CES Day-3: It's raining tablets!
Well here I am at the midnight hour again. I’ve got a pile of business cards in front of me, but no time right now to tell you all about everything - good & bad - that I reviewed at CES today. So, here are the briefest of notes:
- Videosurf - attempting a video version of Shazam.
- Anti Sleep Pilot - got it wrong. Attempts to keep driver awake by introducing yet another distraction, sort of like playing Simon with your dashboard.
- Phone Guard - got it right. Parental control of texting & driving. Also answers the question of how to enable use for non-driving passengers.
- Vulkano - looks like a nice competitor for Slingbox.
- Zeo - less onerous than a full blown sleep study. Yawn… I’m already sleepy.
- Iolo - please, make my PC faster!
- Jeffrey Stephenson Design - beautifully handcrafted PCs.
- Yurbuds - Unlike those cheapie disk-shaped things you get with an iPod, these look like they won’t fall out of my ears.
- Cinemin - wins my prize for most clever product name. A DLP-based pico-projector. Get it? Cine… min?
Intel - tablets galore. Windows, Android, MeeGo… shotgun approach?
But the day, and CES, have belonged to Verizon’s LTE announcements and the Motorola/Google Android-Honeycomb tablet. The trio of companies was represented on-stage in the morning’s keynote session, with Google providing a live demo of Honeycomb that went off just about flawlessly. I don’t know what they did to pull it off, but the repetitious (and certain to be ignored) requests to turn off all RF-enabled devices were apparently not required.
If you would like to get an idea of how Honeycomb differs from Gingerbread and its other Android predecessors, I took handheld video of the demo that you can watch here. I didn’t have a tripod for my Flip camera so my arm got tired, but I think its worth watching. Part I is Verizon plus Motorola, and Part II is mostly the Google demo.
Part II :
Steph commented:
I think your comment about a shotgun approach is on target. After walking the floor, pretty much hitting every offering including the international ones, I reached saturation on which one I wanted to take home. I believe key to adoption is going to be how well the underlying OS integrates with the particular form factor not necessarily the form factor itself. On and off the net.
