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CES 2007: Motorola Announces Q’s Sequel: Q PRO
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: Smartphones, CES, CES 2007, Features,
Motorola today confirmed the Q PRO, their enterprise offering of the Motorola Q. (Though we really wish they would’ve just called it the Q2.) Essentially the same phone, it comes with the ability to disable the camera, (a disturbing feature for all those corporate espionage types) a basic Office suite of apps, (think Word editors, and PDF, Excel and Powerpoint viewers) and enhanced security options that include intrusion detection and real-time event logging. No price, but it’s supposed to be available now, likely only to enterprise customers at the moment. We’d expect a small mark up from the basic Q model, but hopefully nothing too substantial.
Gallery: CES 2007: Motorola Announces Q’s Sequel: Q PRO
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CES 2007: iRobot Create: A Roomba That Doesn’t Suck (Literally)
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: CES, CES 2007, Features, Mods / Hacks, Toys,
Robotic vacuum manufacturer iRobot has always taken a shine to the modders who hack their Roombas in all sorts of new ways. Delivering an open serial port and full instructions on how to utilize it was a great gesture and a very forward thinking move for them, but their latest, the iRobot Create, might really take off. The Create is essentially a Roomba without all of the vacuuming guts. It’s an open platform, with a bunch of expansion and input and output ports on top, and more room to toy with it, since you don’t have to worry about a place to put all that dust and cat hair. Add-on peripherals will be available, but iRobot expects and encourages users to build their own to interface with it, citing a hamster-ball-driven navigation system one test group has already delivered.
The Create is available right now and is selling for the completely reasonable price of $129.99, with an 8-bit command module costing an additional $59.99.
I can see a lot of educational robot teams and the like buying into this, straight away.
(A picture of a beer-fetching Create, after the jump.)
Click to continue reading CES 2007: iRobot Create: A Roomba That Doesn’t Suck (Literally)
Gallery: CES 2007: iRobot Create: A Roomba That Doesn’t Suck (Literally)
CES 2007: Viewsonic Throws Hat Into 1080p Ring, Loses Hat
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: CES, CES 2007, Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment,
Viewsonic has decided to enter the fray with their 1080p 42-inch LCD. The N4261w includes dual HDMI inputs, a 1,500:1 contrast ratio and a launch date in March with a price tag of $1,799. Low-priced 1080p might seem a bit anachronistic, but we’re glad to see them coming down the pipeline sooner rather than much later. Its 46-inch bigger brother, the N4661, will launch in Q2.)
Gallery: CES 2007: Viewsonic Throws Hat Into 1080p Ring, Loses Hat
CES 2007: SanDisk’s Sweet Sansa View
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: CES, CES 2007, Features, Portable Audio / Video,
SanDisk’s Sansa View comes with 8GB of flash memory and the ability to output at up to 1080i when it’s not playing back video (of various, capable codecs, though we don’t have specifics yet) on its 4-inch screen. Expect up to 4 hours of video playback and around 10 hours of audio, basic PlaysForSure support and a $299 price tag come later Q1 when it’s released.
We’ll try for some hands-on time if we can track one down on the show floor.
(Via Engadget)
Gallery: CES 2007: SanDisk’s Sweet Sansa View
CES 2007: HP Shows Off Child-Crushing VoodooPC Notebook
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: CES, CES 2007, Features, PC / Laptop,
Not much has been heard from the VoodooPC camp since they’ve been acquired by HP, but their announcement of their massive, visible-from-space desktop-replacement Voodoo Envy HW:201 notebook continued their practice of completely ridiculous specs in notebooks. Featuring a 20.1-inch display, two NVidia GeForce 7950’s running in SLI mode and up to 320GB of hard drive space, (and no battery capacity) I sincerely believe that it would actually crack the foundation of your house if you dropped it.
Gallery: CES 2007: HP Shows Off Child-Crushing VoodooPC Notebook
CES 2007: TiVo Plays Rhapsody
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: CES, CES 2007, Features, Home Entertainment, Internet, Music,
Good news for Rhapsody subscribers: (Such as myself.) We’ll soon be able to play Rhapsody content through TiVo. This is actually really great for people who want to push every single one of Rhapsody’s 3 million song selection through to their home theatre system’s stereo. You’ll be able to access your shared library, so songs you flag on Rhapsody over Tivo will be automatically added to your PC song library. This will be available soon through Tivo and likely represents a huge potential gain for Rhapsody, since they’ll be getting a great deal of free advertising pushed straight to millions of Tivo subscriber households.
Now, let’s see a discounted Rhapsody rate with Tivo subscription, eh? (No firm release date, but we’ve heard Q2 2007 from the Rhapsody folks.)
Gallery: CES 2007: TiVo Plays Rhapsody
CES 2007: Finally, Something We Can Use—R2D2 DVD & Projector
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: CES, CES 2007, Design, Features, Home Entertainment,
Coming from borderline ridiculously awesome territory is Nikko Home Electronics’ R2D2 Projector. The sheer volume of “features” in R2’s shell is astounding: “Safety sensors,” sound effects, fully motorized and controlled by a, I kid you not, Millennium Falcon remote control. With a light-up propulsion system and cockpit light. Wow. Oh, and an integrated DVD player. (What, no Blu-Ray?)
And coming next? An R2 Skype phone.
Full feature diagram after the jump.
Click to continue reading CES 2007: Finally, Something We Can Use—R2D2 DVD & Projector
Gallery: CES 2007: Finally, Something We Can Use—R2D2 DVD & Projector
CES 2007: HP MediaSmart Server
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: CES, CES 2007, Features, PC / Laptop, Storage,
HP’s MediaSmart Server was announced as part of Bill Gates’ keynote last night. It looks rather dashing, and runs Windows Home Server, a variant of Windows Server 2003. The box has a few USB ports and a network port and that’s about it. It comes with an install disc that lets you interface to it through the network, allowing you to configure which media is shared, and how. It includes a neat psuedo-RAID, psuedo-JBOD (just a bunch of discs) approach, that allows file- and folder-specific replication at your choosing, and hot swapability, to boot. (Heh.) They don’t have the full launch config specs down, but we’re guessing 700+ GB, 2GB RAM and probably not terribly expensive, since you don’t have a pricey SLI graphics solution to include. It’s ready to launch, Q2 2007.
Gallery: CES 2007: HP MediaSmart Server
The Bleeding Edge 069: CES 2007 Video: A Look At The SanDisk V-mate
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Accessories, CES, CES 2007, Features, Home Entertainment, Movies, Portable Audio / Video, Videocasts, Videos,
|Download| - iPod-formatted H.264
|Download| - Apple TV High Resolution
|Download| - MPEG-4
|Download| - Windows Media
Read More 
| The Bleeding Edge
Gallery: The Bleeding Edge 069: CES 2007 Video: A Look At The SanDisk V-mate
CES 2007: Gates Keynote Liveblog
Posted by Chris Cardinal Categories: CES, CES 2007, Features, Microsoft,
We’re not going to lie. We’re in the comfort of a Bellagio suite with a 12 mbps down pipe, watching the Gates keynote stream on a pretty massive TV. And we’re liveblogging it. Some very cool things coming up, including Avalon applications, Xbox IPTV “channels” and hot, Bill Gates action. Stay tuned, refresh a lot, and have fun.
[6:48pm] We’re being welcomed to the social with a cool Vista-esque video showing off some of the new things we’ve seen this year.
[6:50pm] “Sure, I’ll keynote next year, but I’m not sure they’ll want me, because I’d likely talk about infectious diseases.” Oh, Bill.
[6:51pm] “Over 40% of US homes now have multiple computers.” Clearly, a large amount of credit due directly to Gates for this.
[6:52pm] He’s talking about the incredible increase in bandwidth, capabilities, high definition and all the fun we’re seeing lately. “The graphics revolution is letting us think about representing reality on the screen.”
Check the rest, after the jump:
Click to continue reading CES 2007: Gates Keynote Liveblog
