L've covered probably 60 per cent of the stands at CES and highlights include:
LG's stand - its large LCDs are amazing and the LG Shine is a great evolution on the Chocolate. The Blu-ray, HD-DVD combo drive is great.
Microsoft - they've gone all out to impress and several things do - Home Server, bringing Xbox Live to Vista PC gamers, IPTV over Xbox Live (the demo wa simpressive, but our broadband speeds won't support it for a few years). The Zune integration into the Ford cars also looks good.
HP - Their new media centre PC with touch screen is a beautiful device and perfect for (upperclass) lounges. Don't know the price but it can't be cheap.
HD-DVD stand - A great place to kick back and watch King Kong in hi-def.
Nokia - the N800 internet tablet is pretty nice, especially with Skype functionality. Still, I'd rather see a built-in hard drive than 128MB of onboard memory and two SD card slots.
An alternate version to the story on the Herald website at the moment.
TECHNOLOGY
By Peter Griffin
LAS VEGAS – It was a competition to see who could talk louder on the phone yesterday as the US technology industry reluctantly made way for their new rival in the mobile phone business, iPod maker Apple.
Confirming widespread speculation that it was developing a music player and phone in one device, Apple used its MacWorld conference in San Francisco to unveil the iPhone, a slim, black mobile that Apple boss Steve Jobs hopes will “make history”.
Jobs aims to sell 10 million iPhones to claim one per cent of the mobile phone market by 2008 and will use the popularity of its iTunes music service to try and do so.
Apple has sold 67 million iPods since 2001 and 1.5 billion iTunes.com songs.
The iPhone will come with either four or eight gigabytes of memory, enough to store thousands of songs – as much as Apple’s existing iPod Nano music players. The iPhone will sell for US$500 – US$600, though the phone will not go on sale here until next year.
Apple is working exclusively with mobile operator Cingular to launch the iPhone in the US. It’s unclear yet whether the iPhone would be made available to both Vodafone and Telecom on its debut here.
Among the many details of the phone up in the air until yesterday was its name. Networking equipment maker Cisco owns the ‘iPhone’ trademark and has been negotiating to licence use of it to Apple.
But those discussions were reportedly unfinished when Jobs demonstrated the functions of the new phone in front of an audience of thousands.
Music on the phone has also been a strong theme at the other big technology show under way this week, the CES electronics expo being held in Las Vegas.
News of the iPhone’s arrival stole the thunder of computer industry veteran Michael Dell, who urged the computer makers to adopt recycling programmes and kicked off a scheme at Dell to plant a tree for every computer it sells.
Elsewhere at CES, show visitors watched Jobs deliver his speech as several of Apple’s rivals Nokia, LG and Motorola among them, launched their own new phones. The debut of the iPhone effectively kills the Motorola Rokr, a phone Apple developed with the mobile handset maker that has not been eclipsed by the iPhone which Apple has developed itself.
The arrival of Apple TV continues another theme of CES – the move towards a digital hub for the lounge where users can store music, videos and photos and stream content wirelessly from their computers to their TVs. Apple TV, which will sell from next month for $498, tackles the market Microsoft has so far held with its Windows Media Center software, which has been built into several versions of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, which goes on sale later this month. Apple with Apple TV will join Microsoft with its Xbox 360, Sony with the Playstation 3 and a large number of other companies in the battle to become the device of choice for the digital living room.
Peter Griffin attended CES as a guest of Microsoft
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