The Consumer Electronics Show has sections for all sorts of technology. If you head to one part of the Las Vegas Convention Center, you’ll get bombarded by very loud car stereos. Walk over to another spot, and you get a huge variety of cell phones. That said, you could say that everything on display has something to do with a digital lifestyle and in case you didn’t notice, that’s what we’re about at FutureLooks. Here are a couple of companies that we strolled across at CES this year that are dedicated to promoting the digital lifestyle.
D-Link
It should really come as little surprise that the majority of CES attendees can be categorized as gadget geeks and computer nerds. They’ll toss around acronyms and numbers that probably meaningless to the average Joe. D-Link doesn’t want the average consumer to be left out in the cold, so they’ve designed a whole line of products that are meant to integrate the digital lifestyle into everyone’s home. This line, appropriately enough, is called D-Life.
One of the first products I was shown was the DUB-9420 Wireless USB Starter Kit. It is comprised of the D-Link DUB-1210 USB dongle (which physically connects to your computer) and the DUB-2240 four-port USB hub. The two pieces communicate with one another over a wireless signal, offering speeds that are just as fast as standard USB 2.0. The range is said to be about thirty feet, but I imagine that is with zero interference and perfect line of sight. I imagine that this starter kit would be a great peripheral for desktop users who don’t have ready access to USB ports on their computers.
Digital frames are a wonderful and glorious thing. They also make perfect sense. When you consider traditional film photography, you had to make a physical print of the image if you wanted to share it with family and friends. You’d sometimes put these pictures inside a frame so that they can be showcased on the mantelpiece. Now that just about everyone has hopped over to digital cameras, why do we still feel so compelled to make physical prints? The D-Link Digital Picture Frame does other frames one better by including WiFi connectivity as well as touch-sensitive controls. When you log into the D-Life website, you can add the frame, making it possible to drag and drop photos into its on-board storage from anywhere in the world. Neat-o! Talk about convenient.
Perhaps the biggest D-Link announcement at CES 2008 was their new PC-on-TV player that is designed to bring PC content to the television. There are other devices on the market that help you show YouTube, Google Video, Revver, and other embedded videos on your regular television, but many of these depend on the codecs that are housed within. The key advantage with the D-Link version is that the codecs are those on your computer, because everything is being streamed from your computer instead of through a direct connection to the web. The PC-on-TV player can also handle whatever you’ve got in iTunes, WMP, RealPlayer, and so on. The current $199 version only does analog for now and will be released near the end of February or early March. An HDTV/digital version is planned for Q2.
For more pictures from D-Link, check out our CES 2008 D-Link Photo Gallery. Now on to Genius!
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Genius
Genius, also known as Genius KYE, is a firm based out of Taiwan and they manufacture a wide range of consumer electronics. They had a fairly large booth at the Sands Expo, showing off quite a few products that are perfectly in-line with experiencing the digital lifestyle.
The first product that we were shown as the BT-03i Touch Panel Headset. This is a Bluetooth stereo headset that lacks conventional buttons for controls, opting instead of touch panels to adjust volume, change tracks, and so forth. It’s compatible with both AVRCP and A2DP, and it boasts something that they call Clear Voice Capture (CvC). Operating time is said to be in the 6-8 hour range, whereas standby sits at up to 220 hours. The BT-03i received a CES 2008 Design and Engineering Showcase Award.
Continuing with the touch-sensitivity theme, the next item that I was shown was a 2.1-channel touch sensitive speaker system, largely designed for use with PCs, but it should also be perfectly effective for other audio sources as well. The 30-watt subwoofer is a pretty standard cube with no notable controls, but on the right stereo speaker, you’ll find a series of touch-sensitive controls for adjusting volume, the equalizer, and so on. Each of the two satellite speakers produces 10 watts of juice. There’s also a line-in jack and a headphone jack for alternative connectivity.
Genius also had a wide range of digital picture frames on display, all of which had a 4:3 aspect ratio. The company representative said that most people own digital cameras these days and that they typically take their photos in the 4:3 aspect, so there really is no point in having a wide-aspect digital picture frame. The image quality appeared to be quite good and they came in a variety of designs, including keychain-sized picture frames.
On a side note, the Genius reps seemed very disinterested in their products and they had absolutely no enthusiasm about anything that they did. This is unfortunate, because not only does it reflect poorly on them as PR reps, but it also reflects poorly on the company. They also didn’t sound too ecstatic about sending out review units, but if you don’t let the press review your products, you’re not going to get very much exposure. I think that the Genius execs need to re-think their marketing strategy.
For more enthusiastic looking pictures of their products, please check out our CES 2008 GENIUS Photo Gallery. Onto UBICOM!
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UBICOM
You’ve probably never heard of Ubicom. Prior to my visit to the Consumer Electronics Expo, I didn’t know about them either. This is because they typically do not release products under their own company banner, instead creating reference designs that are then reworked and marketed by other companies. For example, UBICOM’s Stream Engine technology has found its way into a lot of award winning products like the D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Wireless Router, which takes advantage of their StreamEngine processor and gives the product its wicked performance. The primary item being showcased at the Ubicom suite in Wynn Las Vegas was a digital picture frame. But of course, not just any digital picture frame…
Digital photo frames are everywhere these days, so Ubicom wanted to ensure that their offering was a little special. For starters, this is a wireless photo frame, meaning that you can grab content through a standard WiFi connection. Using WiFi, the frame can connect seamlessly with social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, Google Web Albums, and Microsoft Live Spaces. This means that while you are on vacation, you can instantly share those pictures through the frame at home.
Another way to share the digital pictures is to use the web aggregation solution delivered by Frame Media inc. This content can then be transferred via UPnP or a desktop widget. The idea is that this frame is supposed to be easy to use for even the newbiest of newbies. Digital photo frames are often given as gifts, so it’s helpful when they can be configured remotely.
If you’re wondering about when this frame will be ready for market, look no further than one of the first devices to make use of Ubicom’s reference design is already getting marketed by D-Link as part of their D-Life line of digital lifestyle products. No word on pricing, but we here that this reference design is perfectly capable of 802.11n connectivity too.
For more pictures from our visit with UBICOM, check out our CES 2008 UBICOM Photo Gallery.
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