The Gadgets Page

The product on my Most Wanted List from CES is the WebAround.

It is a portable and lightweight disk that hooks to the back of your chair that provides you with privacy when you use your webcam. Whether it’s for video blogging or video conferencing, it is a great product. Here is a video from their website describing how to use it:

It could also be used for green screen effects or use it with iMovie to easily put yourself in front of whatever image or video you want. I would go with the Ocean Blue color if you want to do any green screen effects (unless your entire wardrobe is blue).

For only $30, the WebAround is a great product. You can order them directly from their website here:

• Web Around – Web Cam Privacy & Security

The companies in the International Hall at CES are looking for distribution in the United States. Their products are unavailable in the U.S. and they looking for their lucky break. I sure hope someone gives Windix Industries a chance.

What attracted me to their site are these robo-bird clocks:

When the alarm goes off, they chirp to wake you up. You can also choose to wake up to the radio, but I loved the idea of waking up to a happy chirping bird. Even if the robo-bird wants to kill me…

They had a wide variety of digital clocks to choose from. I liked the ones shaped like lamps, but the clocks with the built-in LED lamp looked much more practical. See how the LED lamp folds up and out of the way when you don’t need it?

Windix seems to have specialized in making digital clocks and they have some colorful and interesting ideas. I just hope their products see the light of day in the U.S.

The winner of the most pervy display at CES this year goes to Ultmost.

Instead of half dressed booth babes, they decided to go with nearly full frontal nudity. Who thought it was a good idea to insert their video projector over a naked woman?

The best part is that it DIDN’T WORK. The convention going crowd is so desensitized to this sort of thing that the Ultmost booth was ALWAYS empty. I would see a couple people roaming around the projector, but I think they were Ultmost’s exhibitors. We went to The Sands three times over the five days of CES and never once did I see someone with a Buyer badge at their booth.

In the end, the booths that get crowds at CES are the booths with interesting TECHNOLOGY. Give them something fun to do at your booth and you have a chance of catching them, but trying to attract them with booth babes and nearly naked posters is a mistake every time.

At $99 street price at the time of this writing, the Corsair Flash Voyager is bulk flash storage on the cheap. With a read speed of 27MB/sec and a write speed of 11MB/sec, its performance is typical of mid-speed USB drives.

But with this much storage, performance becomes critical. You purchase large capacity drives because you have big files you need to move. I copied a 27GB virtual machine data file to the drive, which took 40 minutes. My A-data 32GB Expresscard drive (through a USB interface), on the other hand, copied the same file in 20 minutes, and a RAID-0 drive of 4 USB flash drives copied the data in 15 minutes (which is essentially the USB bus limit for data transfers).

It’s always disappointing when I plug a drive in and I’m reminded of the difference between what the package says and what the drive is. A 64GB drive really equals 60GB of data, which is the amount that will show up in your operating system when you mount it. Whether or not you’re being ripped off depends on the definition of a gigabyte: To everyone in the computing world except drive manufacturers, a Gigabyte is the binary 2 raised to the 30th power (1,073,741,824). To the drive industry, a gigabyte is the decimal 10 raised to the 9th power (1,000,000,000). In the days of megabyte hard drives, the difference was negligible but in the days of terabyte drives, the difference will hold an entire operating system installation. Drive manufacturer’s say they can’t change or they’ll look bad in comparison. I think it’s an issue the FTC should rule on so that all manufacturers have to change at once. But this is a review, and not a rant on ancient numerical injustices, so I’ll go on.

Like all flash drives, the Corsair Flash Voyager 64GB is highly reliable. However, out of the eight Corsair Flash Voyager drives I’ve owned, one failed suddenly. Despite the promise of a lifetime warranty, the warranty was basically impossible to execute, with the company sending forms back and forth and then basically doing nothing until I gave up on it because it wasn’t worth my time. I wound up returning it to Fry’s Electronics, who happily exchanged it even though it was beyond their return period.

The CEA sent me a survey. They asked me this question:

Do you have any additional comments or suggestions to improve the International CES for press attendees?

Unfortunately, they didn’t give me enough room to give a full answer, so I’m posting it here and linking to it.

There was very little that I saw at CES this year that I didn’t already know about. CES doesn’t get the word out about products anymore because companies do it themselves on the Internet.

The good thing about CES is that you can actually TOUCH and play with the new products. Companies are having more problems with having products available to try out in stores than distribution.

We all could buy anything we want online, but being able to play with it first is getting increasingly more difficult. Electronics manufacturers need to find a way to get past that and the Internet isn’t going to help them there.

We don’t want to buy things and return them if they don’t work out. We just want to have five minutes with a product in a store to see if it will work for us or not.

CES is the ONLY place where we can do that, and that’s only with the exhibitors that don’t put their stuff under glass. Getting more exhibitors to set up areas where customers can play with their products is the smartest thing that the CEA could do right now.

There are people out there who think that the era of the trade show is dead. I’m not one of them. There are many reasons to converge on one place:

• Camaraderie: Seeing other people in your industry. Never discount the power of networking.
• The Touch Factor: Being able to play with new products in person.
• Pulse Taking: A trade show gives you a visual indication of what people think are interesting. Just by following the crowds, you can track the trends.

For all of you out there who saw the lack of crowds and exhibitors, that’s more an indication of health of the industry than an indication of the health of trade shows in general.

Hands down, my FAVORITE booth at CES this year was Mattel.

They had a new toy that’s going to be out in the Fall of 2009 that blew my socks OFF. It is called B-Nails.

It prints cool designs on your fingernails. This nice girl demonstrated it to me.

First you stick your finger into the machine. It takes a picture of your finger.

Then you choose the design that you want on your fingernail.

I chose this classic Barbie silhouette. At this point, you can resize the image so it will fit on tiny little girl fingers or big fat thumbs or anything inbetween.

After it prints on your finger, you cover the image with clear polish. I couldn’t feel it printing on my finger. There was no heat and I didn’t feel the ink squirting.

Unfortunately, I painted my image too soon, so it smeared a bit.

I had better luck the second time. I sized the image a little too small that time, but it worked perfectly.

They had this toy connected to a PC and running software to control it, so I suspect it will be like the Barbie iDesign and work on Windows only. Hopefully, they won’t make us upgrade to Windows 7 just to play with it.

I am continually impressed with Mattel and their ideas for toys for little girls. B-Nails is just another great toy to add to the list.

iTouchless is a electronics distributor that carries a wide variety of products for your home. Here is a video of a couple of the products: Towel-Matic and iMu.

The Towel-Matic is an automatic towel dispenser. It will spit out the exact right amount of paper towel when you wave your hand in front of it. You can set it to work with half sheets or whole sheets. If it has dispensed some towel, it won’t dispense any more until you pull off the sheet.

This looked like a great product until I remembered WHEN I use paper towels. I use them when I’ve spilled a bottle of grape juice on the floor and I need something to clean it up. I don’t want just ONE towel in those situations. I want to pull off at least three or four. The Towel-Matic would be great for those times when I wash my hands and I want a towel to dry them off, but for the emergency situations, I really just need to grab the whole roll.

They also exhibited this fingerprint door lock. Using your fingerprint as a key, this lock makes it so you don’t have to carry around keys anymore.

They also exhibited the iMu. It’s a small gadget that turns any surface into a speaker. It works best with glass, but it also made a pretty good noise with the wood display.

We saw the iMu in the International hall as well. We recognized the iMu speaker from the iTouchless booth, so we were showing it off to Matt Strebe. We picked up the speaker and the music almost went away. We placed it back on the glass and the music was loud and clear.

It wasn’t until after we walked away from the booth that Strebe said to us what he noticed. Every time we lifted the speaker, the woman had turned the volume down. When we put it back down, she turned it back up.

No one did that at the iTouchless booth, but it made me feel like I was in a carnival. The pins are bolted to the table so I can’t knock them down and the darts are dulled so they bounce off the balloons.

With a name like Innovative Technology, I expected something a little more futuristic, but when I saw these old school flip clocks, I squealed with delight.

When I was a child, my parents had a flip clock next to their bed. I remember lying on the bed, trying to fall asleep for my nap and hearing the click, click, click of each minute flip by. It makes me happy just to see a clock like this.

They also make these retro turntables. You can create a CD from an old cassette tape or record with this turntable. It’s not perfect and the record arm won’t automatically return when the record is finished playing, but it will do a fairly good job of getting your rare vinyl into the digital world.

Innovative Technology seems to have more style than innovation, but sometimes style is what we need. When you can choose from twenty identical turntables or clocks, it’s nice to be able to find something that actually works AND looks good.

It has been a long time since something like this has caught my eye. The Ozaki iMini Pet is merely a dancing flower connected to a clock radio/iPod dock. The difference between it and the dancing flower that I bought when I was in high school is that it’s a full-sized plush animal.

The reason that this display caught my eye, however, is because of the Obama doll sitting at the top of the pyramid of dancing stuffed animals. Here is a video I took of them dancing:

They never labeled him as an Obama doll, but he was dancing along to a speech made by Obama. When was the last time a president had a plush animal made in his image? Teddy Roosevelt?

I don’t know if this is just manufacturers cashing in on the Obama popularity or if it is a statement about our president. Seeing this dancing Obama doll made me happy and that’s why I filmed a quickie video of it. Here is a better video from the Ozaki website:

I wasn’t able to find a place where you could buy the iMini Pet. If any of spot them at stores or on Amazon, leave a comment here.

Nicotine isn’t the only addicting quality of cigarettes. There is also the ACT of smoking that people miss. There were several companies at CES this year who showcased their electronic cigarettes and cigars. Here is a great demonstration from E-Cig.

Here is a closer glimpse of the E-Cig:

I haven’t smoked since I was nineteen years old, but back then, something like this would have made me feel ALOT better when I was smoking to look cool. The only problem with it is it stays the same size. It never gets smaller like a real cigarette does. The end lights up and a harmless steam smoke comes out of your mouth (not your nose, though).

I could see these products being useful for props in the movie industry for actors who don’t smoke who want to play characters that do. Even HD would be completely unable to tell the difference between an E-Cig and a real cigarette.

E-Cig wasn’t the only company exhibiting electronic cigarettes. Desonic also had a WIDE collection of electronic smoking paraphernalia.

To me, the cigars weren’t quite as believable as the cigarettes. I can smell a cigar a block away, so if I saw someone smoking an electronic cigar, I’d KNOW it wasn’t a real one. The electronic cigarettes are MUCH more realistic.

Whether these gadgets could help you quit smoking is another question. A nicotine patch can take care of the cravings, but the electronic cigarette only handles the habit. If you want to stop going out to the smoker’s patio several times a day, an electronic cigarette won’t help you.

Additionally, I haven’t smoked for YEARS, but seeing these electronic smoking gadgets made me want to start again. How crazy is that?!

I suspect that in five years, every late night commercial slot will be filled with electronic cigarettes. Until then, you’ll have to buy them on Amazon.com. Here are a few companies selling them:

• NJOY NPRO ELECTRONIC CIGARETTE WHITE STARTER KIT
• Smoking Everywhere Electronic Cigarette – 2.0 Kit
• The E-Smoke Stop Electronic Cigarette Kit
• Electronic Cigarette, Ecig, E Cigarettes, Ecigarette – Starter Kit
• Electronic Cigarette by Smoking Everywhere E Cigarette
• Electronic E-cigarette Premium Combo Pack
• The Ok Super Mini Electronic Cigarette

Update 10-27-14

Here we are a little more than five years later and you can buy ecigarettes in every gas station in the nation. There are vaping stores even in the smallest towns in America, with flavored nicotine juices and high-tech vamping machines that look like Dr. Who’s sonic screwdrivers instead of trying to look like cigarettes. I am continually shocked at how quickly things change!