CES 2002 Picks and Pans

Glitzy, glamorous gadgets, and even some useful stuff, made this year's show a winner.

Ramon G. McLeod, PCWorld.com

LAS VEGAS-- The cabbies in Vegas are happy again. After the disastrously low attendance at Comdex last November, the Consumer Electronics Show was a major success. It wasn't hard to understand why. Unlike Comdex, CES was loaded with the kind of innovative and interesting products that were once a Comdex hallmark. Our crack team of editors found an astonishing variety of noteworthy items at the show, some brilliant, some bizarre, and some just plain dumb.

Our Fave

Danger, the makers of the snazzy HipTop, managed two impressive feats during a gadget session here: They wowed the normally unmovable CES crowd, and they destroyed a pricey prototype just for kicks. Good show! Danger's cell phone/PDA/instant messenger/Web browser/camera (with accessories) will ship this spring for about $200 from a still unannounced service provider. Best of all, the tiny device has a cleverly concealed keypad for easy input, and it stores all your data on a server, just in case some idiot drops a bowling ball on your phone. The device won a Best of Show award. (For a complete list of other winners, check out TechTV's Best of CES Winners.) --Tom Mainelli

Body Solutions

How Did We Miss The First One? The ButtKicker 2. Kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it? The tagline: "Feel what you've been missing." In case you're wondering, The ButtKicker from Guitammer is a low-frequency, compact subwoofer-type device that you install into a chair to shake your seat during movies. --Eric Dahl

For the Boys: The Guy's Keyboard tries to reinvent the wheel but merely sends everybody in circles with its newly laid-out keys on an otherwise traditional Windows keyboard. Created by architect Daryl Fazekas, the EZ Type layout, as opposed the standard QWERTY keyboard, puts the most commonly used letters in the middle of the keyboard. Does he really expect people to ditch their familiar QWERTY keyboards? Probably not, judging from the Guy's Keyboard ads, which proclaim it's "for the hunt and pecker." --Michael Lasky

TV Toys

Look Ma, no Cables: Is your TV trapped in one corner of a room because you don't want to string cable to another location? You won't have to with Sharp's upcoming SmartLink system, which beams a signal to your television using 802.11b wireless networking. (Price and availability are yet to be announced.) Even in the electromagnetic wave pool of the Las Vegas Convention Center, the SmartLink beamed crystal clear pictures to a nearby TV. Now, if we could just get rid of the power cables... --Sean Captain

Tivo Strikes Back: A pioneer of the slowly emerging digital video recorder industry, early Tivo-based devices were starting to look a bit long in the tooth compared to newer units from SonicBlue's RePlay TV and Microsoft's Ultimate TV. But this week Tivo unveiled its Series 2 device, a smaller and lighter self-branded box due in February that offers two USB ports, an enhanced graphics engine, up to 60 hours of recording time, and a price of $399. Also of interest are the company's plans to offer digital music, photos, games, and even broadband video on demand. --Tom Mainelli

Flat and Phat: The Sampo LME-17S1 Ultra Think LCDTV/PC Monitor is a high-end monitor for a low-end price ($899). It's HDTV-ready, offers SXGA 1280-by-1024 resolution, has a wide 160 degree viewing angle, and provides enough connectivity ports to load multiple video devices. It's available in April. --Michael Lasky

Everything Plays Photos: New DVD players from JVC such as the $249 XVS-500 boast JPG playback support. Philips' $199 Expanium EXP-601 portable CD player can handle photo CDs. And I have high hopes that someone will get the playback interface right and we'll all be watching high-quality digital slide shows on our TVs in years to come. --Eric Dahl

This Note's For You

It's Only MP3, but I Like It: Samsung's $299 YP-100H is not a radical new digital music player, but it is cool. About the size of a Zippo lighter, the silvery YP-100H packs 128MB of built-in flash memory and a removable NiMH battery. You can expand the memory by adding a SmartMedia card, and you can boost the battery by plugging in an expansion pack that holds a standard AAA cell. The YP-100H supports Microsoft WMA, standard MP3, the next-generation MP3 version called AAC, and Samsung's own 2XMP3 format. It also doubles as a voice recorder, and it accepts an FM radio-tuner module. --Sean Captain

Digital Music for Deep Pockets: SonicBlue showed off its recently announced Rio Advanced Digital Audio Center, a home stereo component for MP3 lovers with $1500 to spare. The unit--shipping later in January--includes a 40GB hard drive, an integrated CD-RW drive, top-notch audio components, a modem, two USB ports, and an LCD display that lets you organize the up to 650 CDs worth of music on your hard drive. It's an ultra-suave device, but if you're too cheap to buy your own CDs, will you pay this much to organize your stolen booty? --Tom Mainelli

Boom Box With an Ethernet connector: The Philips FW-i1000 Internet Audio Mini HiFi system caught my eye at an Internet radio technology demo. It's basically a boom box with a broadband connection that costs around $450 and plays Internet radio at a push of a button. You configure the preset stations at a Web site that also monitors the stations for quality. You add a station by downloading the settings. Song information is provided right on the radio's display. Also, keep your eye out for the follow-on product called the MC-i200 Streamium, an Internet radio and online music device minus some of the boom box features. --Andrew Eisner

Spinning Up Portable Tunes: At least a half-dozen vendors debuted music players that pack thousands of digital songs onto miniature hard drives. By late winter or early spring you can expect to see new pocket jukeboxes from big-name vendors including Creative, RCA, and SonicBlue, as well as not-quite household names Archos, Pogo, and Remote Solutions. Unlike the Apple iPod, which uses Toshiba's PC card-size drive, these units incorporate heftier 2.5-inch notebook hard drives. Think of toting a paperback novel rather than carrying a deck of cards. Still, it's a lot easier than lugging your whole CD rack to the gym. And in April, small-name company Evolution Technologies is teaming with big-name player MTV to sell the first music device featuring DataPlay's 1.5-inch, 500MB optical discs. DataPlay albums from record labels BMG, EMI, and Universal should follow in May. --Sean Captain

What To Do When Your Xbox Crashes: A Danish company, MadWaves, has a terrific little technology that generates copyright-free digital music that you can play with, listen to, modify, and/or share. They've popped it into a stylish rectangular box they call the MadPlayer. Just pick a genre--say blues or rap--let the player start making music, then monkey with the music by changing the tempo or the bass, or adding samples, vocals, or effects. Like it? Save it. Or don't, and let the MadPlayer generate another start point for you. The MadPlayer will ship in the U.K. in June and is expected to hit the U.S. by the end of the year. It is not yet priced but expected to cost less than $300. --Anne B. McDonald

Benq Me, Baby

I've Got Your Ad Slogan Right Here: Benq, the company formerly known as Acer Communications and Multimedia Group, showed some decent LCD monitors at Tuesday's Digital Experience event. Unfortunately, all I could think of during the pitch was the guy from the Sega ads yelling "Get Benq!" --Eric Dahl

I Don't Like It When My Pots and Pans Can Think: If you agree, then you might want to avoid Smart Pan's line of digital cookware, in which a display in the handle of your fry pan gives you a visual signal to warn you when the egg is going to burn. Hey, what's life without a little danger? --Anne B. McDonald

It's Hip To Be Horizontal: The form factor for many of this year's cool gadgets is a small horizontal rectangle. We saw this in innovative music players from Rio and MadWaves, an in-progress Web tablet/PDA from Samsung, and Danger's impressive HipTop wireless phone/PDA/Web browser. All of these little sideways stylers are designed to be grasped by one or both hands and have easy-to-reach controls on both sides. --Anne B. McDonald

Of Course, a Magic Marker Also Does the Job: Want to print graphics and text directly onto a CD after you burn it? Casio's tiny CD-R Title Printer, the CW-50, will print both at 200 dots per inch directly from your PC. It costs $100 for the printer and about $10 for each inking cartridge, which should do about 20 CDs on both sides (one at a time, though). --Anne B. McDonald

CES Camera Shots

Vacation Video Memories Without Backaches: It wasn't that long ago when you had to hoist a camcorder onto your shoulder to shoot. Now Sony has digital videocams that fit in the palm of your hand and weigh only 12 ounces. The company's new MicroMV Handycams, the DCR-IP5 and the DCR-IP7BT, provide 500 lines of horizontal resolution, CD-quality sound, and a DVD-like thumbnail picture accessing feature. They use Sony MicroMV cassettes, which are 70 percent smaller than MiniDV tapes. This allows the camcorders to measure 1 7/8 by 4 by 3 1/8 inches. Each cassette is supposed to supply up to 60 minutes of high-quality digital video. The lack of heft comes at a premium, though: The IP5 costs $1299 and the IP7BT, $1699. --Anne B. McDonald]

Biometrics for the Masses: Can't remember passwords? Keep your eye on Panasonic's new Authenticam Iris Recognition Camera. For just $200, the USB device and its software offer state-of-the-art security, plus videoconferencing capabilities to boot. And as the Panasonic representative pointed out, "you aren't going to go blind" using it. --Tom Mainelli

I Am a Camera, Plus: You may never again say, "If only I'd brought my camera!" thanks to companies aiming to plug lenses onto every handheld device. Nexian, for example, introduced a $200 sleeve that fits on the back of Compaq's iPaq pocket PC and adds a 600-by-800 resolution SVGA camera, which is mounted on an arm that flips around to face you for wireless videoconferencing. A camera module will also be available for Sharp's upcoming Linux-based Zaurus handheld. And shutterbug jitterbuggers may like Daisy Technology's new PhotoClip combination MP3 player/digital camera, which comes in a $119 VGA version and a $139 1.3-megapixel version. The PhotoClip has 32MB of built-in memory and a compact flash slot to accommodate up to 512MB more, or you can use it to plug in a modem card and use the device as an Internet surveillance camera. --Sean Captain

Digital Odds 'n' Ends

A Cumbersome Traveling Companion: Most of us would probably take a stab at speaking sentences from a foreign phrase book when overseas. Ectaco goes one step further with its handheld device--but it's overkill. The new $250 Universal Translator UT-103 translates more than 3000 English phrases into French, German, and Spanish, out loud. After scrolling through the on-screen categorized menus, you speak the phrase you want translated and it will read back the appropriate equivalent using speech recognition. Depending on the noise level around you, the Translator can get confused. And there's no way to tell if the phrase you want is on the list; you either consult the manual or dig through the on-screen text. If your needed phrase isn't included, you're on your own. (Try gesturing frantically with your hands.) --Aoife McEvoy

A Real Yawner: Handspring and JetLog debuted a new $100 Springboard plug-in called the 24x7 PowerNapping module. Here's the premise: The light sleep of a quick power nap can refresh you; but fall into deep REM sleep, and you're a goner. Here's how the JetLog helps: You hold the Visor in your hand and place your thumb over two metal contacts. During a light nap, your muscles remain firm; but when you slip into deep sleep, your muscles relax, your thumb slips off the contacts, and an alarm sounds. But the sound of the device falling out of your hand and smashing on the floor is probably enough to wake you anyway. --Sean Captain

Got a Cordless Phone You Love? If you want to make calls over the Internet, PhoneBridge by MHL Communications will let you yack online using your trusty cordless phone. You don't have to be tethered to a PC headset, just plug your regular telephone into the $130 PhoneBridge gadget and then hook up PhoneBridge to your PC's sound card. You can start making Net calls using either Windows Messenger or an existing service such as Net2Phone or DialPad. But $130 is pricey--so you'd need to really love that cordless phone of yours. --Aoife McEvoy

Floor Flushers

Best Floor Show: Those who couldn't get tickets for Cirque du Soleil's "O" water show at the Bellagio could still get a taste of the action at the Sharp Electronics booth. To highlight the latest models in its Aquos brand of pricey LCD televisions, Sharp brought in a giant glass water tank and hired a crew of buff men and shapely women in gold swimsuits to perform Olympic dives and water ballet for a cheering crowd. --Sean Captain

What the...? A very tall and lanky character in turquoise armor was prancing around, talking in robotic tones. Behind the clunky armor was a real female person--standing head and several shoulders above the average CES delegate. Taking on a role similar to that of the Pied Piper, it seemed, the robotic human attempted to lead bemused attendees to Samsung's booth. However, the connection to Samsung was anybody's guess. --Aoife McEvoy