Category: CES-2010

If you paid any attention to the news coming out of this year's CES, you heard about, and possibly already condemned, the multitude of 3-D televisions to be released in the coming year. Instead of playing blackjack or pigging out at the buffet, we spent our days in Vegas running from one end of the Convention Center to the other, only stopping to don funny glasses and dodge flying cartoons. ...

While 3-D TVs and slate PCs stole most of the attention at CES, there were plenty of interesting developments afoot in the normally mundane world of laptops and netbooks. (Yes, we're lumping them together. What is a netbook but a laptop for people with nothing to do but check Facebook?) There were laptops made out of recycled plastics, new connectivity technologies, surprising Linux demos, and ...

We saw plenty of cool gadgets at this year's CES. But for every 3-D screen that needed no glasses, and for every hybrid laptop, there was at least one piece (but, more likely, two or three or ten pieces) of utter crap. There were digital photo frames, iPhone cases, video game controller trees -- so many useless and poorly conceived products, in fact, that it was tough to narrow it down to just ...

Get a group of geeks together, and someone is going to come up with something genius. But for every clever creation, there are several bizarre projects that address a need too obscure to ever have been a concern, or too strange for any consumer to even consider. Mostly, these ideas and items are discarded. The ones that pass through the collective weird-filter, however, end up at CES. ...

We're sure someone out there has already dubbed this the year of the tablet, and it's hard to blame them. Gadget makers all over CES were showing off slate and tablet devices of every stripe, some running NVIDIA's Tegra platform and Android, and some using Intel hardware to push Windows and Linux. But through the chaos, clear trends were forming, dividing lines being drawn. There were also a ...

We weren't surprised to see Ron Jeremy in Vegas -- after all, the Adult Entertainment Expo was just down the road -- but we were taken aback to find him and his massive... personality on the CES floor. Matched against emo-haired "porn pastor" Craig Gross, Jeremy entered into The Great Porn Debate to discuss the role of skin flicks in society and the necessity of Internet filters for preventing ...

Automotive manufacturers are currently embarking on a significant modernization movement, increasingly transforming cars into technology-fueled mobile offices. [Ed. note: Sounds like safe, non-distracted driving!] Numerous companies are using this week's CES festivities as an opportunity to showcase the latest developments in auto tech, some of those being new dashboard features and upgrades. ...

Share If you're going to market a cell phone as "unbreakable," you better make darn sure that it is, in fact, unbreakable. Otherwise, it's like painting a bull's-eye on your back and walking around town telling folks you're Superman. During a CES 2010 demonstration, BBC News reporter Dan Simmons called one manufacturer's bluff, and felled its supposed cell of steel. In this hilarious outtake, ...

While much of the consumer electronics industry seems to finally be recovering a bit (evidenced by the fact we didn't see the depressing preponderance of empty booths we did last year), the same can't be said for the in-car audio crowd. Gone were the multiple in-car TVs and stereo systems gobbling up power by the tens-of-thousands of watts. Instead, the floor was loaded with powerful but ...

Plowing through booth after booth in search of the best new gadgets, apps, and tech at CES always results in finding a few clunkers. We've got our list (coming soon), of course, but we decided to take the question of the worst to the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Frequently mentioned was 3-D TV, which seems to be splitting attendees; many listed it as a product they'd be buying in the ...

CES is all about the hottest and latest tech, from 3-D TVs (yawn) to every single kind of e-reader imaginable (double yawn). And while the circuitry of these devices typically blows minds, their exteriors are often an afterthought. It's like having Einstein's brain in the body of Brian Peppers [note to eds.: or replace Peppers with Sam the Chinese Crested Dog] -- genius, but a little tough on the ...

2009: The Year of Getting Small It is the unwritten destiny of all consumer electronics to be as small and convergent as possible. Despite the economy being soundly in the crapper, engineers decided to pursue that goal with a fervor, costs be damned. Fulfilling the dream that apparently no one ever really cared to dream, a host of companies pumped out unbelievably small Pico and Micro and ...

2008: The Year the Other Shoe Dropped As the beginnings of the sub-prime mortgage disaster were becoming apparent, and as the U.S. economy began to hiccup before it nose-dived later that year, CES's usual celebration of pricey high-end gear was decidedly out of step with the national mood. Intel showcased WiMAX by hosting wireless service from a truck, and LG debuted a purported WiMAX ...

2007: The Year of Cloudy Vistas and Unforeseen Gamechangers It's fitting that 2007, when the stock market was soaring to new highs, when hubris and irrational exuberance were the national mood, was also the year that produced some of the most spectacular fails in tech history. Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, Palm, and the rest of the phone makers blissfully showed off their latest wares ...

2005: The Year of the Home Invasion While HDTVs had already become a perennial focus at CES by '05, and while the year's screen-size arm's race winner was Samsung's positively ridiculous 102-incher, the big CES trend story that year was the digital home. Earnest but misguided product engineers shoved LCDs and Net connections into everything imaginable, hoping that something would stick. ...