A Wider Net

One of the devices from CES that I’ve found myself thinking about often is the Pepper Pad. This Linux-based tablet is in a word, loaded. It’s bright touch/stylus screen is large enough for browsing and watching movies without all the bulk of most laptops or tablet PC’s. A 20G hard drive is adequate for a decent amount of movies and music, and it’s WiFi connection allows viewing of media stored elsewhere. Add to that a VGA camera, bluetooth, dual infrared, USB, and a few other bells and whistles and you have a mighty entertainment and browsing device.

You may have noticed that, unlike other tablets, this device has a split thumb board in the upper corners, plus a scroll wheel, and a 5-way directional pad. All this tactile control input at your thumbtips makes this device extremely versatile for browsing and email. It’s also splash-resistant and fairly light at 2.2 lbs.

From a marketing perspective, this makes an interesting portable kiosk or presentation device. You can hand this to someone and, after they get over the coolness of the thing, they can watch a short presentation, fill out a survey, or play a learning game. While not as light and portable as a PocketPC device or even a UMPC device, the larger screen and easier text entry may make this a superior choice for data entry or media viewing. It’s battery life is limited, however, to less than three hours, which may affect it’s usefulness in mobile applications. It’s worth considering in a lobby to fill out forms and watch informational videos, and it’s worth considering at an exhibit where it can sit on a charger between users.

Edit: I changed the above text to reflect the fact that the camera is, in fact, VGA resolution - not 2 Megapixel.

Here are my shots from CES today before I flew to Macworld. I have a few specific products to write about which I will get to shorty. I saw lots of cool stuff today including a digital picture frame you can email photos to, a tag locator (treasure hunt) accurate to up to 130meters, some cool memory sticks, a dragonfly robot, and a bunch of visor 3D and 2D displays.

The folks at Trimble were showing their Trimble Outdoors line of GPS-Phone products. These are applications that hopefully will be coming to your mobile phone via your cellular carrier soon. Trimble Outdoors makes a fitness training application, an off-road navigation application, a turn-by-turn driving direction application, and my favorite - a geocaching adventure application called Geocache Navigator.

If you’re not familiar with geocaching, check out geocaching.com for a good overview. In a nutshell, geocaching is treasure hunting of a sort, and it has a worldwide following. As an outdoor activity, it combines “adventure game” with “walking”. And it requires a handheld GPS navigation device.

The Geocaching Navigator program makes geocaching with a GPS-enabled phone not only possible, but super-easy to do. Of course, you don’t have to plant the cache directly at the GPS coordinates. Often times the cache is located several clues away from the initial GPS coordinate - hence the treasure-hunting feel.

This will make a great team-building solution for meetings. Geocaching could be used as a high-tech version of a scavenger hunt, and a well-organized geocaching adventure can be a great way to get the team out of the building and into a focussed adventure together.

Walletex showed a line of credit card-sized USB Memory drives, which are double-sided. They are well-suited for corporate promotions and distribution. They come in sizes up to 2GB. They can contain automatic launch code. They are also waterproof and unbreakable.

They also showed a neat MP3 player in the same size, that doubles as a RAM drive. The buttons are built right onto the card, and you plug the special adapter into the USB connector to allow headphone connections.

Not shown was a Web-Key in the same form-factor that contains automatic internet link and custom presentation software. This is a more feature-rich solution for promotions, as it links the data on the drive with a web site.

Finally, they have a credit-card form-factor WiFi Finder, too.

This poor guy was boosting Airborne supplements. I suppose he’s an infection with footwear confusion.

I took less product shots today (partially because I was running around more and partially because I was running out of juice - can you believe they don’t sell AA’s on the floor at CES?)

Here’s a quick tour of North Hall where all the Car stuff was (mostly car shots)

And here’s some assorted shots around Central Hall, South Hall, and at the Sands.

Here are some of the CES photos I took so far.

I was catching weird looks as I shot these pictures of the signs that labeled the real products on display. There were others like me, according to at least one exhibitor, who had the same question I did: “Are these for sale?” Having seen them at Infocomm in one or two booths, and having been told “no, we’re not selling them”, I was pretty anxious to hear a “yes”.
After a couple of “no”’s, I started to feel for the exhibitors. It must be maddening to have the world’s largest plasma screen on display when some gadget freak asks “how much for this little 7″ LCD screen that you’re using as a digital sign for the ginormous plasma?” But truthfully, bigger isn’t always better.

All of the major manufacturers of plasmas and LCD’s build their own little digital signs to use next to each product. In most cases, they merely replaced a foam core sign. In some cases, the sign played two or more pages of information in a loop. In all cases, they were bright, crisp, field-programmable signs and they ROCK for exhibits.

Some only take SD cards as input for their images. Others received their signals via wired ethernet connection, and still others were got their information via WiFi Wireless.

Oddly, only half of the makers of these displays actually sell them. They sell digital photo frames (god, it seemed like a hundred exhibitors make them now) but they didn’t sell these - the nice ones next to each product. Philips is selling really nice wired units with replaceable magnetic frames. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of these in the higher-end exhibits as mini-digital signs. Be cautious about over-using their slide show capabilities. If you replace a convenient at-a-glance sign with a “show”, you’ll slow your booth throughput to a crawl. Use these as attractive easy-to-read field-programmable displays, but stay away from multiple pages as much as possible and stay away from pages that have no content, like empty logo or branding slides.

At around $150-250 apiece, this is affordable digital signage for each major product - just be sure that the product is cooler.

Considering that Apple isn’t exhibiting at CES, they seem to own this show. There is hardly a booth in the show that doesn’t have an i-something. There are more devices here to stick your ipod into, or stick on your ipod, than previously imaginable. Once Apple revealed their iPhone, you could hear the show buzzing with talk of “did you see the iPhone?” and “did you hear…?” and “wow, that’s going to be a fingerprint nightmare”.

Even their competitors have a “we may beat ‘em someday, but for now we’ll join ‘em” attitude. I heard one of Apple’s chief rivals, Creative Sound Labs, shout in their booth presentations “Yes, we do TOO make accessories for iPod!” Microsoft had lots of iPod-friendly solutions, too, despite their Zune presence.

While you may not be an iPod fan (and technically, I’m not either - there are lots of better devices from iRiver, Archos, Creative, and others), but you should know that the universe of iPod accessories that would make decent premiums and SWAG has expanded considerable.

Some of my favorite iPod things (not all of these are suitable for premiums):

Motorola showed a Bluetooth accessory for iPod that allowed you to play your iPod through their neat bluetooth wireless headphones (when they’re not being used as headphones for your phone).

Sharp had a high end iPod dock/boom box/clock radio that sounded amazing, but would require a hefty nightstand.

Visteon, a manufacturer of Car electronics and embedded systems, showed ipod docking stations, ways to control your ipod from the steering wheel, navigation screens that double as ipod browsers, and perhaps the coolest thing ever - wireless device charging for phones, PDA’s, and iPods. Some devices, including iPods needed special wireless charging adapters, but other new devices had the needed induction coils built in to receive the charge. They also claim, fortunately, that the blast of energy won’t harm the battery or hard drive in the devices.

And for the low-to-middle-end premiums, there were endless iPod cases, skins, stick-on protector sheets, fuzzy things, shiny things, and odd accessories like the speaker-and-light-bulb-combo iLamp.

My hats off to apple - they’re not here, but it’s feeling a bit like iCES.

I fell in love with this little (and I mean - little) gadget today. It’s a Personal Travel Assistant(TM) (yep, it’s trademarked - how did that make it through the trademark office?) It’s a Garmin Nuvi.
Like most portable GPS navigators, you can bring it everywhere and it helps you find places with spoken turn-by-turn directions. What makes it cool is that it’s think and slick and does and a TON more. Let’s say you use the directory to find a place you want to go - it lists the phone number, and using a wireless blue-tooth connection to your phone, you can have it call the place for you. You can speak to the other end using the device like a speaker phone or pick up your handset and take over. It also features an MP3 player, an audio book reader, a photo viewer, and the ability to receive traffic update signals in your area. It has language translation, currency conversion and so on and so on. It’s just awesome, and it fits in your coat pocket. *drool*

Pricey at $600-900 depending on the features and size you buy, but if you travel a ton, aren’t you worth it?