CES 2010: Final Thoughts

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…

CES 2010: Day 1 Round-Up

With CES 2010 now well under way, it can be pretty tough keeping track of all the latest announcements. Here's Tech Digest's round-up of the of best Day 1 at CES 2010 so far, including all the news from the…

Photo sharing eye-fi cards come to UK

Already popular in the US, now Eye-Fi cards are coming to these shores. Though they look like normal memory cards, they are much more clever allowing you to upload photos and videos directly to your PC or the web as soon as they come into range of a wi-fi zone.

Three Eye-Fi cards will be available in the UK with a range of features: the Eye-Fi Home Video, the Eye-Fi Share Video and the Eye-Fi Pro, offering easy uploads for every photo lover, from the simple snapper to the photography enthusiast.

Says Jef Holove, CEO of Eye-Fi, comments: “Because Eye-Fi eliminates the time and hassle, more than half of our users upload their photos and videos within 24 hours of capturing them. So, those memories are backed up, organized and shared with friends and family while they are still fresh.”

Femtocells – much more than a signal booster

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Femtocells. Get used to that word because you’ll be hearing it a lot more in the future. Vodafone’s release of their signal boosting hub this week is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what femtocells is capable of.

US company Airvana and Sanjeev Verma, vice president of femtocell business, have just given me a demo of their HubBub femtocells and its ‘party alert’ application.

Basically, the HubBub sits in the house and, as well as solving any coverage issues by providing a stronger network using an existing broadband connection, it can monitor activity in the house.

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Activity such as comings and goings. The scenario they showed me involved two ‘daughters’ arriving home from a day’s shopping only to be joined by a boyfriend and then two other friends. Each time an SMS was sent to my phone to alert me of the arrivals. The HubBub can be programmed to automatically sync and back-up phone contacts, so it knew the names of all of the daughter’s friends. Alerts could have been sent not only by SMS but by email, tweets, Facebook updates and so on.

But if the Vodafone release this week was just the tip of the iceberg then ‘party-alert’ is just, well, the bit below the tip. Femtocells has, in the words of Sanjeev Verma the power to “fundamentally transform the way mobile networks are built and then deployed”.

Not by simply monitoring activity in the house and giving you a good mobile signal but by completely changing the way people deal with their data and networks. For example, Airvana also demonstrated an app whereby photos taken using the daughters’ mobile phones were automatically detected by the HubBub and synced to a PC. These photos could have just as easily been sent to social networking sites, other phones or a photo service such as flickr. No need for cables, no need to sit down and transfer pictures. It was done automatically and it was done quickly due to the large bandwidth femtocells allows for.

And it’s not just photos, femtocells has the potential to manage any digital data. Sanjeev envisages an app store to rival that of Apple’s, where developers will come up with ways of using femtocells to enhance all aspects of digital life – whether that be gaming, music, films or anything else for that matter.

He sees the potential to advertisers as huge, he describes the possibility of “land-grabbing” marketing and promotion. Femtocells will be able to access your phone, your laptop, your netbook, your everything basically. If you are suddenly showing an interest in a new band then femtocells will know. If you suddenly start looking at a lot of car insurance websites then femtocells will know. Obviously you don’t have to allow femtocells to know anything if you don’t want it to. But then you’d miss out on offers or information that you might be really interested in.

Because of the relative cheapness of femtocells – in affect it ceases the need for building and maintaining transmitters for the networks – and the fact that most of the work for femtocell will be done by the ‘smart’ devices that connect to it; phones, computers and so on – the potential for femtocells’ growth is huge.

In the short time expect femtocells to be introduced by more mobile providers to increase signal coverage in the home. In the medium term expect femtocells to promote more family and home based services such as family calling plans and apps like ‘party alert’. In the long term expect femtocells to know everything about you – what you like, who you like and what you’re going to be doing in every aspect of your life. Expect to know all about femtocell sometime soon.

Check out Airvana’s website for more info.

D-Link launches DIR-825 modem – aka the "route-master general"

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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

Sony shows off wireless Bluetooth headphones

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Sony’s made itself a bit of a name around here for steadfastly producing headphone models that don’t really excite but still sell well. Today it’s announced some mostly unexciting Bluetooth headphones.

Both models use Bluetooth 2.1 to communicate with your phone or MP3 player. The DR-BT100CX are in-ear and have a little dongle to control volume and skip tracks as well as answering or rejecting phone calls. They feature eight hours of playback time and are recharged via USB.

The BT101s have a headband design and pack 30mm neodymium drivers. There’s twelve hours of playback in the onboard battery and again it recharges via USB. Both models support A2DP, AVRCP, HFP and HSP Bluetooth profiles and are available to order right now from Sony Style.

Press Release