Posts filed under CES 2010

The Monsoon Volcano is a new app and Set Top Box combo on display at CES 2010 that lets you watch TV from your mobile phone. Not just any TV, though – your own TV at home. Yup, that one there in the corner, and you can watch it wherever you are in the world!

If that’s enough for you, you can also change channels from your mobile phone, which should certainly freak out whoever’s watching the TV at home.

Not only that, you can also stream content from your PC, Network Attached Storage device – just about anywhere.

The Monsoon Volcano is a cracking piece of kit that literally brings part of your home with you, wherever you are!

Check out more details and pictures of the Monsoon Volcano over at sister site MediaMentalism.

LG have been showing off the LG GT540 at CES 2010, a low-cost Android 2.0 phone that does pretty much what you expect an Android phone to do.

Rather than go to town on the user interface like some other manufacturers have done, LG have simply taken an LG phone and wrapped it around a standard Android interface. Not exactyl innovative, but it should keep the cost nice and low when it’s released in a few month’s time.

You can see a video of the LG GT540 after the jump.

Newcomer Inbrics has been showing off the Inbrics M1 at CES 2010. The Inbrics M1 is a new Android phone (currently Android 1.5, but Android 2.0 is on its way) with a cracking form factor. Like the Motorola Droid, it’s got a slide out physical keyboard, but it’s super-thin so you’d never know it was even there until it’s revealed.

But that’s not the key selling point of the M1 – no, that would be the way it handles media, making Nokia’s notion of “multimedia computers” look a little…lagging!

If you think touchscreens are old fashioned and accelerometers are so last year, then Synaptics have go the phone for you – the Synaptics Fuse, a new prototype phone with working technology that was shown off at CES 2010 this week.

The Fuse features more capacitive touchscreens in one phone than in the entire range of Nokia devices! The front display in obviously a capacitive touchscreen, but so too is the back…and the sides as well!

OK, so they’re not screens exactly, but they are capacitive and they do respond to touch to produce a responsive interactive interface unlike any ohter phone on the market today.

More details and video after the jump.

Asus have a tradition of showing off odd-looking concept phones at CES, and CES 2010 is no different. They’ve gone one better this year, though. They’ve come up with a whole range of concept gadgets, each given the WaveFace name, and all of which jump on as many bandwagons as Asus could think of!

The concepts aren’t exactly new. Wearable smartphones, information pushed to you whenever you need it, info available form all sources at all times, yada yada!

The only difference is that the concepts are being demoed at an electronics show where the gadgets are actually doing exactly what Asus reckons the devices of the future will be doing!

Other than the bendy smartphone, everything else you see in the video after the jump is pretty much here now – just check out the latest gadgets at CES 2010 to see for yourself!

Forgive the continued teccie-ness, but straight after posting about the new dual-core Snapdragon chip promised for the end of 2010 comes news of NVIDIA’s new next-gen Tegra2 chip for smartphones, which blows the Snapdragon clean out the water!

Qualcomm’s next gen Snapdragon will be dual core and run at speeds of 1.5GHz. NVIDIA’s nexyt gen Tegra2 will also be dual-core, but although it only runs at 1GHz, it contains no less than eight independent processors, each of which is dedicated to tasks such as Web browsing, mobile 3D gaming and HD video.

What this gives you is a smartphone chipset that’s 10 times faster than anything on the market today. And unlike the Qualcomm chips, NVIDIA actually have the Tegra2 in production, and in the hands of gadget developers now!

Expect it to surface on Internet tablets first, followed swiftly by smartphones.

Phew! I think Google’s right. This really is the age of the superphone!

[Source: Engadget]

In what could be kindly described as a very technical press event at CES 2010, Qualcomm have revealed that their Snapdragon CPUs, which power smartphones such as the Nexus One and Lenovo Lephone, are set to get faster in the coming year – a lot faster!

How fast? Well, the current Snapdragon processor leasd the field, running at 1GHz. By the end of the year, Qualcomm expects to be releasing new dual-core Snapdragon processors running at 1.5GHz that include 3G and lightning fast LTE modems on the chip!

To put this in perspective, current HSDPA modems that you find on nearly all phones these days (apart from the entry level ones) will let you cruise the Internet at 3.2Mbps. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is effectively 4G, and supports download speeds of up to 100Mbps!

Add that to a chip that’s 50% faster than today’s fastest smartphone chip, plus comes with two processors rather than today’s one, and you’re set for smartphones at the end of the year that will more powerful than netbooks! Certainly, the data rate will be faster than your home broadband!

2010 is already shaping up to be a killer year for mobile phones, and yet there’s already so much more waiting in the wings!

[Source: Engadget]

Samsung are another company with a thin presence at CES 2010, but they are at least there and have been showing off the Samsung W9600. This little beauty isn’t a smarpthone and certainly isn’t a superphone, but it does have one neat trick up it’s sleeve – a built-in projector.

Now projector phones aren’t new, but the technology is clearly getting smaller and better. The W9600 no longer looks an unholy fusion of phone and pico projector (as they’re called) it just looks like a phone.

You can beam anything from the phone onto a suitable surface (i.e. a wall). Not just pics, but even the phone’s user interface.

More pics of the Samsung W9600 after the jump.

Ignroing the superphones that have been announced at CES 2010, LG has decided to go big – really big! Step forward the LG GW990, a new phone (at least I think you can call it that!) with a huge 4.8″ widescreen display.

So big is the screen, in fact, that you can fit three different apps side by side. Just check out the pic – contacts, calendar and map, all side by side.

Palm have announced two new devices at CES 2010 – the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus.

The Pre Plus comes with 16GB of RAM, Adobe Flash (and “real Flash – the first time real Flash has been available on a mobile device”, apparently), WiFi, and a new app called the Palm Mobile Hotspot.

This is a cracking new app that not only allows tethering (i.e. turns your mobile into a modem so you can use the 3G network with your laptop), it supports up to 5 simultaneous connections.

The Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus release date is set for January 25th 2010.

More details after the jump