Gadgets, gizmos fall out of CES show

THE FIRST DAY OF the pre-show festivities for CES 2005 brought us some interesting things from the first meeting. A couple of the cooler gadgets were from Samsung, in this case some of phones. The first one is a pocket PC based product, or more to the point a Windows Mobile (TM) 2003 OS Software for Pocket PC 2nd Edition product. Yech. It slides off the tongue like fishhooks and sandpaper. That said, it still looks pretty good.

This one is the i730, a 1X-EVDO slide phone. It worked fairly well, and slid open nicely. It isn't a Palm phone, but they hinted that it one may be coming. Either way, it has a 240x320 screen, actual stereo speakers with 3D surround and all the other goodies. The next one is a 5MP camera phone that I neglected to write the model number down on. Here is the i730.

Next up we got to Kodak, they were demoing a little device called the Printer Dock Series III, a $149 Imagelink printer. If you don't know what Imagelink is, it is basically a standard camera interconnect that lets you plug just about any camera into any printer, and get a real picture out. The 17 seconds I took to look at the quality showed it passed the cursory inspection. One really interesting bit is the memory stick hanging off the side. Possibilities, no?

Moving on, we get to where we started, phones and cameras, not really together, but both from Sanyo. The first one is the Sanyo MM7400 TV phone. It is, duh, a TV on a phone. It currently works with Sprint, and supposedly it will be a flat fee service, but no one could tell me what the number was for that fee. I am not sure why they just didn't pull the signal off the air, but hey, the tech is cool.

The other thing they had is the VPC-04 camcorder. This this is barely lager than my mini Pentax Optio camera, which for reference fits in an Altoids tin, but it does pics and movies. It is a 4MP still camera, and does MPEG-4 movies with fill ACC-LC audio. Better yet, it stores images on SD cards, so buy lots of Kingston stock boys and girls (yes, I realize they are private, think figure of speech).

Anyway, it has a twist out/swivel/rotate screen, and overall feels good in your hand. Couple that with a 5.8x optical zoom and a 10x digital zoom, and you can see the nose hairs of the NVidia reps from across the room. It should be out in Q1 sometime at around $699. I really want one.µ