Full Report
CES Main Conference

Sands - Expo Conference Center
January 8th-11th, 2007

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Here we are at the Sands Expo Convention Center, Sands Expo for short. The Sands Expo is attached to the Venetian, so that you wouldn't be able to tell them apart if the literature didn't insist on calling them different buildings. And since we were at the Venetian, might as well check this out, right?

This photo is kind of sub-par, with that fellow in the middle of it. But what with Pengo, in the foreground, with the same name as the old PC game we played on the computer 20 years ago - and Planet 82, a nice which I would have picked, and then rejected as too farout - this Hall made me feel immediately that perhaps this was going to be fun.

Trimersion - wireless virtual reality. That suit the women is wearing to record her motions is very, um, attractive.

Astak. There are a lot of companies here that I never heard of. Make that most of them, which I think about whether ALL is the correct word.

There were ostensibly game companies here, like Game Wave.

iRobot.

Some of iRobot's robots.

Another of iRobot's robots, apparently capable of getting a beer from the fridge - using an arm that is not readily apparent [no, not that guys arm either - though I expect that guy's arm knows how to get beer from the fridge without any robot helping it, and that he would be happy to demonstrate to the robot how to do this. As would many of us. :-) ].

ClassicJukebox.com. The Sands Expo is turning out very much to be a hodge-podge of stuff.

Ningbo Jiahe Sujiao. I took this photo because of 1) all the stuff lying on the chair there so no one can Sit Down (ahhhhhhh....), 2)how, if you look closely, many booths display empty cups, and sometimes not so empty cups, as part of their exhibit, and 3) how cool it was to have what looks like a small entrepreneur putting together a number of electronic key chains and the like that the kid in us wants to know about each and every one and just how many key chains and doohickeys does it make sense to have in our pockets anyway? One per key? If only if we could convince ourselves of this, and our pockets were big enough.

MusicIP. A name which is very evocative. I presume they have a protocol they have come up with, and perhaps sample implementations? Not enough time to find out, on to the next booth. Rule number One for this reporter - do not get trapped by sales people - unless... but she looks busy.

The Joby Gorillapod.

Again, my camera insists on liking this kind of stuff.

The booths here are, in general, much smaller than elsewhere in the conference.

If they had this kind of opportunity at high-end audio shows... Nothing would ever get hooked up.

The Boomchair exhibit.

Now we are going to geek out a little, As if we weren't already, but....

Here we have a PC by be-quiet.com. Very much a PC for Las Vegas.

We are going to paste in some very large photos here - well they are large in the Full Throttle version, anyway.

And, since we are veering off into PC wonderland - we are going to include the photos from the Zalman booth, that was over in the South Hall at the LVCC, that were probably of limited appeal except to those who may be hardware geeks, or hardware geek wannabes like yours truly, and well people who like watching PCs evolve once more.

Just looking at motherboards has always been so fascinating - I would include a photo of the original PC motherboard, or the TI-99/4A, for comparison purposes if they weren't buried in the unheated garage in freezing weather right now.

The specs for this PC.

The words on the fan there are being animated, drawn and un-drawn using several different algorithms. Cheap entertainment, I know, but that CPU is sitting there almost completely unused between compiles, so....

Before we forget, a photo of the be-quiet booth.

The Zalman booth.

Some motherboard photos....

Some quiet cooling devices....

They had a liquid-cooled PC in this exhibit. However, this particular cooling tower was not being used, as far as I could see.

This was the cooling unit being used. Presumably it is silent. Wonder if they could make one that looked like, say, the nuclear plant cooling towers on "The Simpson's" TV program ...

Here you have a photo of the system setup. Be better if they had a monitor attached with CPU temperature readouts while playing some CPU / GPU intensive video game... or starting up Word or something :-)

Somewhat disorienting shot, huh? No, you will not fall off the planet, let go of that keyboard. But not the mouse.... how else will you be able to scroll down and see....

One of the Zalman chassis - uses heat pipes to take away heat from the CPU. It is fanless unless you have a fancy video card [which one does if they want to drive a 30 inch DELL monitor, for example, like me :-)]. I have the larger chassis, pictured below, and it is a monster.

Problem is that it is of such high-quality and substantialness and pride of ownership that you are never going to want to just heave it in to the dumpster [in an ecologically safe way, of course] like a 2-year old plain-vanilla PC. And the supported motherboards for it lag, say DELL's, technologically by about 6 to 12 months, at least they did about a year ago.

OK, end of geek out mode, back to home entertainment mode.