consumer electronics

New day at DISH

9 January 2012 by Steve Blum
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The Direct Broadcast Satellite pioneer has a new management team, new logo and new products. The core of the company is still satellite television, but there’s a more coherent and seamless integration of the company’s other offerings, such as satellite radio, DVRs, Blockbuster movies and more.

Joe Clayton has firmly taken over the helm from founder Charlie Ergen. He’s brought over some key players from the team that launched what is now known as DirecTv. Back in 1994, Joe led RCA when it joined with United States Satellite Broadcasting and Hughes’ DirecTv unit to launch DSS – the Digital Satellite System.
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Intel Ultrabook design is more execution than innovation

9 January 2012 by Steve Blum
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With ARM-based tablet sales crowding out netbooks, Intel needed to come up with a way of staying in the ultra-portable, ultra-usable game. Maybe they have something truly innovative in the pipeline, but they weren’t showing it at today’s CES press conference in Las Vegas.

What they did show was a fully productized line of their Ultrabook concept from a wide range of manufacturers, with one or two interesting twists. Ultrabooks are thin, lightweight, Windows 8-based laptops, similar to Macbook Airs, that combine heavy processing power with convertible and hybrid form factors.
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OLPC and Marvell show $100 tablet for the rest of the world

8 January 2012 by Steve Blum
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One Laptop per Child stole the show at tonight’s CES Unveiled event with a $100 tablet computer. Featuring a solar charger integrated into a protective hardshell case and an optional, robust hand-cranked generator, the device gets it right. It could be the defining digital bridge into the developing world.
The original OLPC project – a $100 laptop computer – launched the netbook market but did not achieve the degree of mass distribution in the developing world as originally hoped.
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Personal automation hits and misses

Among the dozens of companies showing their stuff at CES Unveiled tonight were several targeting the personal and home automation space. Some get it, some don’t.

Samsung, Greenwave and Zomm get it, more or less. Each showed a product that enables someone to extend his or her personal information and control network, without being too reliant on closed platforms or particular service providers.

Samsung debuted the SmartCam, an Internet protocol camera with motion and sound sensors, and two-way audio conversation capability.… More

Computer companies changing role, not ditching CES

8 January 2012 by Steve Blum
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Microsoft says 2012 will be its last year at the Consumer Electronics Show. ASUS isn’t holding its usual we’re-just-as-sexy-as-Apple preview event. MSI is MIA.
Computer companies have been exhibiting at CES for about 20 years, migrating to the show as Comdex died out. Microsoft Bob made his debut at CES in 1995. This “consumer friendly” information manager/productivity software package apparently got lost on the way to the airport and was never seen again. He happened in Vegas, he stayed in Vegas.
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A sugar daddy for home automation

2 January 2012 by Steve Blum
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MiOS/MiCasaVerde’s Vera 3 multi-mode gateway. No assembly language required, but you’ll need pretty much everything else.

CES – the Consumer Electronics Show – opens in Las Vegas next week. Among other things, it’s an opportunity to take a second (or third or fourth…) look at industry segments that held breakout potential at one point, only to fade off into a niche.

Home automation is one sector that has never lived up to its hype. Several technologies, notably including the X–10 standard, have been promoted as one-size-fits-all solutions for remote control and monitoring of thermostats, lighting and appliances.… More

Embedded impulses

12 October 2011 by Steve Blum
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The machine-to-machine sector is getting a lot of attention this week at the CTIA Enterprise and Applications conference in San Diego. The growth of M2M figured into CEO keynote speeches and panel discussions. AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega called connected devices “the next big thing for mobility.”

The growth is driven in part by the decisions taken by service providers to back out of the hardware and hosting ends of the M2M business, and just provide connectivity.… More

Sandy Bridge is about fast, integrated graphics, studio-class security, massive processing power and hard coded Windows support

5 January 2011 by Steve Blum
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Judging from Intel’s press conference, their new Sandy Bridge platform – from now on known as the 2nd Generation Intel Core Processor Family – is focused on media and entertainment performance, driven by deep integration between hardware, operating systems, applications, content and networking.


 Mooly Eden shows his fast chips,
 funny hat and cute accentThe headline features are the on-board graphic and media processing capabilities, the 32 nanometer architecture delivering 1.16 billion transistors on a chip and integrated, studio-satisfying content security functionality.… More

The chips are about to fall

5 January 2011 by Steve Blum
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So far, the only close-to-really-new announcements have come from ASUS. That might be because the 2011 CES story is about incremental improvement and minor innovations, not radically new products or services. Or it could be a question of chipsets.

Everyone is hinting or outright pimping upcoming tablet computer announcements, but not actually saying what it is. That’s a little unusual for press days at CES, but it could be because Intel has what it thinks is a huge announcement to make in a few minutes, and they’ve turned the screws on their customers with the idea of managing some kind of coordinated roll out.… More

If A is for Apple, why not for ASUS?

4 January 2011 by Steve Blum
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 Jonney rocks it like SteveAll he needed was the black turtleneck. OK, Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field would have helped too.

ASUS chairman Jonney Shih borrowed the Apple chairman’s presentation style, falling only a little short on the mojo. Shih introduced four different implementations of the new eee Pad family of touchscreen tablets.

First up was the Eee Pad MeMo, a 7-inch tablet device that looks a lot like a big iPod Touch and runs Android on a Snapdragon processor.… More