Wheee! It's our CES shopping spree
Imagine your favorite electronics store -- only bigger. Big enough to fill a convention center, in fact. Aisles and aisles of the lastest and greatest gizmos for everyday life.
That's essentially what the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is. What you see is what you'll get in the stores somewhere down the line. Two ZDNet News staffers had their run of this year's rendition. Along with their regular duties of covering the big news and trends, they pulled one other assignment: Each was given an imaginary budget of $5,000 and told to go crazy.
What follows in what each one would have bagged on their respective shopping sprees.
Senior Editor Rob Lemos
I already have the DirecTV satellite service pouring hundreds of channels of programming into my home. So, the first item into my shopping cart would be a DirecTV-TiVo PVR. Not only is it a DirecTV receiver, but it has all the functionality of a TiVo Inc. personal video recorder -- a hard disk in a set-top box that allows you to pause live TV as well as a much friendlier way to pick and record programs. The price hasn't yet been released, but I anticipate paying less than $500 when it goes on sale in this year's second quarter.
There are two other items on my list.
A host of new MP3 players will hit retail shelves this year. These are the little devices that allow you to carry around tunes you download from the Internet onto your PC. But the coolest among them comes from Audiovox Corp. It's the Audiovox MP 3000. It has a digital AM/FM tuner, voice recording, 64MB of memory for about an hour of near-CD-quality recording, and a fetching round design. Expected price plus an extra memory card: $400.
With all the other digital technology being connected to the TV these days, stepping up to a bigger and better set is going to be one of my priorities. CES was filled with next-generation HDTV flat-panel televisions. Their size, definition and design made me salivate. But at prices anywhere from $10,000 and $25,000, you won't find these behemoths anywhere but in the homes of Silicon Valley ga-zillionaires. For under $4,000, however, Sony, Panasonic, Thomson and others have 50-inch or greater digital projection-screen TVs that come close to high-definition standards.
Senior Writer John Spooner
I'd blow most of my budget in one place.
Compaq Computer Corp. demonstrated a 1GHz Presario PC -- a speed demon. The PC actually runs on a 700MHz Athlon processor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. But it gets its extra oompth thanks to a Kryotech liquid nitrogen system that cools the processor to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, thus allowing it to tear along at a speed of 300MHz more. A very fast NVIDIA graphics card and 511MB of RAM helped a lot as well.
This Presario isn't for everyone. Web surfing seems just as fast at 700 MHz as it does at 1GHz. But speed matters -- a lot -- if you're a gamer, designer or developers. Kryotech itself sells a version of this PC, starting at about $2500. The catch is that the base price doesn't include the video card or the memory, so buyers should expect to pay $1,000 on top of that.
I also covet the Qubit Internet appliance from Qubit Technologies Inc. CES was filled with such devices -- from Microsoft Corp.'s Web Companion to InfoGear Technology Corp.'s iPhone. But Qubit is different. It's designed more like a wireless tablet that you can carry around the house. It also comes with a touch screen and a base-station, with a keyboard. Qubit CEO David Armitage showed off a prototype of a Whirlpool refrigerator with a mounting bracket for the Qubit, which would allow you to check the news or your stock portfolio before grabbing the orange juice in the morning. Qubit should ship in or around April, he said. Pricing is expected to be about $350.
Finally, I want a new cell phone -- the T28 World Phone from Ericsson Inc. It packs tons of technology into its 3.4-ounce package. It comes with microbrowser, making capable of displaying data such as e-mail for basic Web content. Plus it supports Bluetooth, a short range wireless networking technology that'll allow you to synchronize it with a PC. The phone also includes a wireless headset. It'll actually ship in the second quarter and cost about $299, Ericsson officials said.