buzzbishop
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BEST:
HP Envy Spectre
If you're a stylish PC, there's no longer a need to live in the unsexy world of PCs. HP has made a system that has substance and style. Hyped on the show floor as an ultrabook made of glass, the HP Envy Spectre is elegant.
Tinted glass cover the lid, while glass also shows up on the wrist rests to soften the typing blow. Beats by Dre provides the soundsystem and a glowing black keyboard will make you easily think you're working on a Macbook Pro. Except, this will give you more screen real estate. The HP Envy Spectre actually has a lower profile than a Macbook Pro and squeezes a 14" screen right to the edge to give you an extra inch to work with. It is a delicious system that will have PC fashionistas very excited.
TOSHIBA 4K TV
LG may have won the C|Net Best of CES award for their impossibly thin OLED panels, but the best tv experience I saw on the show floor was in the Toshiba booth.
My biggest beef with 3D tv is that it's gimicky. Something always has to pop out at you to underline that you're watching a 3D show. Add to eye fatigue and an image that is always a little blurry or fuzzy (for me anyway), and I'm not a fan of 3D. Toshiba's 4K panel showing a 4K signal, on the other hand, blew my mind. It felt like a natural 3D. Everything was so crisp there just felt like there was a subtle depth to all the images. With 4x the resolution of HD and nearly 8 million pixels on the screen, why wouldn't it look better?
Let's just skip 3D and move right to 4K.
AURASMA
The Aurasma app blew my mind at the show and really unveiled a way that augmented reality can be used in real life.
If you played with the Starbucks app at Christmas, you've got an idea where this sort of technology is going. But it's the user generated content that really brings Aurasma to the next level. I can see people using this as a guided tour of museums, walking tours of cities or even a next gen way to geocache.
I can't wait to toss up some clips and tag places with Aurasma.
Samsung Galaxy Note
While the bluetooth headsets are getting smaller and smaller, the handsets seem to be getting bigger. Toshiba unveiled a prototype 5.1" tablet on the show floor with a 21:9 aspect ratio. It's a longer version of the iPhone. But they called it a tablet. Wander over to the Samsung booth and you would have found a seriously beefed up phone/tablet hybrid, the Galaxy Note.
The biggest hinderance to productivity on a tablet or phone, IMO, is inputing the content. The touch keyboards just aren't flexible enough to be fast and consistent. The Galaxy Note, however, borrows from the old Palm Pilot to add a stylus in the back. You can now scribble everywhere on the screen to get notes and annotations down faster. While the handset itself is a little large for phone use, many of us are using our phones more as computers and it still fits in a pocket.
Nokia's Lumia Line
I love my Mac ecosystem. I really do. But after palming around the latest Nokia Lumia phones and then going back to my iPhone I was left longing for the Lumia. Last year Steve Ballmer was begging us to use the Windows Phone 7, and with the upgrades to Mango and the intergration of the Windows active tiles into Windows 8, Microsoft my succeed in a first: making something with a more attractive design than Apple.
My iPhone screen, with hundreds of nested icons (each with a different logo and colour scheme) just feels messy and uncoordinated after playing around the beautiful fonts and flowing screens of a Windows Phone. It's not enough for me to switch sandboxes, but for those stepping into the smartphone world, having a viable and healthy third option is a good thing for all of us.
WORST:
Justin Bieber's endorsement. It's a dancing robot speaker. For $200. And it doesn't come out until the fall. It's so disappointing and so far down the product line it's surprising RIM wasn't behind the announcement.
Wifi. Connectivity on the show floor was ridiculous. The first two days it was impossible to get a proper signal on your phone. Even with full bars, nothing was getting through.
