Best of the rest: 10 noteworthy Day Zero CES gadgets at a glance
So, pulling back the curtain a little bit here: for the press, CES is segmented into three distinct parts. There's the "first day" (Sunday), which is when a big press event called CES Unveiled kicks off the festivities. It's really just a meet and greet, but some times you see some cool stuff — a waterproof tablet or a surprisingly alluring thermostat, for instance.
After that, even though Monday is really the second day, it's known as Day Zero. All the big press events go down, and it's mostly spent standing in long lines and hoping whatever you're waiting for doesn't fill up (and, as a result, you're turned away).
Even though the Las Vegas Convention Center show floor didn't open until today — Day Zero is, as you have no doubt seen, packed full of goodies. These are some things we saw, liked and wanted to tell you about while we're off running around looking for more awesome concepts and prototypes (like this guy).
Raymond Wong and Evan Ackerman contributed to this post.
Posted on location at CES 2012 in Las Vegas. All images taken by Kevin Hall, Evan Ackerman and Raymond Wong for DVICE.
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Samsung Techwin, which is an R—D arm of Samsung responsible for everything from surveillance to military technology, is turning its optical know-how into two different units: a Wi-Fi video baby monitor (left) and the SmartCam security cam (right). The former is a self-explanatory, fully-featured baby watcher that'll drop in March for $150. The SmartCam launches at the same time and price, and while it's a little pricey, you can daisy-chain as many of them together as you can afford to and keep an eye on your house, office or any room anywhere, really. You can view your cams by way of an app, and its strength is that it's far easier to set up than other surveillance systems. — Kevin Hall
This year, rather than talk up glasses-free 3D, a lot of companies are ballyhooing about 4K resolution displays, projectors and cameras. One major company that's showing off a ton of 4K goodies is Sony. This here camera shoots at a resolution of 8K in 2D (although nothing is saved in 8K, because there aren't any displays to show 8K resolution on) and 4K in 3D. It's a monster camera and probably has a sensor the size of Godzilla. Sony's not talking price or availability, but it's probably safe to say most people wouldn't be able to afford one. — Raymond Wong
Xerox had the nifty idea of including a customized Eye-Fi SD card — which allows any camera to suddenly go wireless — inside the aptly named Mobile Scanner. You scan whatever full-sized page or tiny receipt you want, and then manage the documents on your phone with an app, or on your computer. As someone who has a bag full of paper in a bag labeled "to sort" at home, the idea of going paperless is something I absolutely love, but at $250 I'm just not ready to dive in. When this thing's $150 it'll be an instant buy for me. — Kevin Hall
Don't ask me how Victorinox did it, but the company managed to cram a 1TB SSD into a packages no larger than your average Swiss Army switchblade. It comes in USB 2.0/3.0 and eSata II/III flavors, and sports a "Bi-Stable graphic display (E-Paper software)" for reminding you what's stashed on it. And because it's a Swiss Army tool, it's got a knife, scissor and nail filer too. Pricing is TBA and release should be in April. — Raymond Wong
Just as predicted, the Nokia Lumia 900 is available exclusively on AT&T, and looks nearly identical to the Lumia 800, except for the larger 4.3-inch screen, support for 4G LTE, a larger battery and a new front-facing camera (finally). It's still got that slick polycarbonate body and an 8-megapixel camera that shoots 720p HD video. The Lumia 900 is bigger, faster and every bit as nice as the 800, and I love it. Pricing is TBA and release is "in the next few months."— Raymond Wong
Another 4K technology Sony was showing off was its 46-inch glasses-free 3D prototype. I've had mixed feelings for glasses-free 3D in the past, mainly because of poor viewing angles from anywhere that's not straight-on. From my eyes-on, 3D looked crispier than normal (resolution drops down to 1080p, which is higher than anything currently available), and viewing from even far left and right as well as below have been improved since last year'a 24-inch prototype. Not quite consumer ready, but I think Sony's headed in the right direction with the glasses-free 3D tech. — Raymond Wong
The inTouch by Samsung Techwin performs a neat little trick: plug it into an LCD monitor or TV and, voila, you've got yourself an Internet-enabled, app-happy, Skype-capable, connected display. The inTouch owes a lot to the Kinect in how it looks, and Skype is really the highlight here. The apps are all baked into the unit — you don't pull from any outside app store — but include the likes of YouTube, Google News, weather checks and more. It's a clever way to give some extra oomph to a display that isn't Internet connected, and it all starts in March for $200. — Kevin Hall
The Tinke may not do too much just yet, but it's something I personally think shows a lot of promise (and would love to see built into phones). Right now, you plug it into your iPhone, and with the simple press of your thumb against the scanner for a few seconds, it'll find your heart rate, blood oxygen and more, and will keep track of your vitals and give you stats based on your daily numbers. More interesting than instantly useful, but imagine the day you could, say, send all your information to a doctor just by press thumb to phone. Very cool. — Kevin Hall
While pico projectors are not new, this particular form factor (and miniscule size) is. Texas Instruments is responsible for the hardware inside, and the secret company under the green stickers will be selling this little projector for a couple hundred bucks in Asia this year. There's a battery in there that's good for one movie, and the other end of that cord accepts video directly from your iPhone. It's not the brightest thing you've ever seen, but TI says that it's just a matter of time (and battery power) before we can use these things in places besides coal cellars at midnight. — Evan Ackerman
The MyBook Live Duo is just like the MyBook Live that we reviewed back in October, except with the addition of a second drive that turns it into a RAID system. Western Digital has added two Thunderbolt ports to each of these MyBooks and then dasiy-chained them all together to expand a RAID 0 or RAID 1 into a very fast (and very redundant) RAID 5. You can stack up to six drives together in this way, and the drive-to-drive transfer speeds are blisteringly fast. It's just too bad that those cables are $50 each from Apple. — Evan Ackerman