A Beepwear Pro pager/watch, a Timex and Motorola product. Photo / Reuters
If you're in Las Vegas this week to actually gamble, go to shows and shoot Uzi machine guns, the types of fun things you usually do in Vegas, I don't envy you. Every geek with a excuse to be there is in town for the Consumer Electronics Show so from the Luxor down to the MGM Grand, the place will be a day-glo traffic jam.
And already some of the
. Most significantly, is Warner Bros. decision to ditch the HD-DVD format in favour of Blu-ray dealing what could be a fatal blow to the format war between the two hi-def systems.
The move means one of my predictions for 2008 (the HD-DVD camp throwing in the towel), may occur quicker than expected. Warners move to back Blu-ray exclusively will also probably spell the end of the studio's plan for the hybrid Total HD disc technology it was working on to solve the incompatibility between HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Toshiba the HD-DVD technology pioneer, according to Reuters is "reeling" from the Warners about-turn. What it means is that technology makers and movie publishers will now likely just back Blu-ray leading to the eventual death of the rival format - Apple will be talking up Blu-ray at MacWorld and Microsoft will no doubt be figuring out how to migrate to Blu-ray for its Xbox 360 console. Pity the million of so Americans who in the last year have stumped up for a Toshiba HD-DVD player. This trend is good for consumers. Blu-ray was always a superior format anyway.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates will give his last keynote at CES tonight -here's a wrap-up of what he covered in his previous decade of CES keynotes
in his previous decade of CES keynotes
- last year's one was decidedly flat.
What's shaping up to be big at CES this year?
- Really thin flat screen TVs . Pioneer will show off a 9mm thick plasma screen at CES. Sony is likely to be pushing its OLED screen technology and JVC has what it claims are
the world's thinnest LCD TVs on show
- Wireless HD - saw this at CES last year, but the technology seemed to have moved much closer to commercialisation in the last year. Panasonic
has developed a wireless transmitting system
that sends a high-definition signal from a games console or hi-def video player, to a TV. It cuts out the need to have a thick HDMI cable snaking from player to TV and means you can place your player away out of sight. Westinghouse
is also getting in on the wireless HD game
.
- Rewritable HD laptop drives - Toshiba's Qosmio laptop range will be
the first out the door with HD-DVD R/RW drives
(which may be unfortunate in the long term given the Warners development outlined above). Still, HD-DVD has a strong hold in the computer optical disk market where people just want to burn large amounts of data to disk.
- Wireless USB - like Wireless HD above, wireless USB was demoed at last year's CES. The technology
allows data to be transferred from one USB device to another wirelessly
. A number of wireless router vendors have new wireless USB products in the market this year.
- Peter Griffin technology writer New Zealand Herald/Herald on Sunday
www.nzherald.co.nz/techbloggriffinsgadgets.blogspot.com
Visa and Mastercard push back.