CES 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.

Talk about fast. thanks to its high-speed LSI processor, the Casio Exilim Pro EX-F1  can shoot up to 60 frames per second at 6 megapixels, ensuring you never miss a shot. Its continuous flash means you’re not stuck waiting for that, either. And, unlike D-SLRs, this prosumer camera can record movies at at an amazing 1,200 fps. That means you can really slow down the action and make out striking details.

We really liked the way the EX-F1 groups your shots together. If you take a bunch of shots in rapid succession, it shows you only the first one, so you can either select the whole group of them or move on to the next individual shot when you’re in Play mode. It’s just one of those things that tells you Casio has thought of everything.

Everex, the same company that recently released the $200 gOS Linux based laptop to Wal-Mart, today announced its little brother, the Everex CloudBook ultra-mobile PC.

Weighing in at just 2 pounds, the CloudBook certainly lives up to its near-weightless name. It features a VIA C7-M ultra-low voltage (ULV) CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, which helps achieve its 5 hour battery life on a 4-cell battery. By way of comparison, the Asus EeePC has a 900MHz Intel Celeron processor.

Everex’s CloudBook features the same 7 inch 800×480 resolution screen as the Eee PC, similar built-in speakers, and 802.11b/g that the Asus Eee PC 701 has, but instead of packing in a measly 4GB SSD, Everex has opted for a full-blown 30GB hard drive. It’s an awesome feature that media-heavy users are looking for, although it will most certainly boot slower than the Eee PC. The CloudBook also has a 4-in-1 card reader, as opposed to just a SD/MMC one, and a better 1.3 MP webcam. Unfortunately, Everex only packs in 512MB of DDR2 RAM, and it can only be upgraded to 1GB.

Instead of a Xandros Linux distribution, the CloudBook has the same gOS V2 Rocket distro that the Everex desktop has. It features pre-installed apps like Skype, Firefox, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and OpenOffice.org 2.3, among others. Size-wise, the CloudBook measures about the same as the EeePC: 9.06 x 6.73 x 1.16 inches as opposed to 8.9 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches.

The black faceted unit looks pretty attractive in our pictures, and we admit, it’s going to take a lot of will-power to hold back from grabbing one on January 25th when it hits store shelves for $399.

The amount of place shifting devices and services has been overwhelming. Its actually hard to find a company that isn’t doing wireless video streaming in one way or another. But, D-Link’s PC on TV caught our eye. The media player allows users to stream their PC’s video to a TV, either wired or wirelessly.

We like to hear that D-Link understands that the Web-based content out there is pretty damn good. Instead of streaming your TV or DVR to your computer Sling style, you can send YouTube videos and Google Video from the PC without the use of a proprietary media player. Supported are MPEG-4 or any AVI videos or virtually any local video content, and use any media player, such as iTunes, Nero, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.

The device supports photo viewing at 1280×720 screen resolution and streaming video at 640×480 resolution at up to 30 frames per second. Even better it comes with a mouse-like trackball remote control.

We’ve long been fans of the Sonos Multi Zone Digital Music System, which taps into your PC and music services like Rhapsody and streams tunes throughout the home using an elegant mesh networking technology–complete with a remote control that has a scroll wheel and big color screen. But no one I know can afford the $999 it costs for all that wireless goodness. Logitech has found a way to deliver a lot of the same features and functionality for a fraction of the cost. The $399 Squeezebox Duet Network music system is one heck of a bargain for what you get.

What a difference mobile broadband makes. When we previously reviewed the LifeBook U810 from Fujitsu, we liked its $999 price point, sharp 5.6-inch display, and over five hours of battery life. But something was missing. That thing was a wireless connection that lets you surf the Web from anywhere. Enter the refreshed U810 with integrated HSDPA from AT&T.

Even inside the Las Vegas Convention Center the U810 got five bars of coverage, and sites loaded in about 15 seconds. We can’t wait to take a final review unit of this UMPC for a spin. It’s funny how you’ll overlook things like a tiny keyboard when you can check your e-mail and update your blog on the fly.

We’d like the 12-inch P8o10 even more if it had mobile broadband, too, but based on our hands-on impressions we think it could be one of the better value-priced ultraportables of the year.