LAST WORD
JANUARY 10-16, 2011
www.wbj.pl
23
Tech Eye
Welcome to 2011, damn it
picked out, halfway between the local vicarage and an infamous house of burlesque (along the busiest thoroughfare in the village). We even sent a letter to Ban Kimoon at the United Nations extolling the virtues of 2010 (“slightly rumpled, but very comfortable”). And if those efforts failed to convince people to abandon the whole concept of the New Y ear, Techeye was prepared to establish an underground movement dedicated to fighting it. This band of temporally
challenged guerrillas would mount fearsome strikes on 2011 (mainly through quirky flash mobs) before mysteriously disappearing, cloaked in their stubborn refusal to acknowledge the present. It would all be terribly existential. So why didn’t it come to pass? Well, we were headed out to picket when one of the local fishwives saw our sign and shouted, “Oy, what abou’ CES 2011, ye munghead?” The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the biggest, most important tech fair of the year... and we nearly forgot. All thoughts of picketing were immediately abandoned and we rushed off to buy a ridiculously overpriced plane ticket to Las Vegas. How to describe CES? Cacophony. Chubby, salivating nerds everywhere. Scantily clad models feigning interest in chubby nerds. More 3D TVs than you can shake a cross-eyed kid at. In a word: Nirvana. One item thronged on the showroom floor was T oshiba’s as-yetunnamed tablet (some are simply
calling it the Toshiba Tablet). It’s got a 10.1 inch, HD display (compared to the iPad’s 9.7 inch screen) and it will run Honeycomb, the first Android operating system built with
COURTESY OF KODAK
A HIB OS FT YO S TE UR CO
Techeye came very close to boycotting the New Y ear. We had our picketing signs ready (“R efudiate 2011!”, “Keep your hands off our junk, 2011!”) and had a prime s p o t
tablets in mind, rather than smartphones. The machine should hit shelves in the first half of 2011; no price point has been announced, but expect it to compete with the iPad. Another interesting gadget was Kodak’s Playfull, a slender video camera “made for social butterflies
and social networking superstars.” The camera’s software is designed to make it as simple as possible to upload to Y outube, F acebook or what-have-you, and it boasts full 1080p HD video and 5 MP HD stills. There’s also the option to record using a “70’s film look” effect, a feature presumably targeted at people who love disco, “Shaft” and cheesy disaster flicks. The world’s last Kodachrome film processing facility closed up shop in December, marking the end of a photographic era, but it’s nice to see that Kodak itself hasn’t disappeared. Its Playfull product comes out this spring at a price of $149.95 (z∏.441). Finally, Techeye was smitten with Lenovo’s IdeaCentre A320 AIO, which it’s touting as the world’s slimmest all-inone computer. It’s got a 21.5inch widescreen display and runs on Intel’s new Core i5 processor. Other features include HDMI in/out and up to 8GB of RAM and a 750GB HDD.
The A320 should be available in June, starting from $699 (z∏.2,057). Be warned though – it will probably make you look fat. That’s all the CES goodness we could fit this time, but Techeye will cover a few more gadgets next week. In the meantime, maybe we’ll start a petition to hold the show every week, or at least twice monthly. Ban Ki-moon should expect a letter to that effect very soon. ●
O OV EN FL YO S TE UR CO
Ever engaged in a temporally challenged form of existential protest? Let us know: techeye@wbj.pl sare_268x81.ai
22-03-10
13:25:37
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