CES 2006: Innovation Award highlights
CES 2006 may still be two weeks away, but that hasn’t stopped the organisers from handing out gongs for the year’s most innovative products. Here are just some of the winners:
Belkin Tunestage for iPod
First of the 30 products to receive a CES 2006 Innovations Design And Engineering Award was the Belkin TuneStage for iPod. This slim silver and white box enables you to play songs stored on your iPod through your stereo or TV and then access them from up to 10m away using a Bluetooth remote. The TuneStage is available in the UK now for £100.
Polk Audio I-Sonic
Chiefly famous for making butt-whupping hi-fi and home cinema speakers, Polk Audio has now branched out into complete systems with the I-Sonic – an all-in-one entertainment system comprising a DVD/CD player, high definition FM/AM radio and ports for hooking up an iPod or other MP3 player. However it’s the I-Sonic’s sound quality which is most likely to tempt US punters, promising 360-degree stereo (?) and the kind of arse-quaking audio for which the company’s famed. The I-Sonic is expected to go on sale Stateside next spring for around $599, although there’s no news yet on a UK version.
GE Mobile 2.1 digital speaker
This is the first product we’ve ever seen that enables laptop users to enjoy virtual surround sound with their movies. The device, from the Jasco Product Company, comprises two satellite speakers and a bass-generating subwoofer which simply hooks up to your Mac or PC via USB. The system comes complete with rectractable cables and a carrying case, making it easy to enjoy high quality sound wherever you are.
Logitech G5 laser mouse
We’re not quite sure why the CES judges plumped for a mouse over all the other innovative computer products we’ve seen this year, but Logitech’s G5 Laser Mouse is certainly worthy of a place on the shortlist. Aimed at serious PC gamers, the mouse comes with a customisable imaging engine that can be tuned as high as 2,000dpi or as low as 400dpi depending on the amount of accuracy of mouse movement you want to achieve. It also comes with a pull-out tray and 14 different size weights that enables you to load up the mouse to the exact weight you need to enhance your gaming experience. The mouse is also available in a choice of custom paint finishes, with each one hand-sanded in a seven-step finishing process that promises to make each one sold unique. The Logitech G5 costs £60.
Fujitsu PalmSecure biometric scanner
This award winning innovation is Fujtsu’s PalmSecure FAT12FC1L1, a high-level security product for PC users that analyses the unique pattern of veins in your hand when held over a near-infrared scanner. The scanner works by assessing the movement of deoxidised haemoglobin in your veins, making it extremely tricky to forge, failing to recognise the user in only 0.00008-percent of cases. The scanner’s contact-less design also makes it hygenic to use in public buildings and offices.
eMagin Z800 3D visor
It’s been 20 years since virtual reality first promised to give us an immersive experience and it’s yet to live up to the hype. That’s chiefly because we’ve always felt stupid looking at blocky graphics on a cumbersome headset when the rest of the world is engaging in the much more interesting ‘actual reality’ instead. That hasn’t stopped eMagin Corp. from coming up with this Z800 3D visor which twins a stereoscopic OLED display with a 360-degree headtracker and a pair of headphones. The judges at CES were obviously won over by the $899 device, which has just given it an Innovation award. We’ll keep schtum until we’ve had chance to try it out for ourselves.
LG Wi-Fi plasma TV
One of the downsides of hanging a flat panel TV on your wall is that you can still end up with a veritable forest of dangling cables hanging down from the bottom of the set so you can hook up your DVD player, Sky+ box, Xbox 360, etc. Some TV makers have got around this problem by selling offboard media hubs that use a single connector to plug into the back of your telly. LG for its part has ditched cable connections altogether and plumped for a Wi-Fi solution instead. Already the recipient of the CES Innovations Award, the 50-inch set uses 802.11g to stream source material to the display, although there is no news on how the device gets its power, although it presumably uses a conventional cable like everything else.
Sonare Technologies Babble
Fed up with your office colleagues overhearing your private telephone conversations? Then you need the Sonare Technologies Babble, a voice privacy device designed for open plan offices that cleverly masks your speech. The Babble works by scrambling the phonemes of your voice and then broadcasting the scrambled signals at the same time as you’re speaking. It also broadcasts low level white noise to further enhance the effect. Bill Dekruif, president of Sonare Technologies says Babble effectively turns you into a ’small crowd’ while obviously hoping to attract large crowds to his company’s stand at CES 2006.
Kodak EasyShare-One digital camera
After years of uninspiring products and a sharply declining film business, Kodak is finally back in the game with some truly innovative tech – and its efforts have been rewarded with two Innovations honours from the CES judges. The first of these is the EasyShare-One, a digital compact camera boasting a 4-megapixel resolution, 3x optical zoom lens and support for MPEG4 movie making. What really sets the One apart from the competition is support for 802.11g Wi-Fi, giving you the power to transfer your snaps directly to your laptop or desktop without the need for any linking cables. The UK version ships with a Wi-Fi card in the box so there’s no additional outlay, while the 256MB of onboard memory is good for 1,500 snaps which is a lot more generous than what digital cameras normally ship with. To be honest, the £400 One has received some mixed reviews here in the UK, partly due to its relatively low resolution and because its menu system can be tricky to navigate. However we reckon that Kodak’s put itself ahead of the curve by adding Wi-Fi, a feature we expect to be commonplace on all kinds of portable devices in the very near future.
Celestron SkyScout
Point the Celestron SkyScout at the night sky and it’ll immediately identify up to 6,000 different stars, constellations and planets and then give you information in the form of an audio commentary. Designed for kids, students and astronomers, the SkyScout isn’t much bigger than a regular camcorder and weighs 453g.
Flexity PowerSquid
The unusual design of the Flexity PowerSquid addresses two fundamental problems that we all have when it comes to computing and consumer electronics: Firstly that there never seem to be enough power sockets for all the devices we own; and secondly that even when you use a powerstrip, you can’t plug half of the your devices in because they use bulky transformers that obscure half the sockets on the strip. The PowerSquid gets around this problem by offering multiple sockets mounted on individual connectors that are flexible enough to accommodate all of your devices’ transformers, while still only requiring a single wall-mounted power outlet. Naturally the ‘Squid also comes with built-in surge protection for your appliances too. Flexity sells two different units – one for home cinema/PC applications and other for Pro musicians, although neither is sadly available in the UK as yet.
Kodak EasyShare Photo Printer 500
Kodak has snapped up an award for its EasyShare Photo Printer 500, which allows owners of different brands of digital cameras to print their shots with or without a PC. Camera brands supported include Canon, Sony, Olympus, Nikon and HP. The printer sports a 3.5-inch LCD screen, which Kodak claims is the world’s largest on a “snapshot photo printer”, and offers four print sizes, from one 10 x 15cm print to nine 3.3 x 5cm prints per sheet. It also offers four colour modes – natural, enhanced, black and white, and sepia – and editing functions including zoom, crop and red-eye reduction. The EasyShare 500 also allows for optional wireless printing via Wi-Fi, so if you’ve got something like the Kodak EasyShare-One you can finally free yourself from cables. It’s not overly expensive either, costing £149 online.
DaVinci Horn DV-H speaker
Someone somewhere obviously likes these speakers a lot because they’ve already been given a CES Innovations Award despite the fact that few people – us included – knows a thing about the product or the company. What we can tell you is that the company won’t be exhibiting at CES, and that the website for Hi-Fi Research displays a rather cryptic login screen containing no information whatsoever about the product. The only clue we have comes from the CES Innovations site, which describes the DaVinci Model DV-H as a “high efficiency single driver speaker that reproduces music to a level of realism and quality that few speakers can achieve – with just one watt.” For now we’ll have to take their word.
Samsung Quatro fridge
Who says the camera never lies? What we took to be some extraordinary space dwelling moored on the outer reaches of the solar system turns into something a lot more banal once you look at the detail. For far from being a minimalist ET habitat, this monolithic beast is actually the Samsung Electronics four-door convertible refrigerator “Quatro” and comes complete with its own individually customisable cooling sections, a cool water dispenser and storage bins for holding rarely-viewed mouldy vegetables. The CES Innovations judges may like it, but it just leaves us cold.
Philips HTS9800W home cinema system
Philips isn’t saying a thing about its new HTS9800W home cinema system until CES 2006 kicks off in just a couple of days’ time. Anticipation has to be high though given that it’s beaten all the other likely contenders to scoop this Innovations award. Look out for more news soon.
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