CES: Noise-cancelling Bluetooth headsets, virtual keyboards, the "Tab 'n Turn" and more
As my week at CES neared its end, I hit the show floor one more time for four more drive-bys: my short video takes on cool gadgets some of which you're sure to find interesting. While standing outside of CNET's news room (a trailer parked in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center), the inventors of an incredibly innovative CD organizer approached me in hopes I might take and interest and take an interest I did. Do you know those spindles that stack of new CDs are packaged with? How many of you use those spindles to store your CDs. I know I do. But here's the problem. How do you locate that one CD in the middle of the stack without going through the CDs above it one at a time. Tab N' Turn, a CD organizer that's so new its inventor hasn't set a price for it yet solves the problem.
Then, when is a keyboard not a keyboard? When it's Golan Technologies Virtual Keyboard. Virtual Keyboard casts an image of a keyboard onto any surface. Then, when you tap the virtual keys, what you type magically appears on the computer's display. In my at-the-show test, it took a little getting used to and you have to be careful not to rest your hands on or touch the virtual keys if you don't want something to appear on the screen. Not thinking, I dropped a piece of paper on the virtual keyboard, an event that resulted in the generation of a string of characters on the display.
Noise cancelling technologies have found their way into many high-end headphones from companies like Bose and Shure (most of which are on display here at CES), but what about into the Bluetooth headset for your phone? Here on one edge of the convention center in a little booth, we found BlueAnt -- a company that will was showing a prototype of its noise-cancelling Z9 Bluetooth Headset (no Web page is available for it yet). One of the smart things BlueAnt did is they made the ear clip removable in a way that you can also just clip it to your clothing or collar.
Finally, in this batch was RiData's Laser pointer and thumb drive in one (pictured above in multiple colors). When left in your USB port, it serves as a 512MB thumb drive and recharges itself. When you take it out and press the button on its side, it turns into a laser pointer (the laser comes out of the opposite end from the USB jack). RiData officials say the ideal application is when you use a USB extension cable to attach the thumb drive to your computer so that you can access your PowerPoint presentations from the thumb drive while using it as the laser pointer. Cool!