CES 2008 led to lots of great discoveries, and one of them was found in Skull Candy. I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of Skull Candy before, and it kind of sounds like some candy in the shape of skulls.

However, Skull Candy is aptly named because it is like candy to your skull, and one of their newest products illustrates that. This product, the iPhone FMJ, are precision headphones that are compatible with the iPhone and the Blackberry Curve phone.

As you can see by the picture, they are equipped with an aluminum housing and noise isolating ear buds. It also has a high-end micro switch connect and disconnect feature.

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Whilst walking around the CES Showstoppers meet and greet, I came upon the Parrot SK4000 bluetooth handsfree motorcycle kit. Now as I have a brother who is a keen biker dude, I thought this was a great idea so was keen to learn more.

The microphone attaches to the helmet via a pressure clip and once on, it ain’t coming off, so no worries about it flying off whilst doing 70k on the freeway. Parrot have also employed innovative noise reduction and echo cancellation technology to ensure clear quality of sound. The speakers are padded and feel quite soft to the touch, and can be positioned anywhere inside the helmet for rider comfort and are slim enough so that I don’t think there’ll be any additional pressure concerns when the helmet’s put on.
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FLIR systems make a range of night vision cameras that can be added to your boat (pictured), car or used in a security context.

FLIR (Forward Looking Infra Red) cameras let you see in total darkness. I can see this being handy in some situations, such as marine navigation - they don’t exactly put street lights on the ocean!

It’s also offered as an aftermarket addon for cars. FLIR systems can see further than conventional headlights so you get more warning of obstacles ahead. It could also offer you an advantage in foggy conditions too - visible and IR systems react differently to fog so you’d get a second view of the road.

You’re looking at around the $4000-$4500 mark fully installed into your car, unless you have a recent high end BMW in which case the factory option is "only" $2500. Pricey, but very neat!

Now, if only somebody would combine this with a head up display to superimpose the night vision picture on the windscreen. That would be pretty cool. BMW, are you listening…?

Everything this year seems to be all about being “eco-friendly” and “green”. Well, in the mobile electronics industry, this trend is nothing new.

Nokia had announced their Eco Sensor Concept phone a while back, and at this year’s CES, they have a non-working prototype on display. From the official website:

The concept consists of two parts – a wearable sensor unit which can sense and analyze your environment, health, and local weather conditions, and a dedicated mobile phone.

The sensor unit will be worn on a wrist or neck strap made from solar cells that provide power to the sensors. NFC (near field communication) technology will relay information by touch from the sensors to the phone or to or to other devices that support NFC technology.

Both the phone and the sensor unit will be as compact as possible to minimize material use, and those materials used in the design will be renewable and/or reclaimed. Technologies used inside the phone and sensor unit will also help save energy.

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Ambient Devices have some very cool technology. We’ve already seen the Internet enabled umbrella, but now they also have something for sports fans.

The Ambient Football ScoreCast and Baseball ScoreCast look a lot like portable weather stations, only instead of giving you a weather forecast they display up to date information on (American) football and baseball scores.

The information is pulled from a nationwide wireless network that reaches 90% of the US, so you don’t need a PC to use it; just insert batteries and turn on. Cute.

So I’m in a hotel room, trying to write up what I’ve seen at CES this year. I’m using the same HP core2 duo laptop I used last year, only this year it’s been "upgraded" from XP to Vista.

So now my battery life is down from a useful 4 hours to a dismal 2 and it’ll sometimes stall for seconds at a time - presumably because the thing spends most of it’s uptime swapping to disk. After all, it’s only got a measly gig of RAM and clearly web browsing / light photo resizing is harder work than I thought.

If it’s not swapping it’s thrashing the disk trying to second guess what app I’ll want next and pre-loading it for me. I’m sure it takes longer to start up too. Oh, and then there’s the new version of explorer. Don’t even get me started on that…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing MS for the hell of it. I make a decent living using MS products and a lot of them are very good indeed. I can’t shake the feeling though that this OS just isn’t giving me as a consumer anything useful. It might have loads of cool enabling technology under the hood but if my end user experience is this frustrating I think they have some more work to do…

There you go, rant over - I’ll get back to some CES posts now!

Draft beer in your own home is most beer drinkers’ preferred way of having their pint (no tinny taste from the can). Krups are now about to launch in the USA the BeerTender which delivers a crisp, fresh perfectly chilled draft beer which will stay fresh for upto 30 days. The unit has been engineered to work exclusively with Heineken and Heineken Premium Light DraftKegs.

The BeerTender is simple to set up and operate, and you have a choice of chill temperature settings depending on your preference. It also has a display which tells you how much you have left, and how long you have before you need to re-stock. It’s the perfect thing to have when you’re having a summer BBQ or a bit of a gathering (which we seem to do rather too often, particularly when we decide to have a poker night!)

The BeerTender is due for launch in March 08, and should be available nationwide in the USA from April 08. Prices start from $380 to $400 depending on model.