CES Day-2: NVIDIA, Motorola, and you say you want to join the press corps?

Pre-show Day-2 is the official International Consumer Electronics Show Press Day.

Not to complain (cuz we wouldn’t do this if we didn’t just love technology so darn much), but I thought you might like to see what we go through to cover the latest and greatest technology announcements here at CES. Brian’s pic of the press room on his blog doesn’t quite capture the peak of the insanity. I took this picture after I left NVIDIA’s 12-1PM press conference (which I was encouraged to get to by 11:15 AM). Samsung’s press conference was scheduled to start right next door in the same corridor of the Venetian Hotel at 2PM. I immediately got in the line (?.. queue?… mob??) with my box lunch in hand (thank you NVIDIA), joining many of my colleagues on the floor while we waited for the next sheep herding… er press conference. (Somebody should contact PETA).

Nevertheless, as the hour is once again late, here are my top two announcements of the day.

 NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s press conference showed off a number of new applications for the Tegra-2 processor, including the 1st U.S. offering of the NVIDIA-powered LG Optimus 2x.

NVIDIA also confirmed that Microsoft Windows is being ported to the ARM-based Tegra-2, and that AT&T’s Motorola Atrix  4G (actually HSPA+) is also based on Tegra-2.

The finale of the NVIDIA press conference held perhaps the most disruptive announcement, however: Project Denver. With that announcement, NVIDIA moved directly into Intel’s dominance of the server market with a new “custom-designed” ARM-based processor. Here is the video of the announcement:

MOTOROLA

In their press conference, Motorola officially announced the widely anticipated 1st implementation of Google’s Honeycomb/Android 3.0 version for tablet computers. Apologies for the poor quality of the pics below, but the lighting in these press events is blinding and far from ideal on reflective screens.

Although the Motorola booth personnel would not confirm it, NVIDIA has stated that Tegra-2 is the processor in this XOOM tablet as well. There are a lot of cool features which I don’t have time to cover here, but this will also be the 1st 4G tablet in Q2 of this year, as it will be upgradeable for Verizon’s LTE network.

There is much more to talk about from today, but that will have to wait. Up early tomorrow for Day-3.