Hey folks, Valkor here. Here I am at CES day 1 and it’s been a crazy day so far. Slacker, Cyberlink, Naxa, and more were waiting for some TOV lovin’ and I was ready to spread it. Oh ya I have a huge surprise waiting at the end of this day one piece, so read all the way through. This year we’re doing things a bit different. It’s much what I did last year with a lot of previews on the main page, tossing in what I did in previous years with a listing of what companies I’ve met with and what they have to offer. First you’ll get the name of the company, next to their name you’ll get my score and after that you’ll get a preview of what’s to offer. Please note all grades are given based on the short period time I had to test the product and don’t reflect our overall score system. Lastly I want to apologize for the lack of pics not taken on my part, damn my eyes i brought the wrong charger for my cam and most of the pics I took were with a disposable, and they were lacking in quality.
Also you’ll know TOV is a team of five yet only one made it out, but life’s complications make it difficult for us to make such a decision to skip such an event. Krush has is real job that needs his attention, so does AP3X, Alacran is nurturing his new hellspawn, congrats dude, and Necross was killed in a horrible accident and will never be seen on TOV again. Now when I say never be seen again I mean he was burned crispy in a horrible explosion where not even his cells can be culled to make clones of himself. (Of course he was not literally killed but yea we pulled him)
Apex
I spent a good chunk of my day hanging out at the Hilton as I had a few meetings (most of which are covered on the main page of the site). But once I got a break in between, I did some booth scavenging and came up with a few choice gadgets. One of which is from a company I covered at a past CES, APEX. (No relation to AP3X of TOV). They didn’t have much and their rep only wanted me to check out their Digital frames which come in an 8, 10 and 15 inch variety. Some come with touch screens, others with a wi-fi. The wi-fi frames are the most interesting because if you have any item with Bluetooth and can take pics (such as your cellphone) you can pair it up and upload it to the frame. They also have great resolution and are easy to use. Plus they also work with such websites as Flickr, where you can load your pics on the site and then sync it to the digiframe and have a little slideshow going. But what stood out the most for me was the Raadx Bluetooth all in one drive. This little gizmo does so much it’s compared to a Swiss army knife. First and foremost it’s a Bluetooth Jumpdrive that you can pair up with any Bluetooth device. Have pics on your phone? With this baby around you can load them onto the drive in an instant for future viewing on the PC. Second it acts as an MP3 player, which would work with a pair of Bluetooth headphone. Finally you can plug the drive into your PC and now it has become Bluetooth enabled. Pretty sweet and we’ll be looking into this in the future. The Raadx is also a CES Honoree in innovations so kudos to APEX in that respect.
Naxa
Talk about a company that doesn’t have much to offer, and what they did have to offer would probably get destroyed in Val-cave testing. I was actually a bit insulted because one of the items was a rip of the new “fatty” IPod nano? Yea they had one but it was called an MP4 player. Plus they had a whole slew of MP4 players that were probably rips of some of today’s technology I’m guessing. I gotta give them a star for at least showing up to the party, but nothing was working so I had nothing to grade anything on except for design. And well… look what that gets them; The first and only 1 star in my entire CES report.
If anyone out there gets the chance to attend a CES show and
if your going with a couple of buddies. Do yourself a favor and stop over to
Texas Instruments DLP booth. Oh my Snapple god I’ve never seen anything so
beautiful than their televisions. First was the 3D Full 1080p HD TV. There were
some games running such as Madden and Project Gotham racing, showing off the
power behind the technology. Not bad and I can see its usefulness in gaming. No
movies were shown utilizing the technology but that doesn’t mean there won’t be
an option.. But what did it for me was the DarkChip 4 technology, DLP 500,000: 1 HD TV. And what was
showing? Scenes from Transformers 2007 by
LG
Here’s another TOV, one which as
of yet been featured on TOV. Come on LG show us the love, we always do every
year. LG had a ton of HD TV’s for viewing. Some of which looked amazing and
others need some work. First is the LG70/71. Both look about the same in their
design, however that’s where they differ. The LG71 has everything the LG 70
has: it is 20,000: 1 ratio, TrueMotion, 24p real cinema, and 4 HDMI ports,
among other ports and controls. However this where the two differ as the LG 71
is a wireless TV. Also you can find their BluRay and SuperBlu (which is a combo
Blu Ray, HD-DVD.) However that was the
Norcent
The folks at Norcent didn’t havea crazy lineup but what they had on hand looked pretty sweet. But my eye was on the DCS1050 10MP digicams. It has a slim design, a large 3inch LCD screen and has many features found in most cams, including Anti-shake and Face tracking technologies, but the DCS1050 touts taking extreme high res pics. This one we’ll definitely try to get in the cave to match up to the other 10MP cams we’ve tested, but for now
I can’t forget the Pat Monahan
concert present by Sony BMG. I hadn't expected to get in, but since people were sneaking in anyway
I decided to pop in as well and let me tell you he was ON. Overall it wasn’t a bad first day. Actually
meeting Jon Favreau was the
Valkor’s note: It may appear that I didn’t do too much with day one, but please note that a lot of the other articles are scattered throughout the CES 08 page such as CyberLink, Slacker, Targus, and such even Wowwee which is located in the robots section.