CES 2009: Vuzix Wrap 920AVs

At CES 2009, Dan got his hands (or eyes?) on Vuzix’s Wrap 920AVs that I was getting excited about here. They’re every bit as awesome as promised, apparently, but Dan also managed to wheedle out a price from them – they’re looking at $399 (£274), and a ‘summertime’ release (for the US, presumably).

Vuzix

Related posts: Next-gen Vuzix VR glasses will be unveiled at CES | Vuzix Wrap 920AV audiovisual goggles – the full, actually quite awesome, details

CES 2009: LEGO-inspired kids gadgets coming soon courtesy of Digital Blue

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One of the quirkier stories to come out of CES this year was the partnership between Digital Blue and LEGO which will see a number of kid-centric gadgets produced with the iconic plastic brick look.

This isn’t build it yourself, unfortunately, so don’t think you’ll be able to buy a box full of LEGO pieces, a CMOS sensor, LCD and a few buttons and create your own digital camera. It’s just the look, rather than the actual coloured blocks, but that’s probably just as well as it would be pretty irritating to drop said camera and have it break into a hundred pieces…

CES 2009 – Attendance down 22% on last year, down 15% on expectations

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Last week’s International Consumer Electronics Show drew just 110,000 visitors – the lowest turnout in many years. Last year, the show admitted 141,000 people and CES had predicted that 130,000 people would attend, but both of those figures proved unattainable, likely due to the state of the world’s economy.

Even for those who showed up, the show proved disappointing. Although wireless power generation was showed off, and Palm unveiled its most exciting product in years, the show was underwhelming. All the companies started their press conferences with comments on the global economy and talked about how green they are. Then they just talked about networkng as much of their AV as possible.

Are big technology shows sustainable in the long term? With Apple pulling out of Macworld, perhaps they’re not. If large companies pull out, then attendance dwindles, and it’s no longer worth it for the smaller companies, which provide the bulk of the cash to run the show. Unless the economy takes a sharp upward turn this year, 2010 could be a very interesting time for the big expos.

(via VentureBeat)

For more CES shenanigans, see through our eyes at the CES index megapost.

CES 2009: iRiver's space-age product lineup

After Dan covered the Wave-Home multimedia communicator the other day, I did a little more digging, and found a bunch of other matching products that iRiver unveiled at CES.

I’ve always quietly been a fan of iRiver’s design work. Their latest MP3 players look incredible, and these sleek new gadgets wouldn’t be out of place in a documentary called “The home of 2100”. Click the Wave-Home below to view the gallery.

iRiver (via Akihabaranews)

CES 2009: Panasonic launches three new Blu-ray players including one with VHS!

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Panasonic announced its latest line of Blu-ray players. The DMP-BD60 and DMP-BD80 offer all the latest features you’d expect from a decent player, including full high definition audio format decoding, upconversion of standard definition DVDs, VIERA Link and 24p processing, as well as VIERA Cast which allows access to Amazon’s video-on-demand service.

There’s also P4HD (Pixel Precision Progressive Processing for HD) which gives a superior picture by processing over 15 billion pixels per second, PHL Reference Chroma Processor Plus, and 96kHz surround re-mastering of audio…