2010 CES

LG's unannounced, awesome Blu-ray sound bar

LAS VEGAS--We covered all of LG's major product announcements on Wednesday, but when we swung by the booth yesterday the LLB915 Blu-ray sound bar caught our eye. We're not quite sure why LG didn't mention it at the press conference, but the feature set is impressive. Here's what the product card said.

Key features of the LG LLB915:

Sound bar with built-in Blu-ray player 2 HDMI inputs, 1 output 430 watts of power Wireless subwoofer Built-in Wi-Fi LG's NetCast suite of streaming media services, including Netflix, Vudu, CinemaNow, YouTube, Pandora, Picasa, and AccuWeather DLNA-compliant No … Read more

The Geek Squad goes electric, thanks to Mitsubishi

LAS VEGAS--Best Buy leased four iMiev electric vehicles from Mitsubishi in a test program for its Geek Squad. The cars, sporting Geek Squad livery, were on display at CES. All right-hand drive, the cars were built to Japanese specifications.

Best Buy will run the cars out of its El Segundo, Calif., store, using them to provide in-house tech support to residents in the area. Given the 80- to 100-mile range of the cars, Geek Squad members will have to reserve them for local calls.

Mitsubishi has been signing up partnerships with various organizations, including utilities and Best Buy, to get … Read more

A sleeper show for Samsung Mobile

LAS VEGAS--CES press conferences aren't always exciting, and Samsung' Mobile's event early Friday morning proved to be particularly underwhelming. Though the company normally buries us in phone announcements at technology trade shows, this year Sammy announced no new handsets in Las Vegas.

We started with a brief recap of the last year. Samsung managed to earn the biggest market share in the U.S. market, which is not surprising to us considering the range of its handsets that passed through our hands. Company execs also recapped current design and feature trends, like the TouchWiz interface, AMOLED displays, and … Read more

Samsung's trio of Blu-ray HTIBs get DLNA, Wi-Fi, apps

LAS VEGAS--We liked most of the Blu-ray home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB) systems we reviewed in 2009, but the Samsung HT-BD1250 stood as the best, thanks to its excellent sound quality (for an HTIB, at least). Samsung has announced a new line of Blu-ray HTIBs at CES 2010, adding features like DLNA-compatibility, Samsung Apps, and Wi-Fi. Here are the details.

Key features of the Samsung HT-C6500:

5.1 home theater system Built-in Blu-ray player Built-in Wi-Fi 1GB onboard storage Supports Internet@TV/Samsung Apps, which will provide content from Netflix, Pandora, Vudu, Blockbuster, Picasa, and Twitter Automatic speaker calibration No release date or … Read more

Motorola adds Google search to navigation

LAS VEGAS--Although not a big name in navigation, Motorola is trying to keep up with top brands such as Garmin and TomTom by adding connectivity to its MotoNav series of GPS devices. The MotoNav TN500 and TN700, launching in the next couple of months, both feature a data connection for Google Search.

The devices both hold internal POI databases for finding restaurants, gas stations, ATMs, and the like, but Google search enhances the local search capabilities. Users will be able to enter the name of any business and get Google search results in the interface.

To use Google search, the … Read more

Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1141: Good news for high-tech mouth breathers

A new technology from Zyxio allows you to control your PC by breathing. Obviously this is good for accessibility, but it could also mean good and bad news for gamers. We'll discuss. We also rundown the latest news from CES, including the Intel keynote. And we talk with the winner of the Apps for Innovation contest about his Web site that makes it easy for you to find out what the government is about to do to you and gives you a chance to make a comment.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) … Read more

Nyko rolls out PS3 Slim accessories

Sure, we really like the PS3 Slim's brand new-sleek design, but unfortunately some pre-existing PS3 accessories don't play nicely with the console's updated form factor. To fix this, Nyko has revamped most of the company's PS3 accessory lineup for the Slim and improved on the Media Hub in the process.

The Media Hub Slim doubles the system's amount of USB ports to four and adds an SD card reader slot as well. The unit fits snugly under the front left lip of the console and plugs into both of the Slim's existing USB ports. … Read more

OoVoo to take its video-calling app mobile

With the advent of 4G bandwidth, the time may finally be ripe for high-data mobile video calling to take root. That's what video chat company OoVoo is banking on: it just announced its intention at CES to translate its desktop and Web video chat interface to the mobile phone.

Oovoo's desktop video-calling apps (Windows|Mac) can handle up to six conference-call lines at once, and can record conversations, to boot.

We can only guess at this point if video conference calls will figure into OoVoo's mobile app, since it won't even have a product to formally … Read more

Live from Qualcomm's keynote

LAS VEGAS--Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs is about to speak here at CES 2010. We'll be posting frequent updates once he gets started, in about five minutes.

Update 11:20 a.m.: Jacobs opens his speech with a prediction: that all consumer electronics devices will essentially be phones one day. Because inside they'll have chips from cell phones for downloading books, apps, and connecting to other devices. This is what he'll be talking about today.

Update 11:25 a.m.: A lot of computing power is going into mobile phones, and that will impact the user experience, Jacobs … Read more