Gadgets to look for in 2010

Opinion

by Anthony Calypso |

This year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas may have truly marked the advent of 3D technology delivered right to your living room. Thegrio.com took a look at a few cutting edge products to help accentuate your home, your car, and your phone calls.

Several key equipment manufacturers have been working hard to usher in the idea of 3D content availability at home. Sony’s BRAVIA line of TV’s for example feature 3D compatibility. Video gamers and sports enthusiast may be relied upon to usher in this first product cycle of 3D on their respective screens and for the manufacturers, it seems fair to say that 3D has become part of the image equation or selling factor to help lure consumers. The hardware giant also introduced the XEL-1 OLED Digital HDTV. (The XEL-1 is currently listed at approximately $2,499.99 retail price.) According to Sony, some of the highlights from XEL-1 include a 3mm thick Organic Light Emitting Diode, (OLED) monitor panel capable of delivering a 960 (Horizontal) x 540 (Vertical) lines of native resolution or picture quality.

The company Light Blue Optics (LBO) introduced “Light Touch,” a miniature projector capable of turning virtually any flat surface into a 10-inch interactive screen. According to LBO, the projector, which weighs less than a pound, also features both Bluetooth and Wifi connectivity. Portable devices (i.e. ipods, smartphones, digital cameras) can now share or display multimedia content via the “Light Touch” projector screen. For your car, Pioneer introduced their latest GPS navigation unit from the AVIC series, the X920BT. The unit display is touch enabled and supports HD, Internet, and Satellite radio. The X920BT is also capable of connecting to a second portable device in the car via Pandora’s music application.

Google’s Nexus-1 smartphone, which is available through the search engine’s Web store, comes with a turn-by-turn GPS feature as well as a ‘wayfinder’ application that operates like a digital compass. Point the Android 2.1 OS platform based handset in any direction (in New York, wayfinder is a NY based application) and the Nexus-1 transmits the approximate distance and number (or letter) of the nearest set(s) of subway trains. The Wifi enabled Nexus-1 supports both the GSM/Edge networks. (The unlocked version of the Nexus-1 may not support AT&T’s 3G network.) It also has a 1 Ghz Qualcomm chip processor and 512 mb’s of RAM. In comparison to the G1, the first handset from Google and HTC, the Nexus-1 trades in a physical keyboard for a virtual one. It has a smooth, although somewhat drab matte like finish. This smartphone model, which is designed by the Taiwanese handset manufacturer, HTC allows Gmail users to open multiple Gmail accounts simultaneously. (HTC has also recently launched the HTC HD2. At press time, T-Mobile was announced as the carrier for the U.S. HD2 model.)

Phone call reception was sharp with the Nexus-1 but consumers are going to gripe about the lack of an FM receiver on the device. Terrestrial radio lovers are somewhat stuck (for the time being at least) logging onto Internet radio. After several warm-up attempts the voice command application worked on this Google handset. The Nexus-1 has a fairly robust 5 Megapixel camera and a 3.7-inch touch-screen. It also comes with a 4 Gigabyte Micro SD card expandable, according to the Nexus-1 specification sheet, to 32 GB. The smartphone market will continue to evolve or take shape perhaps for two reasons and neither of them have to do with any genuine rivalry between smartphones. The winner(s) will be the handset(s) with the smartest combination of hardware design and dynamic application delivery. Visually, we should expect more 3D enabled applications delivered right to your PDA’s and smartphones. The next step afterward, looks like placing the actual 3D technology in the hands of the consumer and allowing them to create 3D quality content. Possibly.