LAS VEGAS--The truth can be so brutal.

After spending two days in the Fitness TechZone at the Consumer Electronics Show, I now know that my weight, blood pressure, and stress levels are all higher than I would have guessed. And now, thanks to the Fatigue Science ReadiBand I've been wearing since yesterday morning, I also know I need more sleep.

The band looks like a faceless black watch (warning: it draws attention to itself, at least here at CES) but it's oh so much more. The wrist movement detector tracks activity to calculate fatigue based on sleep levels, … Read more

While it's hard to keep up with the hundreds upon hundreds of product announcements out of CES 2011 this week, there have been some attention-grabbers.

Dell announced its Streak 7 tablet, Motorola its Xoom tablet and Droid Bionic phone, and HTC its Thunderbolt 4G LTE handset, to name just a few.

There's the new Ford electric Focus, Microsoft's new Surface, and all the new computers powered by Intel's Sandy Bridge. And, of course, there are the Lady Gaga Polaroid camera sunglasses from Gaga's new Grey Line. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Pleo is an autonomous toy dinosaur robot that became more or less fossilized in 2009 when the company behind it went extinct. But it's been relaunched at CES as Pleo Rb with improved interactive features, longer battery life, and better skin.

Pleo Rb (for "reborn") is designed to be an emotional robot. The Life OS artificial-intelligence system in each Pleo has unique innate personality traits such as obedience and courage. They begin life as a hatchling Camarasaurus, either male (blue) or female (pink), and then go through infant and juvenile stages, interacting with their owner and … Read more

Oh, how I've missed you, Chumby. I remember back when you were just a wee little beanbag. I remember your awkward phase as the Chumby One. Then your identity crisis when you morphed into the Sony Dash and the Insignia Infocast. Now, you're all grown up and hanging out at CES with a friggin' 8-inch screen. The time just flies by, doesn't it?

All reminiscing aside, the Chumby 8 looks to be the company's reclaiming of its hardware roots. It's rocking all the same widgets and functions as the original Chumby (news feeds, alarm clock, … Read more

Rockchip, a Chinese chip designer that focuses on processors for Net-connected phones, TVs, and e-book readers, announced a new processor today at CES that supports Google's WebM technology for video streaming.

WebM can be used to encode video with the the open-source and royalty-free VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio codec, and Google hopes it will keep patent encumbrances off the Net. Its primary competitor is the H.264 codec, also known as AVC, whose use requires licensing an expensive set of patents.

Crucial to WebM's success, though, is hardware support that speeds decoding and saves battery power … Read more

LAS VEGAS--After a long, hard week at CES, a little stress relief is in order. But can you achieve a peaceful state through a portable PC gadget?

Being demoed at CES this week is the Emwave 2 personal stress reliever from HeartMath. This portable device lets you monitor your stress levels and help you calm down. Specifically, it monitors your heart rhythms as an indicator of how stressed you may be. To use the device, you connect it to your PC and place your finger on its small monitor. A graph charting your heart patterns then appears on the PC.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Since the review of the Seagate Momentus XT, the first and only mass-produced solid-state hybrid hard drive on the market, I've received many e-mails asking when computer makers will start building it into machines. I have the answer now.

At CES 2011, Seagate demoed the performance of the 7200rpm Momentum XT drive against a regular 5400rpm hard drive. The demonstration was done with two Asus laptops with exactly the same specs, other than the main hard drives.

The demo consists of a script that automatically executed a series of tasks as soon as the computers booted up and … Read more

LAS VEGAS--BlackBerry owners now have a way to send content directly from their phones to their PCs.

Introduced this week at CES, the new Tazzle IT device connects a BlackBerry to any Windows PC via a Bluetooth connection, allowing people to send e-mails, file attachments, documents, photos and other files to their computers for easier access.

BlackBerry owners install the Tazzle app on their phones and computers and then plug the Tazzle USB stick into the PC for instant BlueTooth pairing. Once the connection is established, people can not only send content from their phones but also directly view and … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Samsung Galaxy Tab owners looking to both protect and erect their tablets have a number of products to choose from.

On display this week at CES 2011 is another case-and-stand combo: the upcoming $49 Zaggmate for the Tab, which joins a similar Zagg product for the Apple iPad.

The Zaggmate creates a hard shell around a tablet and unfolds into a stand to prop it up.

Zaggmate for the iPad includes a Bluetooth keyboard as an alternative to the tablet's onscreen keys. The keyboard also supports the iPhone and iPod Touch. Taking it for spin with my iPod … Read more