Gadgets

LAS VEGAS — A crowd of gadget enthusiasts gathered at the entrance to
the Consumer Electronics Show here Thursday, awaiting admission to one
of the world’s largest gadget shows.

Organizers expect 110,000 people to attend this year’s show, a decline
of about 25,000 from last year. Despite the downturn, hundreds of
exhibitors will still be showing thousands of new products, from watch
phones and giant 3-D televisions to USB humping dogs and electronic
air fresheners.

LAS VEGAS — Dubbed the Skylight, Lenovo’s smartbook is one of the freshest looking products showcased so far at CES. It’s a groovy “notbook” (a netbook that tries oh-so-hard to not be called a netbook, but in essence still is one) with an extremely thin form factor, rounded edges, a 10-inch screen and an ARM-based processor.

Why’s it called a smartbook? Oh, ’cause it features the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which you’d typically find in smartphones.

This wonderful piece of plastic sculpture isn’t just a Polaroid Land Camera. Take a closer look and you’ll see that it is a Polaroid Land Camera made from Lego. To see just how good it is, below is the original, from Flickrer Timmy Toucan.

That’s some rather creative Lego use right there, but the replica, showcased at the Lego-fetish site Brickshelf, prompts a rather interesting question. Why don’t cameras look this good today? Is is merely the retro-stylings of yesteryear which look so good to our eyes, bored as they are by the amorphous blobs of plastic that are today’s gadgets? Or is the Polaroid just a design classic, its beautiful lines obviously superior even when masked by the misty swirls of time?

Clearly something to consider as we end yet another year, and the instant nature of the extinct Polaroid is the perfect metaphor for, well, instant disappearing things.

Last month, Google unveiled Chrome OS, a lightweight browser-based operating system for netbooks. But the company didn’t offer any details on what kind of device could run the OS.

Now specs for a netbook with Chrome OS have leaked and it looks pretty.

The Google netbook will reportedly have a 10.1-inch high definition multi-touch display, a 64 GB solid state drive, 2 GB RAM and connectivity features such as Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth and Ethernet port, says British publication IBTimes.

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC is on a tear. This year alone, the company has released five Android handsets. Its next phone, the HTC Nexus One, aka the Googlephone, is among the most anticipated devices of 2010.

Just about a decade old, HTC looks like it is poised to pull ahead of much older and larger rivals such as Samsung and LG in worldwide phone market share. While the older companies’ strength lies in now-declining “feature phones,” or inexpensive, less-capable handsets, HTC’s bet on the booming smartphone business is giving it a major boost. It has also acquired a powerful godfather in Google, the Goliath whose attention is now captivated by the mobile phone business and whose chosen partner is HTC.

Coming up with a concept design is pretty easy — after all, you can say it does anything and you never have to actually fit real components into a real box and program a real machine. By this measure, Timur Pinar’s concept tablet is rather conservative and, counter-intuitively, somewhat more attractive than more outlandish designs.

Some AT&T customers are taking Fake Steve (who is, in reality, Newsweek’s Dan Lyons pretending to be Steve Jobs) seriously. The satirical blogger on Monday encouraged his readers to take part of Operation Chokehold — a plan to overload the AT&T network with ruthless, bandwidth-sucking activities.

On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees.

Continue...