The Consumer Electronics show, the behemoth of tech, the Valhalla of gadgetry, has come and gone for yet another year. But this time, rather than arriving with a bang, it slinked into sight with something more like a whimper.

CES 2010 had really had the wind knocked out of it before it had even got into the ring this year. All eyes were already on Apple and their rumoured Tablet in the run up to the event, despite the fact that Apple are traditionally a no-show at CES, instead planning their own top-secret unveiling at the end of January. Likewise, Google delivered a sucker-punch in the shape of the Nexus One, their flagship handset revealed at their own event on the eve of CES 2010's opening.

To make matter's worse, Microsoft's opening keynote speech (delivered by walking personality drain Steve Ballmer) was pretty darn dull. First a power cut, then a load of waffle on the 2 month old Windows 7, Ballmer hardly seemed to be trying to keep our attention. Though the Christmas release date for Project Natal was welcome news, it revealed nothing new about the device, whilst the partnership with Hewlett Packard for the new Slate device seemed merely like a case of keeping-up with the Joneses. Or should that be the Jobs-es?

But the Las Vegas event wasn't without its highlights. Far from it in fact. Maybe it's the recession, or the generally pocket-pinching mood in the air these days, but for once the most sought after tech wasn't in the realms of dreamy aspiration, but was actually fairly affordable.

Take for instance the brand new 3D TVs on show, of which the Sony BRAVIA XBR-52HX900 (video above, courtesy of Ashley) was the pick of the litter. Finally shaping up to the standards set by its cinema siblings, company reps promised that the average 3D TV will cost little more than a top-end Full HD set. Skype and video calling in many TV sets too will help turn your living room into somewhere the Jetsons could only dream of.

E-readers are also looking to be both big and affordable in 2010. As a comic book fanatic I'd have liked to have seen more attempts at a colour screened e-reader (I'm not including the MSI offering, which is really just a dual-touch screened PC, super-cool as it is). Plastic Logic's Que Pro e-reader looked great though, with a massive, durable screen, and was far lighter than the hundreds of books you'd be able to store on the tabloid-sized device.

There were, of course, tablets aplenty. The dual-booting Viliv P3 may be an underdog in the category, but seemed way more exciting than Microsoft's offering. The offer of both Windows and Android on the same device showed a respect for user choice not often seen in the back-slapping world of consumer tech.

There was still time for fun too. The Parrot AR Drone Quadricopter was fun and fresh, combining real-world toys with augmented reality controls. A little less high-tech but full of retro-chic was the Lasonic i931 iPhone dock/ghetto blaster mash-up. Odd's on its at the top of Flava Flav's Christmas list. And there was still some time for the weird and the plain old dumb, too.

Though less prevalent than other years, there were some great examples of brand new tech on show that were genuinely exciting. A real head-turner and my favourite item of the show was the Light Blue Optic Light Touch. Using a pico projection engine and a touch sensitive sensor, it'll turn any flat surface into a touchscreen. It works ridiculously well despite still being in the development stages, and has almost unlimited potential.

Some detractors say that, recession or not, CES looks to be on its last legs. It's sad, but not unlikely, when you consider the audiences that companies like Apple and Google can command for just a single product launch. However, for emerging companies like Light Blue Optics CES is still vital to gain some exposure, not to mention the fact that such a prominent date in the calendar forces the tech giants to have made some significant, competitive advances in their gear, year-on-year.

So here's hoping the old dog's got a bit of life left in it yet. Hopefully next year will kick off the recessionary cobwebs and kick the show back into high-tech gear. It wouldn't take much to tempt us back to the City of Sin once more.

Click here for full CES 2010 pre-show, day one, day two and day three round-ups.

Another day, another Tech Digest CES 2010 round-up. Fancy Tweeting hands-free in your car or controlling your PC by breathing? Check today's top stories below and find out how.

Twitter coming to Ford cars
The digital equivalent of drink-driving?

Motorola announce Backflip Android Phone
Hinged smartphone is Motorola's big CES 2010 offering

Ion launch the iType full QWERTY keyboard add-on for the iPhone
Making the portable unwieldy

Vuzix demo Wrap 920AR Augmented Reality visor
Turning your trip to the shops into a scene out of Robocop

Zyxio's new breathing-based PC controller, the Sensawaft
Affordable accessibility gadget, perfect for disabled PC users

3D gaming headed to the Palm family
Apple isn't the only mobile now capable of some hardcore gaming action

Is the Viliv P3 the underdog tablet to look out?
Dual-booting tablet is looking very tasty indeed

Razer and Sixense bring motion gaming to the PC
But will it catch on within the incredibly competitive PC gaming peripheral market?

UK getting the Dell Mini 3i
Android phone hitting UK shores in the not-so-distant-future

Video- Armour Home Q2 Tilt Internet radio
Innovative and simple radio from Brit-based Armour

Video - "World's smallest Windows PC" the UMID M Book 1
It makes a gnat's bum look big. Well...not quite. But you get the idea

Video- Casio's Digital Art Frame
Making all those dodgy Facebook snaps look good

Video - The coolest retro iPhone hi-fi ever, Lasonic's i931
Bring 80's boom box street-chic bang up to date

Video - Toshiba's Cell TV that is controlled by hand gestures
Innovative tech, but it makes you look a bit of an idiot; not sure I want a work out in front of the telly

Video - Sony's BRAVIA XBR-52HX900 3D TV
Their flagship 3D set is a stunner

Video - Panasonic's 3D camera
Bet the adult-entertainment industry cant wait to get its mitts on this one

Click here for more CES 2010 coverage from Tech Digest

Tech Digest at CES is sponsored by Best Buy. For more CES stories and videos go here

Here's a neat demo-video courtesy of Engadget showing off Zyxio's new breathing-based PC controller.

A novel mouse-alternative, the Sensawaft features a sensor which converts the direction, length and strength of your breathing into commands for the PC cursor. It takes some getting used to according to Engadget's Paul Miller, but he was getting to grips with the device within a few minutes.

Lots of potential uses here for the disabled or those with accessibility difficulties, not to mention perhaps medical uses where a third hand would be...handy. Keeping in mind the low suggested price range of $70, this is also far more affordable than other accessibility-designed PC control units.

Via: Engadget

Click here for more CES 2010 coverage from Tech Digest

Tech Digest at CES is sponsored by Best Buy. For more CES stories and videos go here

If you're a PC gamer feeling a bit left out by all this buzz surrounding motion control, relax; Razer and Sixense have you covered.

The two peripheral manufactures have teamed up to bring motion sensing controllers to your Counter Strike death-match.

Like a Frankenstein mix of Project Natal and Wiimotes, the device uses gestures like swipes and tilts to get your gaming done.

PC gamers are very particular about their peripherals, with the hardcore shelling out wads of cash for low-latency, high accuracy mice. Razer are well respected in the field, but will have to pull off something special for this to appeal to any but the most niche of audiences.

Head over to Engadget for a look at the device at work.

Click here for more CES 2010 coverage from Tech Digest

Tech Digest at CES is sponsored by Best Buy. For more CES stories and videos go here

Brand: JBL
Product: Creature III
Purpose: 2.1 PC speakers
Price: £99, available from Apple stores, John Lewis, M&S, PC World, Comet and Amazon

You could accuse JBL of slacking of late, having spent the last two years releasing only fairly standard looking speaker set ups. But with the Creature III 2.1 speakers, it seems that period of relative inactivity was spent lovingly honing this rather special audio
system.

First things first; the Creature III speakers look great. An update on the previous Creature II design, the subwoofer looks like some sort of B-movie alien mother ship and the two satellite speakers masquerading as twin recon UFOs. Connecting with a single 3.5mm mini jack, the speakers stand on four claw-like feet, with the subwoofer housing two chrome-finished bass and treble knobs. Available in black, white, red, aluminium and grey, there should be a suitable colour to match most people's decor.

All this great design work would be for nought however if the audio quality wasn't up to scratch. Thankfully, the Creature III speakers perform superbly, thanks in part to the use of Odyssey and Magnum driver units. A 75mm driver in the subwoofer achieves an incredibly resonant bottom end and the satellite speaker's 40mm drivers have remarkable definition, retaining clarity and avoiding distortion even at the startlingly loud maximum volume.

Across a range of MP3s, I found the speakers to have excellent definition within the mid and low-mid ranges. Vocals sometimes sounded a bit too sibilant, but I'd take a crisp sound over a muddy one any day. I also found fine-tuning with the treble and bass knobs to be incredibly responsive, with a handy soft-lock click when they were moved into a neutral position. Likewise, DVD playback of the Pod-racing scene in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace really showed off the speaker's responsive range, as did a few hours battling through the PC version of Dragon Age: Origins.

The Creature III speakers are not flawless however. Volume is controlled via two "capacitance- touch" buttons placed on one of the satellite speakers which for me personally were overly sensitive, and lacked a visual prompt to measure volume levels. There was also on occasion a low hiss when the speakers should have been silent. Minor gripes though they may be, they seem to be problems overlooked that could have easily been addressed, and with an RRP of £99, you'd have expected JBL to have done so.

But forgetting these few small issues, the JBL Creature III speakers perform remarkably well. They may be a bit more expensive than your average 2.1 PC sound systems, but rest assured that the attractive design and excellent audio quality are well worth the money.

4/5

Think your DVD collection is safe for life? Think again. According to the National Archives, CD/DVD life expectancy is "2 to 5 years". Enter then Cranberry, who have invented a DVD disc made of "synthetic stone" which they claim can last as long as 1,000 years without degrading.

The DiamonDiscs hold 4.7 GB of data, enough to hold a few thousand songs and photos. Perfect then for a digital time-capsule, in the unlikely circumstance that humans still use DVDs in 1,000 years time.

Isn't it a little convenient that the main selling point of the discs, the claimed 1,000 year lifespan, will never be proven by anyone who buys them in the near future?

We suspect that our future-friends will be too busy with their hover cars and cyborg body-parts to care much about our quaint digital holiday snaps anyway.

If you want to leave a message teaching the next 10 generations of kids what an iPhone was or how "revolutionary" we found the Wii, pick up a DiamonDisc here.

Canon are set to launch the imageFORMULA P-150 portable duplex scanner on Monday 9th November, and Tech Digest were on hand at Canon HQ today to have a test.

Weighing less than a bag of sugar, the P-150 is incredibly compact. It measures up at 280 x 95 x 40 mm when closed, folding out to 280 x 222.7 x 202.2 mm to reveal the loading tray. It'd easily fit in a hand-bag or "man-bag", and is light enough to not be too much of a hassle when travelling.

Despite its size, the imageFORMULA P-150 packs a lot of punch for a scanner so small. Capable of 15 pages per minute/30 image per minute duplex scanning in black and white and 10 ppm/10 ipm in full colour, it churns through paper work at a pretty pace.

In a nice touch, the P-150 is fully powered by USB, and thanks to built in software can be plugged into any PC and used instantly, without the need to install any extra programs.

For the high-volume user, the P-150 will be compatible with Therefore software, offering remote management and streamlined indexing of scanned items. An Office-style UI will make the management system instantly familiar to most users.

According to Canon, 23% of office space is filled with filing cabinets. With the imageFormula P-150 not much bigger than a handheld gaming console, it could be a great solution for the space-conscious.

Look for a full Tech Digest review on the imageFORMULA P-150 early next week.

All plans for slightly bigger DVDs have been blown out of the water today with claims from a group of scientists that they can store up to 10TB of data on a single disc.

The team of egg heads from the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, has added the dimensions of colour and light polarization and employed them to store the huge amounts of extra information. Confused? I'll do my best to explain.

The colour is the tricky part. How can you store information in colour? I know. Weird. Well, the deal is that the surface is made of gold nanorods and these nanorods react differently to different kinds of light. Colours are, of course, different kinds of light of varying wavelengths, so you can record multiple amounts information on the same nanorods. Capiche? Yeah, bit of a mind melter.

AMD seems to release a new chunk of silicon every five minutes but when they break the 1GHz barrier with a graphics card, it's worth taking notice.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 is the first standard air-cooled GPU to reach the clock speed milestone, nine years after they managed with CPUs, and it offers 1.6 TeraFLOPS of graphics crunching power.

AMD claims this factory over-clocked unit is 50% faster than the competition. What we do know for sure is that it's going to make video transcoding, post processing and, of course, gaming that little bit smoother.

AMD

The Mivx Nubbin might not be the sexiest name for a product but when this little USB devil can give your old arse laptop the kind draft-N wireless your router's been able to do since the Dark Ages, who cares?

Naturally, it's backwards compatible with IEEE 802.1n draft 3.0 and IEEE 802.1b/g to suit your location and it'll deliver up to 150Mbps speeds with just a 3/4 inch body. That makes it the smallest USB draft-N adaptor in the world today - well, at least for the next three minutes.

Works with Windows, Macs and Linux too.Yours for $39 including free postage if you happen to live in the US.

It's not every day I consider spending £129.99 on a wireless router but then it's not everyday you meet the D-Link DIR-825. Naturally, we're talking draft-N wireless here, backwards compatible with all the other standards and it goes without saying that all four of its LAN connections are gigabit Ethernet.

There's also a gig WAN port too as well as a USB Shareport where you can plug a printer or other such device that can then be accessed wirelessly by any computer on the network. The router supports quadband wireless at 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies for separation of signals and an easier way to prioritise your bandwidth between simpler browsing tasks at the lower level and the likes of HD streaming at the top.

You're getting a better penetrating and faster signal and it still manages to maintain the green standards that D-Links to have in place. It also supports the IPv6 should the rest of your equipment be sufficiently advanced. It's available from now in the UK.

D-Link Buy it

Intel has just announced a new chip based on its Nehalem-EP architecture called "Jasper Forest". It's aimed at storage products and embedded applications and the I/O hub has been integrated right onto the chip.

Jasper Forest is named after a petrified forest in Arizona, pictured above. Intel often names its chips after geographical locations, with Nehalem named after an Oregon-based tribe of American indians.

(via Macworld UK)

AMD has just dropped us word of their latest graphics card release, the ATI Radeon HD 4890, which they're claiming is the most powerful graphics processor in the world.

The beast runs at 850MHz, has 1.36 TeraFLOPs of processing power, as well as 1GB of GDDR5 memory and the functionality to cram four of these things in the same machine, using ATI's Crossfire technology.

It's notably faster than its predecessor, the HD4870, but slower than the dual core X2 variant. Pricing reflects that, with the card retailing between £185 and £200. It's not a massive leap, just an evolution of existing cards, but it's certainly a solid upgrade if you're running a graphics card that's a couple of years old.

ATI Press Kit

Gaming peripherals usually fall into one of two categories - useless or ridiculous. Sometimes both, but there isn't often something that's both sensible and useful. That's why I was mildly startled by the G13, which does what it does very well, and doesn't look like it was designed by a moron on acid.

Unfortunately, you pay through the nose for that kind of quality. £75's worth of nose, to be prescise. Competing products, despite not being quite as good, are less than half that price. Perhaps in a few months it'll cheapen down a bit. I'll be waiting patiently until then before I make a purchase.

It's all very well having the Xbox but, what with the notebook market currently under explosion, you can understand why Microsoft might not be feeling the love in the PC hardware market.

So, today, they set aside their Lifecams and announce a slightly pointless laptop cooling station for the price of $29.95 when it's out in July. So, basically, it's a tray with a fan in it. It tilts your machine up at a very slight angle, tethers it to the wall and generally chips away at the wonderful simplicity of form that is a notebook. Not on my Christmas/birthday list.

On the other hand, if anyone wants to buy me one of their Arc Mice, which now come in a spectrum of exciting colours, I wouldn't have too much of a problem with that. You might though. They'll cost $49.95 from June.

The Softies

In a dark castle, somewhere in deepest Transylvania, HP's bosses squint into a crystal ball. "What do you see?" says one. "Everyone's in Barcelona at MWC" comes the reply. "Ah! So the last thing anyone would expect is for us to release five different mice and a webcam, with some targeted towards women!".

HP has just released four mice, a mouse-and-keyboard combo, and a webcam. They run the gamut of target audiences, from gamers to girls (not that those two audiences can't overlap) and they all look pretty, so I've stuck them in the gallery. Click on the flowery number below to begin.

D-Link has invented a niche it's calling the "home security market" - and has released a couple of webcams to help you discover who it is that's eating all the biscuits.

The DCS-2121 Megapixel Wireless Network Camera is the hottest of the pair, coming fully loaded up with wi-fi connectivity so there's no tell-tale wiring going from your computer to the cavity you hollowed out behind the mirror.

The DCS-910 is the wired version, coming with an Ethernet socket for easily hooking it into your home network. Both come with D-ViewCam 2.0, D-Link's monitoring software that has the power to let you watch 32 simultaneous video streams from 32 separate cameras at once, should you have a PC powerful enough, a bank balance unrestricted enough, and compound eyes.

They and their little software friend can record video direct to the hard drive as EVIDENCE, plus motion detection sensors let you leave them running - and have them email you when there's something happening in the room. If you're very, very paranoid and controlling, both are out now - at £129.99 for the 910 and £174.99 for the wi-fi 2121.

(Via D-link)

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It was, as everything always is, leaked on the internet a couple of weeks ago, now Amazon's finally detailed the specs of Kindle 2 - ideal if you're just starting to get in on the hot new book-reading scene.

Kindle 2 will feature a 25% longer battery life, according to Amazon, will turn the pages 20% quicker if you're an amazingly impatient person for whom TIME is MONEY and you can't waste TIME waiting for PAGES to BLOODY TURN, will be thinner and lighter, feature a higher-res screen with 16 rather than four shades of grey for sharper text displaying, plus the internal memory has been boosted to a ludicrous 2GB.

2GB is enough room to store 1500 books - ideal if you've got a long flight coming up. Like, if you're manning the first mission to Mars.

(Via BGR)

Related posts: Amazon after "casual" gamers | Kindle 2 leaked to the internet

We're gradually moving to a world where devices that used to have hard drives in them are now sporting solid-state drives instead, but it's still quite a hit on the wallet.

Take Buffalo's latest device which it claims is a world first -- a solid state Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that can be used to store all your multimedia files, is compact, reliable, has low power consumption, and is extremely quiet.

Samsung has managed to cram 32GB of memory onto a single RAM stick, by developing a 4Gb RAM chip (4Gb = 512MB). The 32GB capacity is possible by shoehorning two 16GB modules onto one unit. Of course the real effect will probably be an increase in the availability of 16GB RAM sticks, which are much easier and cheaper to create.

Considering most people still run 32-bit operating systems, which can cope with a maximum of 3.8GB of RAM, this development is one to file under 'wait a few years', especially as most people will likely plump for 32-bit Windows 7 for compatibility reasons. Despite the scientific progress, the market is still stuck in the 2GB - 4GB range that it has been for a couple of years.

(via Gizmodo)

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