Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

I have to admit that this post is way overdue but better late than never. A full three months after the end of the 2008 CES we would be crazy not to thank our sponsors. Without these three companies we would have gotten nowhere while out in Vegas.

Pentax - We were thankful to be hooked-up with a Pentax K-100D Digital SLR. The pictures were fantastic, storing photos on a SD card made posting extremely convenient, and the zoom lens helped us get some great close-ups even when not up front. Just check out the great photo galleries. Now we are left drooling for the K200D.

Energizer - Energizer? Yup, Energizer. If you learn one lesson after your first trade show, it is that you can never have enough batteries. In the past we have been burned by buying after-market computer batteries but because of the major cost difference between the manufacturer models and OEM models, we continued to search for a high quality solution. This search led me to Energizer and their line of rechargeable computer batteries. Personally I went for the ER-L385X extended battery for my Sony VAIO, and it could not be happier.

Sprint - Last but certainly not least would be Sprint. Without a whole bunch of mobile broadband cards there would have been no way for us to offer our non-stop coverage from up and down the Vegas strip. I think we may have had every single card, all EVDO Rev. A from the Sierra Wireless ExpressCard to the Pantech PCMCIA card.

So, thank you to these sponsors and we hope you, our readers, benefited from them supporting us.

I have the patience of a four year old.  I don’t want to know about things available in six months, I want it now.  OK, really I wanted it five minutes ago, but you get my drift.  CES is all about the future and that is fine, but what about things you can take away now?  Here is my list of cool things I took away:

SimulScribe - I’ve been waffling back and forth on giving this a shot.  This service takes over your voicemail from your carrier and then emails/sms you the transcribed version along with a wav file.  That sounds scary at first, but it is simple and completely reversible, not unlike a vasectomy.  The result is you don’t need to stand there listening to voicemail (which is a complete waste of time).  Instead of playing the message and listening to callers stumble over their ideas, you cut right to the chase and speed-read their message.

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In cased you missed it, or want to watch it again, here is the video spoof shown during the CES 2008 Bill Gates keynote about his last full day at Microsoft. The production team pulled out an all-star cast for Mr. G, including: Brian Williams, Steve Ballmer, Matthew McConaughey, Robbie Bach, Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Kevin Turner, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie.

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At CES, the company SkullCandy unveiled a pretty cool new pair of headphones that have a unique feature. It comes with a SD slot so all you have to do is load in a SD card filled with music and you can listen to it without the need of an MP3 player.

It can even work with any type of SD cards, so if you own let’s say an 8GB or even a 16GB one, it will work and then you have access to loads of music. It will also come in 3 different colors, orange/brown, yellow/white, and black. Furthermore, it comes with a rechargeable battery, and all the controls on the side of the headphones. This pair of headphones look to be pretty cool and I’m not sure why SkullCandy kept it so low profile during CES.

Expect it to start shipping in March/April for an unspecified price.

Via [Ubergizmo]

Back at CES this week, iriver had quite a bit of new products to show - some were closer to production than others, but all looked slick.  One of their new products that we got some hands-on time with was the P10 media player/viewer.  The device has a 4.0-inch TFT LCD touch-screen display at 800x480, and pretty much supports anything you can think of: video, music, voice recording, T-DMB, Office viewer, PDF viewer, picture viewer, and an e-Dictionary.  To hold all of this media madness, the P10 boasts 33GB of memory crammed into a 1.3” internal hard drive.  The P10 comes with Flash Lite 2.1 pre-loaded, has a customizable GUI, and is a touch-screen, of course.  Read on for the supported file-formats…

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Check out the gallery: Hands On: iriver's new P10 media player

Not only did we have the chance to stop by Blu-ray’s booth, but we also strolled through the HD DVD booth.  As you can see by the pictures in the photo gallery, the HD DVD booth was nice, but didn’t have that huge feeling that the Blu-ray camp had.  Maybe it’s because Blu-ray just stole another studio away from HD DVD, or maybe they just would rather spend their money on research and development than a booth at CES.  Either way, check out the pics below and let us know what you think…

Check out the gallery: CES 2008 Booth Tour: HD DVD

The Consumer Electronics Show has been the launching board for many new products.  Amoung them this year is this amazing recharger, the ZPAC 40 Zinc Air Powerpack, which represents the first commercial product from the Power Air Corporation. This lightweight, compact, recyclable “CellPac” that easily fits inside a shirt pocket provides the equivalent energy to 40 AA alkaline batteries. For those who may not know, this is enough to recharge a mobile phone more than ten times!

The ZPAC 40, which can be used anywhere and anytime, is guaranteed to provide safe, personal portable power without need of an electrical outlet. It provides extra runtime for travel, emergency, remote and recharging power applications by supplying

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At CES, Magellan released more information on their RoadMate 1400, which one of the three announced in the new RoadMate series, the others being the RoadMate 1412 and the RoadMate 1430. 

The RoadMate 1400 comes with a 4.3 inch touch screen, preloaded Navteq maps of continental U.S., Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Additionally, it comes with 1.3 million POI’s and is priced at $300, a very crowded price point.  It’s features should make it a stand out.

And those features are:

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At CES this year, Blu-ray had a pretty slick setup.  Not only did they tout their recently announced partnership with Warner Bros., but they also had a speaker talking about their superiority while facing the HD DVD booth… which turned out to be very funny.  The Blu-ray booth had such things as a ship from Pirates of the Caribbean, Homer and Marge Simpson, and the 150-inch Panasonic TV.  We’ve got a full gallery of images for you to look at, so check them out below…

Check out the gallery: CES 2008 Booth Tour: Blu-ray

Recently at CES, Kingston - known for their flash storage devices, announced the availability of a few new flash drives.

The first is called the DataTraveler (DT) 400, comes preloaded with MigoSync, which is a form of data synchronization software which allows you to work with many computers and synchronize files, emails, etc. pretty easily. This flash drive is available in a few different models, a 2GB, 4GB, and a 8GB. They will be selling for $31, $56, and $137, respectively.

Next we have the DataTraveler HyperX, this name, you may or may not know, comes from Kingston’s HyperX D-RAM gaming module. This device comes with a fast write speed of 20MB/second and a read speed of 30MB/second. It also comes with

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