CES 2008

LAS VEGAS--Every year, I schedule too many meetings at the Consumer Electronics Show and don't get enough time to just roam the show floor in search of gadgets that are either ultra-cool, absurd, or preferably both.

This year, I made a commitment to wander the show floor and absorb as much as possible. It should be said, in three hours on the show floor, I covered a very small portion of the south hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

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So the seventh wonder of the tech world could have been in the north hall, central hall, or the far-flung Sands expo hall, but I couldn't tell you.

What did I learn? First of all, there was not one product that everyone was talking about. If there was a universal hit, it was the huge flat-screen displays that many companies were showing off. I spent a few minutes watching video on a 100-inch screen. It's by no means the biggest on display here at CES, but it was three times the diameter of anything in my house.

From there, I decided I needed a rest, stopping at what might be the best massage chair I've sat in--a $4,000 model from Anaheim, Calif.-based Omega Massage. I make it a point to always try these out, whether at trade shows or the airport Sharper Image. It's all part of my sacrifice for you, my loyal blog readers (or you, the random clicker on this post).

From there I made my way to the folks who needed the massage chair far more than I did--the HD DVD booth. There, association members and technology partners put on a brave face, despite the major blow delivered by Warner Bros. last week, announcing that they would exclusively support rival Blu-ray.

I'd heard about some wireless earbuds from Sennheiser, so I went by the booth to check them out. They were behind glass, but I could see enough to know they weren't for me. They look kind of like a pair of those Bluetooth earpieces I already find annoying, plus they require your iPod or other device to wear a somewhat bulky transmitter. I think there's probably a market for these. It's just probably not for the average iPod owner.

Continuing on the headphone theme, I went to the booth of Skullcandy, a company whose hipness factor is hurt only by the fact that I own a pair of its earbuds. There were DJs and hip-hop musicians performing and an artist doing a skull drawing as the company showed off a variety of products, including a set of iPhone earbuds and a DJ-style headset that also includes a built-in SD card slot for playing music without a separate MP3 player. Both products sell will sell for $89, with the wireless SD headphones due out around March. I also stopped by Shure, which was showing off an attachment that turns its line of in-ear headphones into an iPhone headset by adding an in-line microphone.

Having heard enough, I moved on to other areas of the hall. Among the places I stopped was a Dell environmental booth that consisted of some eco-furniture and two glass whiteboards where people could scribble their ideas on how to improve our ecological impact. The booth rep told me the ideas would be taken to an executive meeting back at Dell headquarters. Not sure what they will do with the posts, which included "Take public transit," "No more products, no more people," and "Killjoy."

My favorite moment was when a woman from Baton Rouge asked if she could get a brochure.

The booth rep tried to handle it politely. Well, no, see, the whole point is...

I decided to let Dell save the planet without me and continued on in search of more tech fare. I stopped by several random booths that caught my eye, including a company peddling a mini-photo studio perfect for snapping shots of your eBay trinkets without casting a shadow. I stopped by HP and Kodak to check out the latest in photo-printing kiosks. I'd been pretty impressed with the HP model I tried out at a drugstore this holiday season, and found Kodak's models even more versatile. Both make choosing prints easy, but I liked the quick photo books that it was capable of cranking out, as well as a new Photo DVD maker that lets you set your photos to one of about 20 songs, ranging from a Hootie and the Blowfish track to the theme from St. Elmo's Fire.

I found myself drawn to the Brother booth, where it was showing software, apparently not new, that turns your digital photos into something stitch-able with one of its embroidery machines. The software sells for around $1,000 and the machines range from a $600 model to one that sells for $13,000.

I was also drawn to a small booth in the corner, with a sign "We buy closeouts" and showing a smattering of non-tech and low-tech items such as whiteboards and fax machines. Carolina Wholesale owner Larry Huneycutt said the Charlotte-based company has been coming to CES for 20 years and finding customers and sources for his far-from-state-of-the-art gear.

His catalog includes label makers, digital projectors, and calculators. "We even sell typewriters," Huneycutt said.

But some of the latest gadgets were also low-tech, including the oft-maligned Quik Pod, a camera attachment that holds a camera at a distance allowing for better pictures of oneself. It's a gadget that I reckon plenty of people would like, but few would want to admit to needing, much less buying.

The latest model is an even tougher challenge. It's an SLR model for larger cameras. My colleague points out that this only increases its dorkiness factor.

I don't disagree, but also think that there is a market, even for pros who want to snap their own picture as well as the legions of wannabes. I just think that the pros (and wannabes, myself included) are less likely to want to admit it. That's why it's nice that the SLR model can also be used as a monopod.

Dell's 16-inch laptop prototype.

There's a well-worn axiom in journalism that finding three examples of the same thing in short order officially constitutes a trend. With that in mind, take a look at this prototype Dell XPS laptop being shown under glass at the Dell booth. It's a 16-inch laptop, called the XPS 630i, and the unusual size displays images in a true 16:9 screen ratio (like your HDTV), rather than the 16:10 screen ratio found in most 14.1-, 15.4- and 17-inch laptop displays.

While Dell is the only PC maker showing off a 16-inch prototype to the public, it's not the only company interested in new laptop screen sizes. We can think of at least two other brands (and possibly more) that are all working on both 16-inch and 18-inch laptops, which makes this an official trend in our book.

As it has in the past, Dell put a new desktop on display at the show this year, but without revealing any specifics. We're not able to tell much by looking only at the exterior of the XPS 630, other than the fact that it retains the overall look and feel of the high-end XPS 700 series, including the external case lighting.

Two flavors of Dell's secretive XPS 630.

(Credit: CNET)

Dell pulled a similar move with the XPS 710 H2C at last year's CES, and that system shipped in February 2007. If Dell follows that same pattern, we hope to have a review unit in our hands by mid-January.

The new "Chill" lid design.

We first told you about the existence of Dell's new low-cost 15-inch laptop late last week, now we've got some more hands-on details. While we've always liked the excellent 14-inch Inspiron 1420 model (and the very cool, but more expensive, XPS line--the 13-inch M1330 and 15-inch M1530), somewhere in there, Dell's basic Inspiron 15-inch--long the bread and butter of the company's consumer laptops--got lost in the shuffle, offering a small increase in screen size, but a much larger, more unwieldy chassis.

Watch the Dell Inspiron 1525 video on CNET TV.

Dell's taken these points to heart, and the company has cooked up a very nice reworking of the Inspiron 1520, in the form of the Inspiron 1525. It's a smaller, lighter version of the previous 15-inch, about 30 percent thinner, in fact, much more in line with the 14-inch version, which has a great sense of proportion among its screen, keyboard, and keyboard tray.

We had a chance to spend some hands-on time with the new system, and for a laptop that starts at only $499, it offers a lot of bang for your buck, including an HDMI output. Nicely spec'd out, you can get a T7000-series Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM for under $900. Also new are four background lid patterns (joining the usual palette of solid colors), Chill, Street, Commotion, and Blossom (Chill is seen here).

On the other hand, especially after getting used to the brushed metal of the XPS M1530 (which itself starts at only $999), the new Inspiron 1525 has a somewhat cheap plastic feel, and we're not sure it would stand up to too much abuse on the road.

Look for fixed configuration version of the Dell Inspiron 1525 to ship on January 11, with custom configured systems shipping around January 18.

Even though Dell released this 15-inch entry in the high-end XPS line a little more than a month ago (to capitalize on holiday sales, no doubt), the XPS M1530 is still one of Dell's big pushes at CES. It's a move that makes perfect sense, as Dell basically took one of our favorite laptops of last year, the slim, snazzy 13-inch XPS M1330, and built a new 15-inch laptop around it.

The XPS M1530 isn't nearly as revolutionary as the earlier model (which had an LED-backlit screen and was less than an inch thick), but it's still the best-looking 15-inch laptop we've seen in a long time, and reasonably configurable, starting at just $999 with high-end touches such as a slot-loading DVD drive, touch-sensitive media buttons, and an HDMI-output jack.

Upgrades to the original late-2007 version (see our review here) are already under way, with a higher resolution 1,680x1,050 screen now available. No signs of it yet, but we'd love to see the slim XPS profile rolled out to Dell's 17-inch laptop--the current version, the XPS M1730, is as thick as a small-town phone book.

Following on the heels of yesterday's Crystal LCD release, Dell is at it again today with a new 30-inch LCD monitor, the UltraSharp 3008WFP. Compared to last year's 3007WFP model, which we liked, the 3008WFP features a new look and loads more connections. The image here doesn't do it justice, but the 3008WFP has a brushed aluminum housing that sits atop a glossy, flat base (say goodbye to the Flying V stand of last year's model). And the cantilever arm allows for more flexible positioning.

Our biggest complaint with last year's model was the limited number of video connections, which seemed odd given its size and obvious entertainment appeal. The 3008WFP boasts the standard dual DVI ports and an analog VGA port, but it also serves up HDMI and component connections, plus a DisplayPort connection. (You should begin seeing DisplayPort graphics cards in a month or two.) There are even composite and S-Video ports, should you need to connect older devices. Rounding out the connection goodness are four USB ports and a media card reader. It features the same 2,560x1,600 native resolution of last year's model and an impressive 3000:1 contrast ratio.

Priced at $1,999, the UltraSharp 3008WFP isn't a cheap date, but it is $200 cheaper than the 3007WFP when it debuted last year.

Also jumping the CES gun by a few days is Dell's 15-inch Inspiron 1525 laptop. This model actually popped up on Dell's Australian Web site earlier this week, but is being officially announced in the US today.

With a complete top-to-bottom revamp of Dell's entire laptop line in mid-2007, why the need for a new mainstream model so soon? While the current 14-inch Inspiron 1420 hit the size/features/performance sweet spot, and the high-end XPS M1330 and M1530 are slick, thin 13- and 15-inch models, the middle-of-the-road Inspiron 1520 was always a little too big and clunky.

With the upgraded Inspiron 1525 (hey, nobody ever accused these guys of creative naming), Dell's managed to shave a little bulk off of the system, and the smaller chassis leaves less dead space on the keyboard tray. Compared to the older 1520, this new version is about 30 percent slimmer and almost a half-pound lighter.

The Inspiron 1525 starts at only $499, and includes an HDMI output and touch-sensitive media controls, which are nice touches in that price range. The standard Dell configuration options are available (including a few new lid patterns, such as the one seen here), so you can easily build this out into a system costing $1,000 or more.

We'll take a more hands-on look at the Inspiron 1525 next week during CES.