Devin Coldewey (it's "cold-away") is a freelance writer and photographer based in Seattle. His personal website is coldewey.cc, and you can reach him at devin at crunchgear dot com.
We saw these guys at the Startup Debut event before CES, and I think they’re offering a pretty handy service. It’s essentially a universal middle-man for translating your website, whether it’s Angry Birds or a new hotel. They design the page around the new language, offer a quick-switch for your users, and basically automate the process. There are other translators out there, but Premium Fanpage focuses on the social side of things, where developers and companies have blogs, tweets, Facebook pages and so on, that need high-quality translation that can’t be trusted to Google.
The supreme madness of the CES season has passed on once more, leaving our team with sore feet and a tech hangover. If you were watching our live video stream, you know what sort of a show it was — pretty much CES 2010: The Next Generation, what with all the 3D TVs and tablets. But that doesn’t mean there was nothing worth seeing. Far from it, in fact; the show floor was packed with interesting devices, they just weren’t at the big players’ booths.
Here are our favorites from CES and impressions of the show in general.
As the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show wraps up today, we’d like to share a few secrets. The CrunchGearwriting team, with support from TechCrunch TV, provided more than 20 hours of live CES video coverage, taking our viewers right to the industry and media access only exhibit floor. For a look at video highlights, check out ces.crunchgear.com. Hundreds of Twitter questions were answered in real-time, giving our viewers a chance to interact with the company reps and win some giveaways.
We ran into iTwin co-founder Kal Takru at last night’s press event, Showstoppers, and he had some good news for us. You may recall them as a finalist from 2009′s TechCrunch 50 — and now they’re shipping. That’s a stage many startups don’t reach.
In case you’ve forgotten, the iTwin is a simple device for connecting two computers wirelessly. You plug one half into one computer, and one into another, and if all goes well, an encrypted connection is created between them (via the internet, not directly), letting you share files securely.
We saw a lot of these features go by in fast-forward when that Honeycomb video leaked the other day, and you could get a sense of Android 3.0 through the screenshots there. But if you really want to know what it’s like, you’d better take a gander at this series of videos T-Mobile has put out. They’ve been around for a while but we thought we’d just put them in one place for your convenience.
I’ll let them speak for themselves. No sense duplicating their content with a tedious explanation of each one.
I just wrapped up a short interview with Ted Schilowitz from RED, in which he told us (and all our live stream viewers) all about the new RED Scarlet digital cinema camera. I got to hold the thing and revel in its 3K glory; and while RED devices are notoriously never “final,” this felt about as final as it gets.
I don’t want to repeat what’s already out there regarding the resolution, accessories, dates, and so on, which are all googleable (and some not final), so I’ll stick to general impressions and you can watch the video as soon as it’s live for specifics. In the meantime, here are a couple new pics to tide you over.
During our foray into the “robots” section of the south hall here at CES, we found this little guy. I heard about this guy a few months back somewhere, but it was something else seeing it in action. I mean, it’s not like it was going crazy or anything, but look at it! The two halves (I prefer to think of them as twins) attach to each other through the glass magnetically and then work their way systematically over the window with its little microfiber cloths. Love it. Here are some more pictures of this guy. It’s from a company called Ilshim.
The camera Polaroid teased last month, at the time simply (and ominously) called “Grey,” has been revealed by no less than Lady Gaga herself (about 40 minutes late), who claims to have been intimately involved with the design process. It’s pretty much what it looks like: a digital Polaroid camera that doubles as a wireless color printer. It’s got a flip-up LCD where you frame your shot; the controls are all under there unless you’re just firing one off.
Oh man, I was so pumped to get my hands on this thing. This is the beautiful retro-styled, APS-C sensored, dial-covered compact camera we heard about a few months back, and immediately fell in love with. It’s got a “hybrid viewfinder” that either works as a regular see-through thing with overlay, or you can flip a switch and it becomes an EVF.
Thinking about buying both a new TV and a Boxee Box? Well, I can save you some trouble. Viewsonic has included Boxee as an included app on its new line of connected HDTVs. It’s nothing crazy — you can just run Boxee on the thing, without the box. No price, but it should be arriving in Q2.
We saw the new Surface twice yesterday, but getting shots of it turned out to be a bit difficult, and if you wanted to see video, you had to skip through the live stream of Ballmer talking about Zunes and Kinect sales (fun as that was). But they’ve gotten official with a video and a bunch of official photos, so feast your eyes on the new Surface.
We first saw the Onza improved 360 controller at last year’s CES, and at the time, I thought it would be released during 2010 — but it’s only now hitting… because of delays? Or because they decided to capitalize on the CES hype? I’m guessing the latter. At any rate, it’ll be available in a little over a week.
The vaunted successor to the Tesla Roadster, the Model S, is being shown off in near-production form here at CES. But it’s being shown off by NVIDIA, of all people, who provide the tech behind the enormous touchscreen interface making up a third of the dashboard. They refused to crack this one open so I could get up close and personal with the UI, but I thought I’d take a few glamour shots while I was there. Enjoy the gallery.
Geez, how do I see something like this and forget to post it? Here it is, anyway. This little guy is not for sale, and it’s just being displayed as a concept right now, but it’s actually pretty slick. The resolution is only 1366×768 right now on the 10.1″ screen, so it’s not quite the 1080p you’d want from your Blu-rays, but the 3D effect really works, and you wouldn’t have to worry about the guy next to you on the plane watching over your shoulder — he’d get a headache.
The 360 is turning into more of an all-purpose living room machine, and the Kinect is blowing up. That’s the takeaway from the Ballmer keynote here at CES. They’ve sold a huge amount of Kinect — 8 million, far more than the 5 million they predicted, and which we were all skeptical of. But it’s a surprise hit and I think that’s indicative of both its unique appeal (even the haters have to admit it’s unique) and the growing importance of a powerful box in the living room.
Avatar Kinect? I’m not buying it. But I’m not the target audience. I’d rather have it for the hands-free media control. Either way, though, it’s more stuff the 360 can do, and the central hub for media, games, and communication is obviously becoming a popular and contentious product category.
Remember that video we posted earlier that was quickly taken down — but not before we took screenshots and put them on display. Turns out that was supposed to air just a few minutes ago as part of T-Mobile’s “G-Slate” promotion. Yes, it’s a T-Mobile tablet running Honeycomb.
Literally all that was shared is that it’s from T-Mobile, it’s 4G (though some may disagree with that term), and it runs Honeycomb. Yet they can make a 1000-word press release out of that. Talk about spinning straw into gold!
Last night we were streaming live from the CES Unveiled press pre-show event, but of course, not everyone can be watching a live stream during the rush hour on a workday, so we’ve collected a bunch of the videos we took there and put them in one big post for you — to whet your appetite for our live coverage tonight of Pepcom, another big press event, starting at 7.
There was some interesting tech at Unveiled, but it’s really about experiencing the lunacy that is every CES press event. Tortellini, drinks, booth jostling, and crowd noise are all I remember. Caution: lots of video windows inside. RAM use may skyrocket.
This sucker was just sitting there, showing a loop of random 3D footage. I really can’t speak to the fidelity or 3D effect, since those are mostly on the shooting side, but this thing was 44″ (there might have been a larger one) and 4K by 2K resolution, and you didn’t need no stinkin’ glasses to watch it.
Bad picture, I know, but it was stuck in the wall in a dark room. What do you want from me? Fine! I’ll go back! God!
We decided to take a look at Sony’s goods before the press conference actually started. What, it was right there! Believe me, guys, if you like 3D, you’d like this booth. We’ll spend some more time there later, too, but in the meantime I just wanted to put up some quick shots and impressions of their new 3D cameras.
This result of “deep collaboration between Samsung and Microsoft” looks suspiciously familiar. Could it be because Asus announced one just like this last night? Oh, snap! Samsung got served, possibly! Actually, not so much, since Asus’ version runs a skinned version of Android, and this Samsung one, related to the Gloria of a few months back is a full Windows 7 thing.
Every year I come to CES and hope that Casio is going to blow me away like it did with the original FC-100, still perhaps my favorite point-and-shoot camera ever made. But they haven’t done so, and this year again they provide a practical, but not very interesting, upgrade to this versatile device. The only difference between this and the previously announced ZR10 seems to be the addition of a 12.5x optical zoom.
We saw a peek of Casio’s Tryx (or TRYX if you like the all-caps style) camera yesterday when Casio mistakenly let it go live on their website… oh, and put up 100-foot posters of the thing all over the convention center. But now it’s really for real, and we’ve the specs and everything. Basically it’s a standard full-featured point-and-shoot with a crazy-ass body. That’s all you really need to know, but I guess I could stand to type the details here.
Fujifilm has just released no less than 16 cameras just this moment, and I’m going out of my mind, each accompanied by a thousand-word press release. I’m going to have to punch a pillow here. I haven’t even had breakfast, or coffee, or tied my shoes yet. But this is the life! Forward, into the breach!
All right, this is ridiculous, I’m going to group these by general use and leave the details to the curious reader to find out at Fujifilm’s site, where these cameras are semi-helpfully labeled “new” and listed in some sort of order.
Now, you may know that I’m a big proponent of high definition — that is to say, images that look good at high resolution. Usually you’ve just got the resolution part. Canon has actually been bucking this trend occasionally, for instance with the G11, which lowered its megapixel count in order to improve low light and image quality.
They’re taking a similar approach with the new Vixia camcorders, whose image sensors actually just have 1920×1080 pixels, supposedly allowing for larger pixel wells and better low light performance. Check out the new lineup.