CES First looks

BY Cathy Margolin, Reviews Editor

 At the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, there were tons of new products, most of which were larger, faster improvements on previous products such as 102 inch Plasma TV's, faster 64 bit computers from AMD, more connectivity for stereo in the entire home, and more home automation. The war between Blu-Ray DVD standard and HD-DVD standard is starting with some DVD players starting to ship or soon to be shipped (Recall VHS vs Beta??). Some of the brightest products are below.

Sandisk announced their newest Cruzer flash drives will contain the U3 standard for portable devices. You will ask – what is U3?  It is a  new standard for portable applications that are resident on the thumb drives and can be carried from computer to computer without leaving   any trace on each computer.  This means your favorite software such as Firefox, Yahoo toolbar, Portable version of RoboForm for passwords and many more other applications including your profiles,  preferences, passwords, favorites can be carried on this flash drive, used and then just ejected, thereby leaving no trace behind. Visit the U3.com website for applications and flash memory cards that use this standard.

 SanDisk also announced that they would be the provider for the SanDisk Rolling Stones Grūvi™Card  miniSD (formerly transflash ) cards for the Verizon wireless VCAST service for music downloads, within minutes without needing to convert file formats, download songs, or identify compatible players. 

The new Palm Treo 700w cell phone will be running Windows Mobile 5 instead of the Palm operating system. It is available today at Verizon Wireless, with EVDO high speed network but no built in Wi-Fi. I talked to a beta tester and she loved it (she only has 12-15 Pocket PC devices currently including phones from 3 providers). Bluetooth and EVDO network availability are included. You can very easily synch with Outlook- calendar, contacts, email and also just move over Word and Excel files without any third party programs involved as with the Palm OS, and run them using Word and Excel on the Pocket PC Treo. It will also play MP3 and has an SD slot for storage  and/or any other functions you many want to add (I was told that Socket makes a very good wi-fi card that will work here).  Current price is $399.

Neatest small camera- The KODAK EASYSHARE V570 zoom digital camera is a  dual-lens digital still camera.  One lens is an ultra-wide angle lens (23 mm) and the other lens is an optical zoom lens (39 – 117 mm). All this into a sleek, pocket-size package less than an inch thick. It will also enable you to do panoramas with the 1st picture in the left part of the viewfinder so you can match up the images, and it will then stitch them all together seamlessly.  The viewfinder is a 2.5 inch screen- nice. It will be about $399 US and available later in January 2006.

Most Unusual- Cool IT Systems had a USB Beer (Beverage)  Can cooler that was thought up by their president after they had been designing cooling systems all day and someone said they needed a beer cooler - jokingly, and he went home and designed this. They actually make quite good coolers for PC units. They are working with case manufacturers to have their Freezone CPU Cooler included as part of a package.