Thursday, January 6, 2011

CES

Mother in law is in town, so we have been busy. Also, Malachi is very sick, running a ~103 degree fever because he has viral tonsillitis. As a result, Esther is home from work taking care of the boy and making sure his sickness doesn't spread to her workplace. It's always a mixture of great and unproductive when the boy and the wife are home. It is difficult to get much done and I certainly have no desire to be a slacker in terms of helping to take care of our son. I did manage to keep up a bit with my schedule of work, although I haven't gotten as many job applications out as I might have hoped. I almost forgot to do my (hopefully daily) post.

In addition to all of the craziness at home, CES has officially started this year. Now, as a disclaimer, I am not involved with CES in any official way. I am simply a nerd who subscribes to as many feeds about the show as I can get my hands on to see what the latest and greatest in gadgetry will be.

The Notion Ink Adam is shown at the expo. Shown to be every bit the awesome game-changing tablet that I anticipated it to be. And shown to be well worthy of a pre-order, although I missed my chance to do so. This is alright, when all is said and done. I would really like to have one in my hands, but we are pretty strapped for cash right now, so having that extra $500 stay in our bank account was ultimately the best idea.

Aside from monetary concerns, though, there's likely a high probability that all the other new products hitting the market this year will delay my desire to get an Adam even further. I am still in love with the Pixel Qi display, and that may ultimately win me over to buying one. There really isn't a competing tablet in that market. However, there are other tablets coming out with more power and better features. This will always be the case, of course, and isn't really a reason not to commit to the Adam now instead of waiting another year to see what might develop. Honestly, I doubt I would wait another year, but then again our finances may well dictate that I have no choice. The one thing the Adam lacks which I am most wary of is a clear method of connecting with the rest of my digital life (outside of a contract with a wireless provider, which will NEVER EVER EVER HAPPEN). It does have a very very good file management system and it does have the full capability of working with external hard drives and thumbdrives. This alone may well be enough.

Aside from the Adam and tablets in general, there are some really cool ideas hitting the market in cell phones. Esther is waiting to get her new phone until the dual core phones finally hit the market (unfortunately not until Q2, 2011 at the earliest at this point) and I think it is a good idea. The two major downsides there are the fact that she dislikes her phone and the fact that holding a contract with ATT and Verizon simultaneously is expensive. We would really like to get both phones onto Verizon plans to save ~$30/month. Saving money anywhere and everywhere we can is definitely a priority.

The amazing ideas I see are the HDMI mirroring that is included with seemingly all dual core phones. This technology allows you to play a video on your phone and on your big HDTV simultaneously, which is like the coolest remote ever. Also it has many other amazing applications.

I think my favorite innovation is with the Motorola Atrix, though. This phone is ATT only, so we definitely won't take advantage of its features, but the innovation of having a phone that doubles as a netbook is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen. I'd like to think this is the future of mobile computing and it may well be. It will be interesting to see how the idea pans out in the long run.
[*edit: It will be interesting to see how it pans out because the current implementation of the Atrix phone to netbook conversion has no forward compatibility. The netbook accessory itself is cost-prohibitive and nearly impossible to justify under the conditions a) it wouldn't work with any future phone and b) a fully functioning netbook costs the same or less than the ~$300 price tag being discussed for this accessory. The implementation needs to be standardized to ensure the accessory itself has life beyond the life of the phone)

/geek

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