If you haven’t been to CES, you may have heard of the headache inducing noise, leg-ache inducing size and debt-ache inducing taxis and hotel rooms. We’ll save you all that and run over the highs and lows from this year’s CES 2006 show – shame we can’t help out with the glitzy lights of Las Vegas.
Noteworthy on the entertainment front was the Saitek A-250, a $129 wireless 2.1 speaker system playing music stored on a PC’s hard drive via Class One Bluetooth technology. The system managed to effortlessly stream music up to 100 feet away from the PC.
Satellite radios from XM and Sirius while Toshiba’s new HD-DVD playing Qosmio laptop gathered attention. It’s the first laptop to debut with a built-in HD-DVD player. The laptop can also play hi-def discs on your TV. The Qosmio is expected to hit the streets in March 2006 – months before the first Blu-Ray boxes are due out.
For multimedia aficionados, PC World reckons the Harmony 890 could take gadget lovers to remote control nirvana, with Logitech’s Harmony 890 Universal Remote using RF technology allowing owners to control consumer electronics located in other rooms and floors.
It looks great, but you’ll need deep pockets and an understanding partner to justify forking out $399 for a humble remote control.
When it comes to portable video devices, Samsung’s new YM-P1 handheld DVR was described as a “genuinely intriguing product”, offering users the ability to record TV directly to the built in 20GB hard drive for viewing later on the unit’s 4-inch screen. You can expect the device to come out in February, priced around $400.
In the flash-based MP3 player department, SanDisk’s 6GB flash player proved a hit, impressing with its generous storage capacity, pretty-boy looks, feature set and video support.
Elsewhere, the PC World editors were less than impressed with the ongoing willy-waving battle for the biggest plasma screen, arguing that they’d prefer it if the manufacturer’s considerable energies were directed into producing affordable plasmas for regular folks.
Read their full list of highlights and lowlights here: CES 2006: Picks and Pans.
Slapping iTunes around the face with their hefty gauntlet, Google have laid down a challenge to iTunes with the announcement of their new video and television Internet service, the Google Video Store.
The service promises to “democratise” video sales, letting wannabe Spielbergs sell their movies on Google Video Store, with Google taking what Larry Page has described as a “very low” percentage of the sale cost.
Visitors to the Google Video homepage at 
Speculators with a wad of cash might like to consider convert said cash into an ITV plc share holding in the next few days some feel.
BT, despite having previously stated that it has no desire to enter the content market, needs to consider the competition from both BSkyB and a revitalised NTL. This could force BT’s into making an early move before other predatory companies come out of the shadows but will need to balance this against the cost of such an acquisition.
Unlike Sky, which is principally a broadcast platform owner and call centre operator, ITV actually has what companies with desires to be fully-grown media giants badly need; content and a fifty year plus heritage of making TV programmes.
Like a pub drunk wanting to take on the entire world, Google have gone over to Microsoft’s table, knocked over their pints and invited them out for a scrap.
Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience at Google commented, “The pack has been created to give users a way to painlessly install all the essential software they need – pre-configured in a sensible way – in a matter of minutes. Better yet, users don’t have to keep track of software updates or new programs – we maintain and update all the software for them.”
Josh Bernoff, a media and internet analyst at Forrester, a technology research company, described the move as a “direct action to challenge Microsoft,” adding, “Google is saying, ‘We can manage the browser and other elements of the computer-desktop experience better than you’.”
Interestingly, after 
Mr Gates, speaking in the keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, evangelised the “arrival of the much-trailed ‘digital lifestyle’” (which of course, we here at Digital Lifestyles just loved when 
Palm have finally announced the launch of their much anticipated Windows Mobile powered Treo 700w smartphone.
The transition to Windows has, however, seen the TFT screen resolution shrink from Palm’s 320 x 320 pixels to a more miserly 240 x 240 pixels (the same as the Treo-alike HP iPAQ hw6500 series). Early reports suggest that the screen is somewhat washed out compared to the current Palm Treo 650.
The removable battery gives up to 4.7 hours of talk time or up to 15 days of standby.
If Palm have successfully managed the transition to the Windows platform, we can expect this new smartphone to be a winner, although we do wonder what long-term impact it may have on their Palm OS range.
Happy New Year!!Since the New Year has just begun, a piece focusing on last year, the one that has just begun and the developments suspected to emerge during it seemed justified.
You might wonder why I am so confident in this prediction: Afterall, Microsoft has been pushing out 
There were of course 
However, this has always been on quite specific Mac-related Websites, and not in main stream media.