CES 2007: Day one

If you like the Mac-style white look for your computer hardware, you're going to appreciate Toshiba's initial entry in the Windows Vista laptop category. The Portege R400 is a beautifully crafted convertible tablet laptop, one that is every bit as expensive as it looks.

Samsung is no slouch when it comes to music phones, but at CES 2007, the company is doing everything it can to top its efforts of previous years. Instead of offering new music features, however, the Samsung Ultra Music brings an innovative music phone design. And if all goes well, we should see it from Sprint by March.

We're starting to believe that camera manufacturers are able to stuff tiny quantum singularities into their products. At least, the only way we can explain the increasing range of the internal zoom systems in ultracompacts is with a fold in space. Casio's latest fold holds a 7X zoom, with the 35mm-equivalent range of 35mm-266mm, in an inch-thick ultracompact.

SanDisk just announced the Sansa Connect, which uses built-in wireless technology (802.11g, to be exact) to hop on to any available hot spots, allowing the user to grab music and photos without connecting to a PC.

JVC announced a pair of superslim LCoS HDTV in mid-December, and showed them again at CES. The sets are designed to "easily fit on most stands and furniture designed for flat panel TVs" according to the company. The 58-inch HD-58S998 (January, $3,300 selling price) and the 65-inch HD-65S998 (March, $4,200) occupy a mere 10.7 inches and 11.6 inches of depth respectively. The company is marketing a stand and a wall-mount bracket that allows these TVs to hang over the fireplace, plasma-style.

The newest addition to the company's N series of multimedia computers, the N76 boasts a beautiful and slim design (available in sleek black or hot red) yet manages to pack in a boatload of features. There's a 2-megapixel camera, a built-in music player (supports Windows DRM, MP3, WAV, MIDI, M4A, AAC, eAAC+, and WMA files), FM radio, and a 3.5mm headset jack so you can finally plug in a pair of decent-sounding headphones.

Altec Lansing says its new video-iPod-compatible iMV712 speaker system, just released here at CES, belts out a "genuine movie theater experience." Hyperbole aside, we love the idea of portable speakers with an 8.5-inch LCD screen, especially for dorm rooms, kitchens, or anywhere else you don't have (or don't want) a TV, but where you just might spend some quality time catching up on The Office. Two 3-inch speakers, a 4-inch subwoofer, and a remote control give this portable getup an edge over your laptop any time. (Anyone else tired of propping notebooks on their knees in bed?)

It wouldn't be CES without some giant TVs that nobody can afford, and Sharp has done its part with a gigantic 108-inch LCD TV. The 1080p-resolution set measures 93.9 inches high and 52.9 inches wide, so you'll probably need a mansion to go along with your new TV. There's not much more to say except that, unlike many of the giant TVs that are unveiled, Sharp announced at its press conference that this set will actually be available to consumers.

Asus wins the prize for being the first manufacturer to cook up a laptop design that puts Vista's SideShow feature to use. The W5Fe SideShow notebook looks like your typical 12.1-inch laptop with one small addition: Embedded in the lid is a 2.8-inch LCD.

The Vista-based, 17-inch Alienware Area 51 m9750 is the first laptop to hit the market with two Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 graphics cards in a scalable link interface for fast gaming performance. Add to that the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, up to 2GB of quick 667MHz RAM, and two 7,200rpm hard drives with up to 400GB total capacity, and you're looking at one smokin' machine. The icing on the component cake is the price: though pricing is subject to change before the laptop's official release later this quarter, Alienware's shooting for a price below $2,000--which would make it one of the most affordable gaming laptops available.