CES was last week and quite a few cool devices popped up at the event. Here are some of my favorites.
Palm Pre
The biggest (in my opinion and CNET’s, is the Palm Pre. This iPhone competitor is a touchscreen phone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard and a cool new Palm OS called WebOS. This OS is filled with cool animations, gestures (multi-touch ones), and seems to be very intuitive. Now, I bet you are thinking along the line of: Doesn’t the iPhone have that already? True, but this Palm does have the ability for you to multitask and it has an actual keyboard (the jelly button kind like the one on a Palm Centro). In addition, it does have copy and paste. Multitasking (not just being able to play music in the background like the iPhone) works by having multiple “cards” on your main screen which you can flick back and forth from. And these aren’t just static views, they are live mini-views of the open apps and you can interact with them too.
Other tidbits: the web browser is also very good (comparable to the iPhone’s), the Pre comes with a 3 MP camera, and you can download music through the Amazon Music Store (similar to the G1). There is also GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 3.5mm headphone jack (yay!), and 8 GB of internal storage.
No details yet on pricing or release date. But it is supposed to be around the iPhone’s price and released in the first half of 2009. The Pre will be available on Sprint.
Palm Pre Video:
More info:
Palm Pre First Impressions on CNET
Palm Pre Photo Gallery on CNET
The Sony P-Series Lifestyle PC
This not quite netbook like netbook is going along with Sony’s general premium higher end feel for laptops. It has a wide 8 inch screen with a 1600*768 resolution, is less than an inch think, and weights 1.4 pounds. But it has no touchpad, instead, it has a pointing stick. It also has 3G mobile broadband (Verizon), 802.11n wi-fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. The P-Series runs Windows Vista and will retail at $900.
CNET article on the Sony P-Series Lifestyle PC
Engadget Hands-on videos of the Sony P-Series Lifestyle PC
LG Watch Phone
This futuristic watch is also a touchscreen phone. It uses iPhone like gestures to navigate through the TFT capacitive touch screen (1.43 inches diagonally). It looks quite cool though I question its usability as a phone. You would probably need a Bluetooth headset to talk calls since your other option is to take phones with speakerphone. There is also a camera built-in. But the main issue is that you can’t get it (no plans, yet), not unless you are in Europe. The LG Watch phone is scheduled for release later this year and pricing has not yet been released.
Hands-on video of the LG Watch Phone
A CNET article on the LG Watch Phone
So that is basically it for what I though was cool at CES. For more info about it, check out the CES Page at CNET (here) and the articles on CES at Engadget (here). Want to mention another gadget that was at CES that I didn’t mention? Tell the readers in the comments!
Images from CNET and Engadget.
What template are you running on this site ? I really like it. Could you post where you got it from ?