A Wider Net

It’s magic, and I want one for presentations. It’s a motorized screen that you carry into a room, plop it down on the floor, and an 84 or 100″ screen rises out of it like a charmed snake. See the video at Gizmodo.

Before:

After:

UMPC Portal published a nice roundup of the Ultra Mobile PC and Mobile Internet Devices at CES 2008.

You may be asking “what do I do with these little things?”. Most people ask that question. That’s why you can’t find them in stores. At least… not in this country.

The rest of the world gets it. They’re great because they’re small, light, easy, and cool. They run familiar things like Vista and Word and Firefox and PowerPoint. And because they can’t quite squeeze all that into your phone. Yet…

This 52″ Multitouch screen that LG/Philips showcased at CES appears at first to trump the Microsoft Surface product, at least in terms of a multitouch interactive display device. Surface is a coffee table, whereas this is a wall-mount display. Surface is, again, a coffee table, and this is a flat panel display. They both offer multi-touch. But when you watch the video below you notice several big differences. The surface interface demos have been optimized for intuitive behavior. If you place your hand on an image and drag your hand it moves the image with your hand. In the LG/Philips demo, the hand movements of the presenter and the google earth images on display are not intuitively connected. Also, he regularly struggles with the interface which is the exact opposite experience of Surface. Frankly, I could have brought up the images he requested far faster with a traditional mouse and keyboard, so what’s the point?

The Surface team has been very careful to make sure they design applications that use the technology effectively and appropriately. They step back and ask themselves “could I do this as well or better with a mouse and keyboard or a traditional touch screen?” and “Am I adding value or adding to the experience with this technology”.

The best part of seeing this video is the fact that other companies are getting inspired to join the party. Multi-touch interfaces are a big part of our man-machine interface future, and like the iPhone, Surface is creative very positive activity in the research labs of their competitors. Now I think they need to pick up the pace!

Thanks again, Engadget.

Engadget published a terrific video of the Optimus Maximus keyboard at CES. You may recall that this keyboard has tiny full-color displays inside each key cap that allows they keyboard to change its appearance for different applications, user preferences, languages, etc.

In this video, the inventor Art Lebedev describes much of the functionality, and makes it really appealing to anyone working with macro-intensive applications (Photoshop, edit software, etc), gamers, etc. As I mentioned a year ago, there must be a way for a company to buy the rights to display their logo on one of those keys and drive traffic to their website, in return for subsidizing the cost of the device. That sponsor could even change that logo remotely to reflect special promotions (Woot! - are you listening? I need a woot-off key!).

I’m assuming that the key labels can change when you depress the ctrl, shift, and alt keys - making the process of finding those obscure macro keys and shortcuts far easier.

Now… if only Mr. Lebedev would send me one to review extensively…

What do these devices have in common?

via multiple sources including Engadget and Ubergizmo

Another gadget from CES - this one makes it easy for you to record podcasts on your iPod with “professional” results.
You probably should be thinking about podcasting. You probably need to think about the quality of the content far more than you need to think about cool (but kinda cornball) devices like this:

via Engadget

Saw this note among the Engadget CES feeds:
Xerox has unveiled a new logo which, for the first time in 40 years, eliminates the signature capital X from their brand. Engadget wasn’t very nice about it, claiming that it’s just like everyone else’s. I’m not so sure about that, but what a bold move. The New York Times has a nice historical view on the logo evolution which was capped by the recent change by agency Interbrand (Omnicom). The change was the result of 18 months of work and 5,000 customer interviews. Here’s the full press release.

If you scan the CES coverage, you’ll notice that cellphone manufacturers have done the expected - launched a ton of iPhone competitors with large touch screens. I suspect they also feel that consumers will see the big color touch screen and assume it has the same or better capabilities as an iPhone which, of course, it won’t. They will have advantages over the iPhone like qwerty keyboards, better carrier options, and in some cases, better 3rd party application support. But they won’t have the slick multi-touch user interface. That’s too bad, because I think that’s the ONLY thing that makes a touch screen on a phone worth all the fingerprints.

Check out the “small screen” phones with the big screens because that’s where your audience is increasingly turning their attention. Here are a couple to watch.

EDIT - ok, the Mylo isn’t a phone, so this note below really references an iPod Touch competitor rather than the iPhone competition. So you get two posts in one.

But my FAVORITE feature on the new crop of touch devices, so far, is found in the Sony Mylo below. It illustrates that Sony clearly had their marketing team involved too much in the design of the device, because they added a “BS” button:

Intended for gamers, I’m loving the vision of this as a demo station at an exhibit:

From Engadget. They have video, too.

This year I’m sitting CES out, and believe me - it isn’t easy. CES is a candy store of oceanic proportion for a gadget freak like me. But there are too many trade shows to hit and I’m opting for other shows this year.

So, like many of you, I’m watching the insanely prolific coverage through the blogs and news sites. It has to be the most well-covered trade event in the world. CES has a significant virtual event component solely through the power of the press and the reports by it’s attendees. This is the right way to do it - leverage the enthusiasm of the folks who are there to deliver the show to the folks who aren’t there. I believe CES should be enabling this coverage themselves, giving their attendees the power to cover the show and highlight the content from within a CES social media environment, and I suspect we’ll see that within one to three years.

For this year, I’ll highlight some announcements that I think you’ll want to pay attention to. If you’re interested in trolling the rapids for news as well, try these links:

Engadget’s CES-themed version of their site.

Gizmodo has a “best of CES 2008″ section and a regular CES section.

CNET appears to be lagging a bit but their coverage is usually well done.