The Consumer Electronic Show has begun and it has all the earmarks over your typical overwhelming display of hard core tech and some rather silly geekery. From the first keynote of the Ballmer era to a flying little birdy you shoot down with an infra-red pistol, to an SD card specification which is larger than the hard drives on my desktop, CES 2009 is getting all the interest this year, leaving MacWorld in San Francisco in it’s proverbial dust.
Some things I’ve noticed so far on day one … silly stuff; like Duck Hunter. As the video names it, it’s a pistol that sends a 10 second burt of energy into a small flying electric bird. You release the bird to fly around and you have 30 seconds to hit it three times with the infra red pistol charger. After the third hit, it succumbs to it’s virtual wounds and augers into the ground. Rather ghoulish, but I can see it being a lot of fun with the hunting crowd.
Other more sanguine offerings include a new SD card spec called SDXC – or SDeXtended Capacity. Obviously going after the high definition flash video camera market, the new SD spec supports memory capacities up to 2TB with read/write speeds to 104MB per second leading up to an eventual 300MB ps! WOW! That’s about twice as much drive space on a tiny SD card than I have on my entire hard drive. That should also change the mobile computing world to boot.
But the big pre-news of this years CES is the watch world WIRELESS. New High Definition wireless gadgets which promise to make audio and video cables a thing of the past and wireless gadget chargers which will juice up your tech by merely placing your cellphone, mp3 player or what have you, on a plate and having the charge transmitted wirelessly. Tesla would be proud.
Ballmer delivers his first Microsoft keynote around 6:30pm PT with hundreds live blogging the event. So stay tuned.