CES 2012: Must See Products

At CES, scientific-equipment giant Life Technologies unveiled a DNA sequencer designed to decode an entire human genome in a day for $1,000 by the end of 2012.

The Ion Proton Sequencer, priced at $149,000, isn't your typical hot commodity on the show floor. But the benchtop sequencer costs far less than its bulkier, slower predecessors (typically in the $500,000 to $750,000 range), and the $1,000 price tag--once costs fall to that level--could put personal gene sequencing directly into the hands of the masses.

"This is such an amazing moment in history," said … Read more

LAS VEGAS--It's a teaser to say the least.

Without any ado or even a hint, Western Digital showcased at CES 2012 its first Thunderbolt-based external hard drive, called the My Book Thunderbolt Duo. This is a drive that looks exactly like the My Book Studio II with one main difference: on the back it comes with two Thunderbolt ports and no other connection types.

There's not much information about the drive, but one thing is clear: this is a dual-bay drive, meaning that it hosts two internal hard drives. These hard drives are more than likely set up … Read more

LAS VEGAS--If you own a GoFlex Satellite from Seagate, I have some excellent news.

Seagate announced today at CES a new firmware that turns the wireless storage expander for mobile devices into another much superior device. This is by far the most significant upgrade to the product.

First of all, the upgrade will give all of the existing GoFlex Satellites the capability to connect itself to an existing Wi-Fi network and share that connection with other Wi-Fi clients connected to it. This means, when your iPad is connected to the Wi-Fi network of the Satellite to stream content from it, you don't have to disconnect and reconnect it to another Wi-Fi network to gain access to the Internet. You'll have both the expansion of storage space and the connection to the Internet at the same time, as long as you use the Satellite in an area of another Wi-Fi network you're authorized to access. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Add a retina scanner and you'd believe you're reading about a gadget for "Mission Impossible 5."

Rocstor announced at CES 2012 what it considers the world's most secure yet user-friendly storage device: the Amphibious.

This is a superrugged portable external drive, and is made out of aircraft grade aluminum alloy. Yet it's still compact and bus-powered, meaning you won't have to carry a separate power adapter with it. And all that is still the least interesting thing about the drive.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--BlueStacks isn't a household name, but it's about to become arguably one of the most useful pieces of preinstalled software on Windows 8 computers.

At the 2012 Consumer Electronic Show here today, BlueStacks revealed a functional demo that runs Android apps of all kinds on Windows 8. This follows last year's debut of the software and release as a rough alpha for Windows 7, but it comes with a piece of unexpected news. The software maker has been in talks with hardware manufacturers to ship the program preinstalled on Windows 8. A beta of the Windows … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Forget what you know about those "faker LED" technologies, because Sony has just announced a television that actually does use LEDs to display an image.

Here at CES 2012, Sony has unveiled a "Crystal LED Display"--a 55-inch prototype TV that actually uses miniature light-emitting diodes in place of pixels. Up until now, the LEDs you have heard of have actually just been vanilla LCDs, just with an LED light source.

If you've ever been to a professional baseball, football, or basketball game, and seen the giant screens above the stands, you will be familiar with LED displays. That's fine for an image measured in furlongs, but this is the first time a company has been brave/stupid enough to try it on a television.… Read more