Best of CES

Staff reporter Joanna Stern hosts this video, highlighting the achievements of our 2008 Best of CES award winners.

You don’t have to throw out your router to get blazing fast 802.11n speeds. Netgear’s 5 GHz Wireless-N HD Access Point/Bridge ($129) can be added to any existing network, whether you want to stream high-def video or enjoy online gaming sans the annoying lag.

When you pair two of the units together, you have the HD/Gaming 5 GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit ($229), enabling users to get their game on while simultaneously streaming high-def videos. Because the two pieces of this solution automatically discover each other, you get easy plug-and-play installation and a rock-solid connection between media devices in the living room (like the Xbox, Slingbox, Apple TV, and Netgear’s own Digital Entertainer HD) and your PC or network storage device.

Small and discrete Bluetooth headsets usually suffer from poor audio quality, but the Invisio Q7 ($149) is different. This tiny device, which will be available in February, sports a bone conduction microphone that captures vibrations in the wearer’s jawbone and converts them to sound without picking up ambient noise.

Just as important, the Q7 is comfortable enough to wear all day, thanks to its patented Soft Spring, which adapts to the contours of your ear. Add in up to 6 hours of talk time and an easy-to-use, three-button interface, and you have an ideal accessory for road warriors.

There’s security and then there’s near-impenetrable security. The sleek and sexy Maxtor BlackArmor takes the prize as the Fort Knox of the storage world, as the first external hard drive to back up and secure your data using Seagate’s DriveTrust hardware encryption.

If you’re wondering about the thoroughness of the government-grade AES protection, how’s this for a kicker? If you somehow lose or forget your password, you’ll have to perform a “secure erase” to wipe the drive clean in order to gain access. That’s hardcore security for only $149.

Media streamers were a dime a dozen at this year’s show, so only a truly envelope-pushing home entertainment system would rise above the others to take the crown as best in class: the Logitech Squeezebox Duet Network Media Player.

Simply hook up the receiver to a stereo system or home entertainment center and you can stream music from your Mac or PC via Wi-Fi. Multiple Squeezebox Duet systems allow multimedia mavens to sync the receivers together to broadcast a song throughout the home, or more remarkably, listen to different songs in each room. Courtesy of Logitech’s SqueezeNetwork, the $399 Squeezebox Duet features always-on Internet radio and aggregation (from sources such as MP3Tunes, Pandora, and Rhapsody) that lets you stream music even when your notebook is off.

It’s been a long time coming, but the much-anticipated Slacker Portable is ready to shake up the digital music world. Available in 15-, 25-, and 40-station capacities (Slacker measures the storage by the number of stations, as each station contains dozens upon dozens of songs), the Slacker Portable allows users to sync their favorite tracks from Slacker’s online Internet radio service via USB 2.0 or over the air via Wi-Fi, and to toss in a mix of their own MP3, WMA, and AAC files.

The built-in touch strip and scroll wheel make it simple to navigate the beautiful (and massive) 4-inch display, which allows music fans to view album art, reviews, and artist bios. All in all, the Slacker Portable faithfully recreates the look and feel of the web-based application, and looks to be the most intriguing player of 2008.

One thing that can be said firmly is that 2008 is going to be quite a year in notebooks, and with those notebooks people are going to want strong peripherals that make their system’s features stand out. Logitech’s diNovo Mini is a palm-sized wireless keyboard that lets you sit on your couch and control your PC.

The svelte black and silver Bluetooth 2.0 diNovo isn’t only stylish enough to keep in your living room, but the keyboard controls are comfortable and very simple to use. We love the orange and green backlighting and the unique ClickPad pointing device, which, based on the flick of a switch, can serve as either a touchpad for point and click browsing or as a directional pad to navigate menus within Windows Media Center.

The Logitech diNovo’s awesome form factor and price of $150.00 stood out to us amongst every other accessory we have seen at the show.

Whether you’re looking to share PowerPoint slides in the conference room or watch HD content on a big screen, you can’t go wrong with the highly versatile Optoma HD65. In a convention hall crowded full of new projectors, the HD65 stood out because of its low price, light weight, and superior image quality.

Sporting a Texas Instruments DLP for enhanced colors and brightness, a native 720p resolution, 1,600 lumens, a 4000:1 contrast ratio, a slew of connectivity ports (HDMI 1.3, VGA, component, composite, S-Video, +12v trigger, and USB), and a $999 MSRP, the HD65 is a projector that every road warrior should have in tow.

Yahoo has improved its powerful and versatile cell phone offering with a more intuitive design, a highly personalized home page, and the ability to add widgets from third parties like eBay and MySpace. It’s an easier-to-use, more developer-friendly platform that will help users access the information they want more quickly.

Available on the 30 devices now in beta with hundreds more to come, Yahoo Go 3.0 also does a better job than its predecessor of updating you on what’s new since you last launched the application, whether it’s alerting you to new e-mails or new photos posted to your Flickr account. And because the Home widget lets you deck it out with mobile snippets of your favorite content from around the Web, this service will feel like it’s made just for you.

Motorola takes music phones to a new level with the ROKR E8, which uses innovative ModeShift technology to transform this glossy handset into a music player. With the touch of a button the perfectly flat virtual dialpad disappears and is replaced by music playback controls, and they feel like real buttons because of the amazing work Motorola has done to improve haptics technology.

A variable-speed FastScroll navigation wheel makes it simple to scroll through the ROKR E8’s menus by sliding your thumb, as well as up to 1,500 songs stored on the 2GB of memory. And the sound quality rivals what you would expect from standalone music players, whether you’re listening through traditional earphones (plugged into the 3.5mm jack) or the powerful speaker.

Sleek and smart, the IdeaPad U110 is one of Lenovo’s first notebooks made for consumers, and it packs an awful lot of innovation into a 2.3-pound package.

This 11-inch laptop makes securing your system simple with VeriFace Face Recognition, which leverages software in combination with the built-in camera to log you in and make passwords obsolete. The IdeaPad U110 also includes Dolby Home Theater technology for robust audio and optional solid state drive technology for the ultimate in performance and battery life.

It’s all wrapped up in a stylish textured design that features a red aluminum alloy top cover and cool touch-sensitive media controls. If you can do without a built-in optical drive, the Lenovo IdeaPad U110 has it all.

I’ll admit GPS was a tough category this year. The market is exploding, and there are a couple of emerging technologies that make us really excited for next year, but in truth, they’re just not here in finished products just yet.

But all is not lost. Garmin (along with MSN Direct) came through with the nüvi 880. Its coolest feature is its voice recognition combined with a remote that straps to your steering wheel. Anyone who has a Bluetooth headset knows how this works. You touch a button to signal that you’re ready to talk, and it goes from there. What’s nice about that is that you don’t have to reach over to touch the device itself, so you can keep your hands on the wheel.

Available in the second quarter for $999, the the nüvi 880 isn’t cheap, but it’s the best voice-recognition model we’ve seen to date.

There were plenty of high-definition camcorders at this year’s show, but none of them rivals the innovation inside Sony’s HDR-UX20. This model not only captures footage at an impressive 1920 x 1080 pixels, it offers face detection for both photos and videos, allocated more pixels to the detected face on the fly. We really like the Face Roll Index, which remembers specific faces and lets you sort accordingly. The HDR-UX20 also has a built-in zoom mic, so as you zoom in closer visually on a subject, you should be able to hear what he or she is saying.

You won’t find more recording flexibity on any camcorder. You can record to the built-in 8 GB of internal memory (about an hour of footage in 1920 HD mode), Memory Stick Pro DUO, or DVD media. And you can copy images and videos from the internal memory or Memory Stick to DVD for playback. A 2.3-MP CMOS censor in combination with a BIONZ image processor ensures crisp video footage with a minimum amount of noise, and you can capture 4-MP still shots. If you’re going to shoot in high-def, you won’t find a more versatile or powerful option for the price.