Maximum PC CES RSS Feed

New Rumors About Microsoft's Pink, Tablet

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:17:59 -0500

More details about the mysterious Microsoft “Pink” project continue to leak out (including a possible drawing). The current consensus is that Pink will be a Microsoft branded mobile phone. However, Microsoft would most likely outsource the actual construction of the handset. It will probably have some sort of integration with Zune services, like the excellent Zune Pass subscription based music service.

The Windows Mobile 7 OS will likely serve as the underlying architecture for Pink. Several sites have indicated that Microsoft may start talking about Pink at CES in January. Though, the gadgets themselves probably won’t make an appearance until later in 2010. These rumors about a Microsoft phone have been swirling ever since the software giant acquired Danger in 2008.

Rumors also abound about a possible Microsoft tablet. Microsoft has mentioned that they intended to make a smaller version of the Surface, and this could be it. The initiative may be codenamed “Oahu”, or at least was at some point. However, it’s likely that Microsoft is waiting for Apple to tip its tablet hand. Is any of this a smart move for Microsoft?

5 Most Awesome Things at CES

Norman Chan — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:00:00 -0600

Palm Pre is All Win

Finally, someone has announced an iPhone killer that we can all get behind. The Palm Pre surprised everyone at CES with its best-of-all-worlds specs and features. We’re talking about a multi-touch phone with slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a truly innovative web-integrated user interface.

Early impressions indicate a really smooth and fast interface and web-browsing experience, with all the productivity and media features that we’ve come to expect from a modern smartphone. It’s as if Palm designers made a list of everything that was lacking from the iPhone and made a point to incorporate it here. Real GPS, MMS messaging, USB port, and removable battery lets Palm blow a raspberry at the competition. Copy and paste is just gravy. But too bad it won’t be converting iPhone users anytime in the near future – the Pre is a Sprint exclusive.

Touch is Really Good

Img credit: pcmag.com

We’re as guilty as everyone who’s compared large touch-screen displays to the gesture-controlled interface shown in the movie Minority Report, but this year’s CES was the first time that futuristic technology actually felt within our grasp (or touch, at least). Intel’s booth showcased a prototype touch screen on a special glass pane with images projected onto it. The single-touch capacitive panel let us intuitively maneuver around a 3D representation of a showroom to read about Intel’s Core-i7 processor.

What was special about this demonstration wasn’t the technology used in the touch screen, but the unique implementation with a transparent panel. This prototype may not have practical applications or ever come to market, but we’re still enamored by anything that’ll take us back to 2002 and let us relive that awesome Minority Report scene.

Windows 7 Charms Us with Betta

It might’ve been the worst kept secret at CES, but announcement of the Windows 7 public Beta was still music to our ears. And despite initial download-server woes last Friday, this beta release has been pretty successful for Microsoft. We were surprised at how easy the installation process was, whether from installing on a new partition, upgrading from within Vista, or even running with Boot Camp on a Macbook Pro.

The OS’s performance also doesn’t disappoint – it’s been as stable as rock – and the new UI improvements (taskbar, UAC, libraries, etc) feel like substantial improvements to the Windows user experience. And with the beta ending in August, there’s a real possibility of Windows 7 being dated for sometime this year. The sooner we can forget about Vista’s growing pains and look forward to a fresh Windows restart, the better.

Ultra-Thin is In

The central CES hall was predictably dominated by fleets of flatpanels, but the models unveiled this year were noticeably more modest than in years past. Gone were 150” monstrosities and the battle for the largest screen size, replaced by the newest fad in LCD monitors – ultra-thin displays. Hitachi debuted a line of 1.5” deep HDTVs, while Pioneer and JVC both amazed us with prototypes that measured less than 10mm thick. But it was Samsung that showed everyone up with their 6.5mm thin panel, taking home the “thinnest TV” title. Advances in LED backlighting is what enables the these displays to be so anorexic, with the possibility of going even thinner once OLED technology is more developed. We don’t know if these ultra-thin displays will make good role models for the next generation of image-conscious televisions, but we have to admit – they’re damn sexy.

Don’t You Dare Call These Netbooks

img credit: Brian Solis

While every system maker was showing off new netbooks, Dell and Sony bucked the trend by revealing systems that defiantly reject the netbook moniker. Dell’s 13” Adamo is a new brand that looks like a Macbook Air-killer with its svelte form-factor and minimalist aluminum design. Hardware specs for this stylish ultra-portable have yet to be released, but Dell confirmed that this will be a high-end product produced in limited quantities.

img credit: Gizmodo

Sony, on the other hand, showed off a device that doesn’t quite fall into either the netbook or UMPC categories. The almost purse-sized Vaio P runs on a 1.33GHz Atom processor, 2GB of Ram, and boots into Vista, but also uses a Sony XMB-like instant-on OS for access to media and the internet (via built-in 3G). Starting at $900 (and going up to $1500 with storage upgrades), the Vaio P is another device that, unlike netbooks, doesn’t trade power for portability – if you can afford it.

Bonus: Light Attendance

Attendance falling 22% from last year may be a sign of the struggling economy, but at least it made walking through the typically packed exhibit floors much more manageable. We didn’t have to weave through swarms of packed crowds to make our meetings, and even the legendary taxi line waits (well over an hour in the past) were bearable. Hopefully exhibitors weren’t too discouraged by the emptier halls and will return next year.

Check back tomorrow for our Worst of CES picks!

Hands-on with Asus's 18.4" Gaming Laptop and New Netbooks

Norman Chan — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:30:39 -0600

Asus is here in full force at CES, showing off their vast selection of netbooks and notebooks. We darted straight to the systems that featured the most updates to existing lineups, including the 1000HE, S121, and 101H tablet. We also got our hands on Asus's newly announced W90Vp gigantic gaming laptop. 18.4 inches comes close to Dell and HP's record of 20.1 inches in their previous lap crushers, and is still too unwieldy, in our opinion. Still, we admire the effort and can't help but be awed by the alleged 15000+ 3DMark 2006 score in this "portable" beast.

First up is the 1000HE, which shows off the new chicklet keyboard design (all the rage these days). Aside from having more comfortable keys, another big change is the relocation of the right-side Shift key to a more conventional location. On previous Asus Eee PCs, the Shift key was located in an awkward spot on the right side of the directional keys. Glad to see that this has been rectified.

Additionally, the 1000HE features an upgraded 6-cell Lithium Ion battery. The new battery is more dense than the previous model, and takes up less physical space while actually providing more juice. Asus's internal testing (which you should take with a grain of salt) rates the battery at 9.5 hours.

Not much information was given on the sleek-looking 101H netbook, except that it's clearly a 10" tablet/netbook hybrid with a swivel touchscreen, powered by an N270 Atom processor. The Asus rep we talked to revealed that the screen is multi-touch and can be used with either your fingers or an included stylus (indicating that it uses IR touchscreen technology). It'll also have an optional TV tuner option.

The S121 notebook on display falls outside the netbook category at 12.1 inches, even though its powered by an Atom processor. It's 1 inch thick, weighs in at 3 pounds, and will start at $1649. The reason for the high price? It's equipped with a sizable 512GB SSD drive, the largest for a notebook in this category. A 128GB drive option will also be available, and drops the price down to $1099.

One interesting tidbit about the S121 is that it uses at 4-cell Lithium Polymer battery, which is rated for 8 hours of use. Lithium Polymer is the kind of battery that the new 17" Macbook Pros utilze for their ability to be molded in any shape. In this case, the removable battery is crafted to be ultra thin.

Finally, we handled the W90Vp 18.4" gaming laptop. Its size is matched by its heft-- this laptop is not meant for carrying around in your backpack. The listed specs indicated a Core 2 Duo processor, though we hope that a Core 2 Quad option will be available in the future. The particular mode on display was powered by Nvidia mobile graphics, but an ATI Crossfire option (using the newly announced 4870 mobility series) is also in the cards.

Other features we noticed: a full sized keyboard with numpad, 2 megapixel webcam, blu-ray drive, plenty of data ports, and Altec Lansing 5.1 surround sound (with speakers flanking all four sides). No word on pricing just yet, but stay tuned!

CES 2009: Opera Flaunts Device 9.7 SDK, Browsing on Wii Expected to Improve

Pulkit Chandna — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:14:18 -0600

It took nearly the whole of last year for Opera Software to develop version 9.7 of its Device SDK. Now that the SDK is ready, Opera has decided to flaunt it blithely at CES. Among the major additions to the SDK is Opera Link, which “continuously synchronizes your bookmarks and Speed Dial between any computers, mobile phones and now devices.”

The future of the internet is in providing an experience that traverses various platforms and so Opera has made a decent start with Opera Link. Cnet expects the Opera Device 9.7 SDK to shine brightest on the Wii’ Internet Channel as it will allow Wii users to easily circumvent the console’s tedious input method.

The 9.7 SDK also brings along a much smoother hardware accelerated version of Opera Zoom. The SDK is available to all device manufactures interested in offering an enhanced internet experience on their devices.

CES 2009 Keynote Liveblog

Will Smith — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:30:00 -0600

Team Maximum PC is here at the Venetian hotel/casino in Las Vegas, attending the Microsoft CES keynote. This will be the first keynote since Bill Gate's retirement, and Steve "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Ballmer is filling in to kick off the conference. This is Microsoft's chance to wow techies after Apple dropped the ball yesterday with its decidedly unspectacular MacWorld keynote. Windows 7 will undoubtedly be the hot topic of tonight's presentation, but we're hoping for a few surprises as well. Ballmer has also historically been an energetic and entertaining speaker, so we know we're in for a good show, at least. Keep your eyes peeled on MaximumPC.com and this liveblog page for all the latest updates!

Important: Log into your Maximumpc.com account for instant updates as we post them. Otherwise, there might be a slight delay before you see the latest liveblog update.

7:51 - Oh shit, they're making us listen to tripod again. RUN!

7:50 - There's a 1mm flexible active display on the stage. it's similar to an e-Ink display. hopefully something you can roll up into your backpack. This is how Ballmer wants to read in the future. I'm ready for that too. The thing in the lower left corner of the shot below is the e-ink flexible display. RAD.

Looks like that's it. Good night and good luck guys. We'll add a full gallery of shots in a bit.

7:45 - Janet is showing a digital anatomy textbook that's pulling the info it displays from the Cloud (I guess that means the internet). she can zoom and see a full 3D model of the human body. This is pretty cool. She said "the cloud" again.

There's an animation showing what synapse firing actually looks like. This tech demo looks more like something that was Hollywood'd than a actual tech demo.

The document is using semantic analysis to determine what she's looking at, what's part of her classwork, etc.There's an unbelieveable knowledge tree of everything she's ever used here. It's kind of like that Visual Thesaurus app, or the musicplasma thing that was hot on the internet a few years ago.

More in a moment.

7:40 - Robbie Bach has left the stage. My ass is numb from sitting here for so long."The TV screen will not be left behind from the kind of innovation that's coming". Is this the big reveal of something amazing? Steve says we're on the cusp of a revolution in technology. Moore's Law has morphed from a world that delivers more speed to a world that delivers more processors. This is tough to do, but the industry can do it. Screens and displays will be everywhere. HD displays are getting cheaper, lighter and more portable. PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices wll become a single platform for creating experiences. Apps will automatically adjust to the capabilites of the devices you run them on. Software will learn what you like and predict your needs. Your software will know what to do to prep you for a biz trip - book hotel, air, etc. I think someone at Microsoft has been talking to William Gibson.

Janet Galore is coming up to tell us what Microsoft Research has been up to next.

7:38 - The kid doing the KODU demo (Sparrow) is hardcore with the radial menus. I forget how awesome they are if they're fast enough that you can actually use them. She was using the radial menus to adjust items in her game world. These are incredibly deep radial menus, compared to other apps. This is a pretty impressive tool, and she's controlling it entirely using the Xbox controller. There are lots of little games in the world,

7:35 - Looking at the Xbox Netflix queue, and looking at 30 Rock in Netflix. He's going to watch episode 2, and we're going to stream it in realtime. You can do this today, although I'm not sure if it's in HD. 12,000 TV shows and movies available via Netflix. The fast forward dialog is really neat, but it's not anything new. You can do this today. He has a phone that you can get on Windows Mobile total access that will let you control your queue on Windows Mobile today. it's like iFlix on the iPhone. Essentially, the phone is the selection device for the stuff in the queue.

Microsoft is winning in music games. I can attest to this, we play a lot of Rock Band on Xbox Live at the Smith house. Xbox Live accounts for 80% of song downloads on all platforms. Artists are using this as a way to introduce new music and expand their audiences.

KODU is a way for kids and others to create their own games on Xbox Live and share them wtih other people.

7:30 -This spring, Microsot will launch Xbox Live Primetime. Scheduled times to play games with your friends.

It looks like they're going to have real, human hosts to host these games. The 1vs100 host seems to actually be talking to Robbie. I wonder if it will really work like this when it goes live.

Netflix is on the screen... More on that in a moment.

7:25 - Talking about Halo now. Do you guys care about Halo? Post in the comments if you do. Average players put in 150 hours of Halo on Xbox Live.Halo Wars will be out Feb 28, and will be rated T. There will be a demo on Feb 5.

Halo 3 ODST will ship this fall. It's a more traditional Halo game, with new characters, new scenarios, etc. This is in 2009, so it should be a good year for Xbox again.

New Xbox Experience (NXE) has increased downloads 60%. 10B hours of gameplay and interaction on the service. The NXE includes avatars now. They're "virtual yous" not virtual Miis :) 33% more friends now than people had prior to the NXE launch.

7:20 - Robbie Back is on the stage. (He's the president of the entertainment division, including Xbox and other cool stuff).

"Entertainment is at its best when you share the experience." Last year, Robbie has a Ford car on stage, when they introduced Sync. They're continuing big work with Ford, including Sync with TellMe built into it. Sync is pretty cool, I've used it. I like it.

Zune had a great year. They won critics over, and the new software's pretty good. 2M people on Zune Social. They drove innovation with subscriptions.

10M unique users a month using Media Center to access entertainment on their PCs. Average session time is about 90 mintes, coincidentally, the length of most feature length movies. 2.5M people world wide subscribed to MS MediaRoom. They're adding PVR stuff to MediaRoom, without requiring recording. There will be interactive apps that will appear on your TV. This is really not exciting stuff.

Xbox is the big success story for 2008. It was the best holiday for Xbox, and best year ever. 28M consoles, with more games bought on Xbox than any other platform. They're sub-$200 first too. Momentum will accelerate for Xbox. Xbox Live has 17M members (70% growth).

7:15 - Tripod is on stage. We'll take a moment to enjoy their musical stylings while we fill in some back pics.

PS. They're making save point jokes. They're pretty funny, but I think the bar at CES is pretty low :)

7:12 - On the right side of a hotmail message, there's a quick add pane, for resturants. It made it really easy to add the search results she wanted in an email. The What's New feed is being pulled into the services you use the most - hotmail, messenger, the homepage, and mobile. One more thing - her favorite new feature in messenger. She's recorded a video user tile. There are Dynamic Display pictures, so her user tile changes to match the emoticon. At the bottom of the pane, there's a tip about mortgage rates dropping to 5.23%. Next up, Robbie Back

7:10 - She's talking about touch now, which is built into the DNA of Windows 7. There are multiple gestures that are built into Microsoft apps, and the APIs are easy to integrate, she says.

Next up, mobile. Flash is built into the next version of Windows mobile, so she can watch hamster on a piano. Right on the phone.Now she's showing us a Samsung camera with a panoramic photo that it stitches together using software. it has a thing on the HUD that steers the direction she should point the camera. From the phone she was able to upload it to the net on the fly.

IE8 and Windows Live go together well. "Communicating and Sharing". People complain about being overloaded, with too many places to keep up with (Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc). Windows Live pull all the info from your contacts here. IE8 has context sensitive options for text on the page, so you can translate in the page on the fly and see what happens. These are called accelerators. Clicking through to photos seems to let you see slideshows and all sorts of other stuff. They seem to have social partnerships with pretty much everyone who has an API.

Next up Hotmail!

7:05 - Jumplist are accessible off of the Taskbar, they put app-specific recent options in the UI in a very accessible way. this is something that seems very power user-y for a demo. Next, she's talking about home networks - 50% of households in the US have more than 1 PC. In Windows 7, Homegroup will setup a home network in 3 steps, giving you easy access to other PCs and devices, without fooling with user accounts and permissions. She can access other PCs and play music, view photos, etc. She can control playback on multiple devices, I assume using UPNP or something.

7:00 - Partners have sold more than 20M Windows Mobile phones. Verizon will offer Live Search on all phones in the US. Is that really a good feature? I wonder if the facebook integration means that the Windows address book will pull from Facebook. Now Charlotte Jones is demoing Winodws 7, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile. Robbie Back - from the entertainment group will be after her.

She's talking about Life Wihtout Walls. Her desktop has a bunch of windows open, between 5 and 15 for a typical user. IT's easier to move between them on the taskbar. This is something that crrently sucks on pretty much every OS, including OS X. Lower right corner lets you peek through the windows and see your desktop. You can move around your PC quicker and easier.

6:58 - Windows Live Essentials - Mail, Messenger, Phone - available worldwide, and works on everything XP, Vista, and Windows 7 Beta. Partnership with Facebook. Will deliver the best social experience wiht half a billion Windows Live users. Facebook stuff will audomatically be published to Windows Live if you want. Windows Live Essentials will be on all Dell's consumer and SMB PCs.

7:00 - The things that made Windows work, the "special sauce". Microsoft is going to break down barriers and transform what Windows is. It's going to move from a PC operating system to all sorts of other stuff in the cloud, on mobile, and in embedded. He's excited about Windows 7. They're saying it's going to be the best version of Windows ever. They always say that though.

Windows 7 will make everyday tasks faster, easier, boot more quickly, have longer battery life, and fewer alerts. It wll make your media better. It will enable cool new user interface stuff, like touch. Beta is being released today, TechNet and MSDN customers can get Windows 7 right now. 2 days from now the beta will be available online for all users.

6:50 - Windows is the thing that's going to make all this happen. Windows is the language that more than 1B people speak, in every culture around the world. Windows is nothing without the hardware it runs on. They're trying to bring that same synergy to phones by working with the incredible folks in the hardware ecosystem. They're rolling a video with all the phones and PCs now. The laptops they're showing are a veritable best and worst of PC design. I love using novel materials in PCs, but some of these simply don't make sense. The new HTC high-resolution Windows Mobile phones look promising. I can't wait to see how ifast it's running on the show floor tomorrow. Steve's talking about how there are really PCs at every price point and for every budget. That, I think we can all agree on. Steve is a PC, and proud of it.

Next up, the future of Windows

6:45 - The big message seems to be that they have work to do to bring computing to everyone in the world. TVs should be computers, convergence is a word he's used a lot. Tech is converging on three screens: the phone, the PC, and the TV. They're becoming a single seamless ecosystem. 1B mobile phones are sold each year, and they're the first computing experience for most people. Smart phones will make up 50% of the mobile phone market. The TV is the oldest screen. The resolution is better, but the capabilities are the same. TVs will be more connected and capable, and the boundary between TV and computer will dissolve. The second thing they're working on is sound and visual interfaces for these devices. Speech, gestures, handwriting will become normal way of interaction. Keyboaard and mouse aren't going away, but everything's going to become more natural. Final opportunity is connected interface. Most of your electronics are disconnected: phone, camera, web, are all separate. That's starting to change, but it's going to get better still More in a sec.

6:40 - Here comes Steve! He's talking about Bill's transition, and the charity work that the Gates Foundation does.They's showing screens from the next version of Windows Mobile as an aside. It looks very slick. He's going to talk about the economy, the computer industry, and the prospects for the next year. "We're all feeling it, and it's impact will be with us for some time." Steve sounds like he's yelling. I guess this is the way he always sounds. The message is that we shouldn't scale back our optimism or innovation. "Digital lives will only continue to get richer"

6:35 - Steve Ballmer's up next. We're watching another video, this time featuring happy looking people using computers set to uptempo club music.

6:25 - The best beatboxers I've ever seen are on stage now. Surprisingly, I'm not being facetious. They're integrating CES into their art, which has made them about 30% less entertaining. They video that's running in the background is pretty impressive. People walk from screen to screen, everything's all sync'd up and stuff.

The president of the CEA is onstage now. Be back in a moment.

6:16 -- Keynote begins in 15 mintues! We're here!

Toshiba Updates Qosmio and Satellite Laptop Lines

Pulkit Chandna — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:11:38 -0600

Toshiba has expanded its Qosmio and Satellite laptop families. Up first is the new Qosmio X305-Q725 that has been designed keeping the gamer in mind. The notebook has a 17-inch display and derives all its muscle from an Intel Core 2 Quad processor and its NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX GPU. As for storage, it has a 64GB SSD. The design is unpalatable and nearly every sensible man can be expected to bristle at its very sight. The ugly Qosmio can be yours for $2,699.99 only.

Toshiba has also unveiled a 15-inch budget notebook under its Satellite sub-brand with a price tag of $549. The Satellite L305-S5921 is a no-frills notebook with a T3400 Pentium processor, 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, a 160GB HDD and 128MB of Intel integrated graphics.

The Satellite E105-S1402 is the third notebook to have been launched. It has a 14-inch display, an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 processor, 320GB HDD, 4GB memory and 320GB HDD. It is available now for 1,199.

Lastly, Toshiba has also rolled out customized color lids for many of its Protégé family of notebooks.

How Will CES be Affected by the Recession?

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:41:39 -0600

In this tough economy just about everyone is feeling the strain. Car companies, internet business and the computer manufacturing industry have all felt pressure from the dwindling U.S. dollar, and because of this it’s expected that CES won’t be the monument that it has been in previous years.

CES 2009 is reporting that only 130,000 people will be attending this year’s show, down from the 141,000 that attended last year. The exhibitors aren’t showing up with the same force either, down from last year’s 3,000 to 2,700. Supposedly, there’s still plenty of room left at some of Vegas’ more convenient hotels, something that was blasphemy in past years.

It’s expected that this year’s show will mostly contain green gadgets, aimed at a frugal crowd. Items such as netbooks and OLED displays are expected to dominate just about every booth.

Image Credit: CES

New Flexible OLED Screen Demoed, Designed to be Worn Around Wrist

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:09:35 -0600

The Universal Display Corporation (UDC) has finally started handing out details about their wrist-worn, flexible OLED prototype that they’ve been building with assistance from the US Department of Defense.

The 4-inch OLED screen will be meant for military servicemen in the near future. But, as you can see, the prototype still has plenty of work that needs to be done. UDC does plan to bring a working version with them to CES, allowing the curious public a hands-on chance with the OLED future. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out.

Image Credit: Universal Display Corporation