CES 2010
January 11th, 2010, 3:39pm by Mike
First issue: Forget Disneyland, we need to plan for a Pyslent trip to CES 2011. We just need to go.
OK, but this year’s show. From the firehose of information that Engadget, Gizmodo, and the like have put out, it sounds like the biggest things to come out of this year’s show were e-book readers (yawn), Android devices, and the big one, 3D TV.
But there were at least a couple other things that were interesting. First, Kelvin and Jake have touched on the Palm announcement, which to me boiled down to some upgraded hardware to be offered on Verizon, as well as opening up the hardware to developers through plug-ins. There are other rumors swirling around, including further indications of the existence of the Palm C40.
To me, the most interesting thing was the RCA Airnergy[1, 2, 3], which purports to charge gadgets by harvesting the energy from wifi networks. So, it’s like a normal battery-powered charger, except that it’s constantly, passively recharging as long as you’re near a wifi hotspot (or, presumably, a baby monitor). With a full battery charge, it can supposedly charge a Blackberry from 30% to full charge in about 90 minutes, which probably isn’t much slower than my current battery charger.
Jake sounded like he thought the Airstash wireless SD card reader was kinda cool for iPhone users, and it seems like, in principle, it could work for any wifi-enabled device (like a Pre, or a laptop). In theory, as Jake said, you could read files off a camera’s SD card directly into the iPhone, except that I didn’t see where you could actually copy files from one place to the other (it sounded more like a way to stream data, like music, to the iPhone using a dedicated app). If true, you could potentially view a photo from your camera’s SD card on the iPhone, but that’s not nearly as cool as dumping gigabytes worth of photos off a card onto your phone.
(Jake asked if the Eye-Fi could do this. I have my Eye-Fi SD card upload to Dropbox, and I can view the photos on my phone via the iPhone Dropbox app, which is awesome. To get the photo into my iPhone’s camera roll, I have to mail myself a link to the Dropbox photo, then use Safari to navigate to it and save the image to my camera roll. The Eye-Fi app on the iPhone only allows you to upload your iPhone pix to your standard Eye-Fi places — which means I can upload to Flickr and Dropbox, but I have other apps that can do both of those things anyway).
What did you guys think was the coolest thing at CES?
January 11th, 2010 at 4:06 pm
Correction — the Airstash apparently does allow you to download your photos to your iPhone. Actually, reading their web page, it sounds pretty cool.
Supposedly it’ll work with other platforms, too, like Pre.
January 11th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Oh that’s neat. I used to love swapping SD cards to send actual camera pictures to Flickr via my phone. Of course, I’d have to shoot jpeg for it to have a chance of working.
On the Airnergy, the real question is how long does it take to fully charge the battery? My guess would be 1 week if you had the thing sitting right next to your WiFi hotspot. I just don’t think there’s enough power around to make it practical. A solar charger that did the same has much more utility, and those haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves. I think it’s probably a standard battery back-up w/ this WiFi charging thing tacked on for marketing purposes only.
January 11th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
And for the eyeFi, I was curious about its utility on the go, when you don’t have a WiFi connection. Can you use the iPhone as the base station that the eyeFi sends photos to? That would be VERY useful when on the road.
January 11th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
In theory, if you have a jailbroken iPhone that allows wifi tethering. Oh wait, I happen to have one of those right here! I’ll try it and let you know!
January 11th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Oh, for a good laugh, read the comments on Gizmodo article.
January 11th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
So, on the Eye-Fi front — it doesn’t work with my card, because the original Eye-Fi cards can’t connect to ad-hoc networks, which is what the program MyFi generates. The newer Eye-Fi Pro card, however, can, so that will work fine, at least according to this guy.
The Pro card also is fast enough to record video (my card isn’t), and still has geotagging, etc. It also handles RAW images, not just JPEGs. Amazon has the current Pro card for $119, and they have the newer version for $149. I might go for it, and put the older card in the D40, since it can’t shoot video anyway.
January 12th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Let’s totally make plans for CES2011. The products themselves usually seem kinda boring, but I’d love the spectacle of it all. And hey, it’s Vegas.
As for the device in question, there are definitely times when I miss having the ability to transfer jpgs from a real camera to a cell phone for immediate uploading, but it’s pretty rare. If I’m going to tweet about it, I’ll take a blurry cam phone photo specifically for that purpose 🙂
January 12th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Let’s totally make plans for CES2011. The products themselves usually seem kinda boring, but I’d love the spectacle of it all. And hey, it’s Vegas.
As for the device in question, there are definitely times when I miss having the ability to transfer jpgs from a real camera to a cell phone for immediate uploading, but it’s pretty rare. If I’m going to tweet about it, I’ll take a blurry cam phone photo specifically for that purpose 🙂