CES - Gadgets

There are all sorts of devices that provide a quick charge for a cell phone or other gadget when you can't get to an electrical outlet. Most, like the Energizer Energi To Go products, require you to insert AA batteries that transfer energy from the AA battery to the device's internal battery. But Easy Energy has a battery-free solution.

Spokeswoman Allison Morrison told me about the company's YoGen product, which is like a yo-yo that generates power. It's a handheld device with a cord. Pull the cord a few times and it generates enough power to … Read more

Dave Taylor is a tech author, journalist, blogger, and question answerer. His Web site, AskDaveTaylor.com, is a place where anyone can submit a question or learn from his many previous answers. Larry Magid asked Taylor about his most common questions, which turn out to be password recovery for people who's social-networking sites were commandeered and iPod issues.

Magid and Taylor also talked about what impressed them at CES. Taylor's response was "smart energy monitoring for the home."

Jasmine and Donald report live from the show floor on the Best of CES finalists and all of Monster's shenanigans.

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LAS VEGAS--I've not been shy about admitting that I'm a big fan of Callpod's Chargepod. I've taken it on many trips and I love that I can charge my camera, cell phone, and MP3 player simultaneously. But not only that: leaving all those individual chargers at home saves room in my suitcase.

At CES the company raised the bar a bit higher, with the debut of the Chargepod V2. Like the first Chargepod, the V2 can power multiple gadgets at once, but it also includes adapters for powering your laptop (both Macs and PCs) and it … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The president of the USB Implementers Forum discussed the arrival of USB 3.0 and gave a brief demonstration of transfer speeds on a Hewlett-Packard laptop at the Consumer Electronics Show.

In case anyone was in doubt, USB 3.0 is faster than the current 2.0 version. Below is a photo from CES of an Asus display, showing a comparison of the time it takes to drag a 2.1GB file from a laptop to an external hard disk drive using USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. (Asus was showing laptops with USB 3.0 connectors at CES.) And in the second video segment, Jeff Ravencraft, president of the USB Implementers Forum, provides a taste of the difference in transfer speeds between USB 2.0 and 3.0.

USB is more power efficient than 2.0. "This uses one-third of the power it would take on USB 2.0," Ravencraft said in an interview at CES. It's also backward compatible, he said, meaning it can also handle peripherals that use older USB standards.

Speaking of peripherals, Western Digital has announced a new WD My Book based on the USB 3.0 specification with an adapter card, which will make an existing desktop PC USB 3.0-compatible. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The most buzzed-about device at CES 2010 wasn't even on display here.

A tablet or slate computer from Apple was basically all anyone wanted to talk about, and it's not even a confirmed product yet. As a result, Lady Gaga might be the only thing that was actually at CES 2010 that could even be described as generating large-scale buzz.

We can partly blame both Apple and Google for this. Google sucked all the air out of the Las Vegas Convention Center Tuesday, two days before this whole show even got started, thanks to its introduction of … Read more

LAS VEGAS--An Intel executive gave a surprisingly in-depth demonstration of a future LG GW990 smartphone from LG Electronics here at CES.

Pankaj Kedia, director of Intel's Global Ecosystems Program for Mobile Internet Devices and Smart Phones, walked me through the phone's interface (see above video) on Friday. It runs on Intel's Moblin operating system and was surprisingly functional for a phone that is due, most likely, in the second half of the year. Intel CEO Paul Otellini brandished the LG GW990 during a CES keynote on Thursday but he demonstrated nothing approaching what Kedia showed me.

To … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Iriver fessed up to plans for its latest portable media player, the Smart HD. The touch-screen player is due out in Korea at the end of January, and includes a 3.5-inch screen, along with Wi-Fi, a calculator, a voice recorder, a Web browser, FM radio, music playback, and a slew of supported video formats (MKV, Mpeg4, XVID, WMV, and H.264).

The Smart HD will actively transcode most HD videos down to the screen's 480x320-pixel resolution. There's no word on whether the Smart HD will include TV output capabilities to make HD video resolutions worthwhile.

Details … Read more

LAS VEGAS--At CES here on Friday, graphics chipmaker Nvidia showed a tablet, or slate, computer running a "demo" Motorola-Verizon tablet interface on top of the Google Android operating system.

I stopped by the Nvidia booth, where an Nvidia representative gave a quick demonstration (see video) of the tablet from Seattle, WA-based ICD. It has an Nvidia Tegra 2 chip, which is expected to find its way into a number of tablets this year.

The tablet performed well for a prototype, though the unusable Wi-Fi connection on the CES show floor made wireless connectivity impossible. The device will also … Read more