV schedules. SONY owns Jeopardy and the technology behind this remote broadcasting effort is from … SONY.
FYI CES folks tickets to the evening tapings are long gone.
With about 4000 press and bloggers in attendance you’ll soon find all the CES Coverage you could possibly need right in your browser. Some of the sites with large teams here are:
With thousands of Press already here and the blog and Press lounges more crowded than last year, CES is not nearly in full swing. Tonight Steve Ballmer will give the Pre CES Keynote, a role that has passed to him from Bill Gates after last year’s very clever Gates farewell to CES which included the clever Gates video with his friends in politics and entertainment as well as a Guitar Hero performance.
CES is Las Vegas’ largest event and takes place pretty much all over town although the key venues are the Las Vegas Convention Center and next door Hilton Hotel and the Sands Convention Center and attached Venetian Hotel. About 2700 Exhibitors are showcasing here to some 4000 press and 130,000 attendees. There are also hundreds of sessions and many keynotes. For details go to the CES Website: CES 2009
Since the Treo’s early days as the smartphone of choice for many, Palm has painfully been lagging others – especially the iPhone – in terms of mobile innovations. However CrunchGear is reporting from a “trusted source” that Palm will launch a new device on Thursday, powered by an operating system called “Nova”, that may prove one of the sensational new products to be launched at CES.
The new Palm is reported to have a large touchscreen and a slide-down keyboard. Lack of a physical keyboard is arguably the Achilles heel of the Apple iPhone where small screens have plagued all Palm devices to date so if this has both it could be a strong competitor in this very rapidly evolving field of smartphones and powerful mobile devices.
As a Treo user I’ve been anxious to make the jump to a new phone for some time and it’ll be nice to have a chance to try out some of best new phones for 2009 at CES this coming week. Hopefully Palm’s new phone will at least match the high standards of other devices coming on the market soon.
If you are a Boxee user you may want to consider this deal from the Boxee folks which is offering a *free trip to Las Vegas* including Airfare in exchange for helping run some Boxee demos. Frankly for anybody who can’t afford their own conference this is a wonderful deal and hats off ot the Boxee folks for thinking of this approach to booth staffing:
Boxee will do this:
take care of your flight + hotel (Jan 7th – 10th) + food/drinks during the show
equip you with boxee shirts + schwag
You will do this:
spend half the day with us giving boxee demos, telling people how boxee rocks, etc.
spend the other half walking the show and checking out all the cool gadgets
You’ll need to send them a video showing you promoting Boxee and presumably they’ll get more than enough entries but I bet if you are good on video you’ll get to go to this.
The only problem is that they pick the folks tomorrow so if you want to do this it’ll have to be right … now.
I love my phone’s data capabilities, however, all those fees and charges for functionality can add up. Even at $8 or $10 a month, I like to check out a service and see how it will integrate into my life and habits before I sign up for yet another fee.
Lots of phone services will allow subscribers to stream radio and music, for a price. However, Clear Channel Radio now offers a free service called iheartmusic, (http://iheartmusic.com) just to iPhone or iTouch users, that allows folks to listen to about a dozen of the most popular Clear Channel radio stations from all over the country. The program integrates perfectly with itunes on your device. The cost for this is nada, which is a hard price to argue with. Naturally, up to 750 more stations are available for a small monthly fee, but I see this as a much more portable alternative to the car based radio of SIRIUS. As it is, I already carry too many devices anyway.
There was a very popular service called WunderRadio out there for free at one point, but alas, their business model caught up with them and it is no longer available, at least not with the cool ClearChannel stations. For those folks, iHeartMusic is the successor service.
iheart also runs a swell music website, and you can submit independent music there as well, where it can be downloaded and evaluated by fans across the nation. Feel free to check them out: http://iheartmusic.com/main.html
Techmeme is a favorite of many in technology for pulling together technology stories and the conversations that often swirl around them. Unlike a simple “ranking” system, TechMeme surfaces the top stories and then links out to blogs and sites that are discussing those “hot topics”. Thus a quick review of TechMeme can give you a very fast orientation to the stories that are making their rounds in the blogs. That does not always correspond to stories that actually *matter* to real folks, but it’s a great start.
TechMeme’s new story editor Megan has a list here of the top 10 for 2008. Number one was the Microsoft – Yahoo aquisition saga, number two was Apple quitting MacWorld, and number three was Google Chrome.
Wired has their list of the top ten technology breakthroughs of 2008. Here’s the list. I’m not sure I can get too excited about anybody that makes breakthrough *number one* the Apple Developer Aps Store, but it’s an interesting list at the least with everything from flexible displays (cool, but not out yet) to the Speedo LZR super slick swimsuits. Hmmm – swimsuits and Apple application stores? I’m kind of wondering if somebody put this together last night after a big turkey dinner.
C’mon Wired, surely there’s better stuff out there than this list?
With CES 2009 coming up in about ten days I’m confident that a better list than this, which we’ll be creating here at Technology Report during the Las Vegas conference, will have the top ten innovations *including* some of the superb innovations we are likely to see unveiled at CES.
However I should say it’ll be hard to top my current choice for top technology breakthrough of 2008 which came from the IBM Blue Brain project lab – a computerized simulation of a rat neocortical column. Doesn’t sound impressive to you? Keep in mind – that would be in the mind that equals your cerebrum which is largely composed of neocortical columns - that the Blue Brain project may be on track to deliver a fully functional artificial intelligence.
Like barrels of oil, good pairs of long range Walkie Talkies continue their plunge into and even under the $50 dollar range. It’s good to keep an eye out for bargains, even when you are not thinking about outdoors family adventures just yet.
Motorola T9500XLR
This radio has decent power and the audio to get out. I highly recommend radios with good power like these for the outdoors, rather that weak .5 watt FRS radios, with are better than toys, but frustrating to use in challenging conditions. I found these units larger than many in this class and a bit under powered at only 2 watts max, but OK.
However, it should be noted that this walkie talkie tends to show up in the “remanufactured” sale list quite often. I suspect this as something to do with the audio problems that others have commented on, or it could be something else. If lots of any electronic product gets returned and resold, it usually means something is systemically wrong with either the design or manufacturing process. In any case, buy with caution.
TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion will introduce a tablet computer in November to compete with Apple Inc's iPad, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing two people familiar with the company's plans. […]
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Two security experts said on Friday they released a tool for attacking smartphones that use Google Inc's Android operating system to persuade manufacturers to fix a bug that lets hackers read a victim's email and text messages. […]
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Research In Motion is not known for its dramatic flair. Like the BlackBerry itself, with its renowned email security, the Canadian smartphone maker seems to put function before form. […]
(Reuters) - Social networking website Facebook Inc may postpone its initial public offering until 2012, Bloomberg said, citing three people familiar with the matter. […]
HELSINKI (Reuters) - An increasingly heated battle in the global smartphone market is set to weigh on handset vendors' profit margins for the rest of the year, analysts said on Friday. […]
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc said its earlier report that Internet search services in China were being fully blocked could have been the result of a technical glitch that overstated the problem. […]
SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co plans to introduce tablet computers this quarter based on Google's Android operating system, joining a growing list of firms seeking to challenge Apple's popular iPad. […]
BANGALORE (Reuters) - Navigation technology company TeleNav Inc warned that a contract renegotiation with its largest customer could lead to a fall in revenue, sending its shares down 16 percent in extended trade. […]
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp set out its ambitions to dominate the consumer electronics market on Thursday with Windows-powered tablet computers and smartphones designed to beat back advances by Apple Inc and Google Inc. […]
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A court in Russia's far east has ordered an Internet provider to block five sites which it said disseminated extreme views, prompting U.S. Internet giant Google to say on Thursday the move restricted access to information. […]
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