The miles of floor and incredible volume of booths and people at CES are clearing, and our three days of coverage is at an end. In this wrap up, we'll try to bring you as much as the excitement from the show floor as possible. Unfortunately, we can't bring you information on every booth and product, but we tried to find the best and most interesting things we saw and compile them all together.

A picture of the show floor courtesy of www.cesweb.org, in our infinite desire to cover the products at the show we forgot to take any pictures of the show itself :)

The Las Vegas Convention Center was filled to the brim with awesome gadgets, have a look...

Digital Cameras and Imaging

One of the most noticeable themes of this year's CES was wireless. Almost every device seemed to have either an antenna attached or a Bluetooth logo, and Kodak certainly wasn't pulling any punches. One of their innovations is a docking station that allows pictures to be uploaded wirelessly from your camera to your networked media device of choice with the touch of one button.

This particular demo is a prototype using WiFi, but the final version could implement any type of wireless solution. The prototype is apparently able to upload to a local or internet location. A car module that could upload to (and eventually download from) a wireless home network was on the floor as well.

In addition to their new found love for wireless, OLED technology is making its way into their products. They brought along the refrigerator computer demo we have seen before, but we also liked this camera featuring an OLED screen. The image was beautiful, viewable from all angles, and low power to boot.

We also took a look at a couple of standalone photo printers by Kodak and Olympus. Olympus employs a standard USB connection to its cameras, while Kodak cameras can be physically set into the port on top of their unit.

A great deal of small digital point and shoot cameras were on the floor. Offerings ranged from the very tiny and discrete to the flashiest (read tackiest) hunks of plastic on the planet. We saw the most intriguing camera designs of the show at Advanced Plus Technology. The first thing all of us thought when we saw this gun camera was "Better not take that to the airport."

This camera has a built in game mode that inserts a bullet hole onto the image so all the kids can finally have some support to their "I got you! / No you didn't!" arguments. Even so, the idea of a gun camera is still a little bit sketch.

Among other Advanced Plus cameras were their video embedded in a little plastic potted sunflower, and a 6mm deep point and shoot digital which they claimed to be the thinnest camera on the market.

Networking

Of course, everything and its brother and sister touted some form of networking connectivity. There were, however, some very interesting offerings in the pure networking hardware arena.

Netgear

One of the new products at on the floor at Netgear is the WGT634U Super Wireless Media Router. This router integrates a USB port allowing for consumer level network attached storage functionality via an external hard drive. Basically, what you get is accessible networked data without tying up a computer. The router can also keep the drive local and private or allow outside access for easy internet data sharing as well.

IOGear

IOGear has something along the same lines, but rather than offering wireless networking, the BOSS GNS1000 offers an internal hard drive. If the wireless router with external storage is more attractive to you, IOGear offers some external USB storage solutions as well.

DLink

If neither of these options seem to fit a need quite right, DLink's Central Home Drive is basically a hard drive with an Ethernet interface. Rather than grabbing a router, you can simply plug this baby into a router or switch you already own.

Mobile Computing

Transmeta had a small but interesting booth at CES - as usual, a number of Crusoe based devices were on display but what was truly interesting was an Efficeon ultra thin-and-light notebook by Sharp.

The Efficeon is the much faster and long-awaited successor to the Transmeta Crusoe processor, built on a 0.13-micron process and running at 1GHz in Sharp's implementation.

Although the notebook features an ATI graphics solution, it uses a NVIDIA chipset - nForce3 150, basically the same chipset that is used with the Athlon 64 courtesy of the Efficeon's Hyper Transport bus and on-die memory controller.

Some Efficeon designs will also use NVIDIA's GeForce4 Go GPU.

An example of an Efficeon reference board

Above you can see a picture of the Efficeon processor itself, a 90nm version is in the works.

With the lid closed, the Sharp Efficeon notebook looks like any other ultra thin-and-light.

But opening it up reveals one surprise:

The switch pictured above will apparently switch between power modes on the notebook, an interesting feature although Transmeta's representatives were not able to provide any specific information about the feature. Most notebooks provide this feature as a software function, we're not certain why it would be necessary to have a physical switch, although it is useful.

What's truly impressive about the Sharp notebook are its specs - 2.1lbs and by the image above you can see how thick, or thin in this case, the notebook is.

Anand's thumb isn't thick, nor is this notebook.

TiVo

For those out there who want to record in high definition en mass, the new HD Direct TiVo sports four tuners (two of which are HD). Any two of the tuners can be recording at the same time.

Of course, what would a showing at CES be without network connectivity and a little slice of convergence? With the Home Media Option, users will be able to connect their TiVo to their home network and upload their recorded shows to their computer using the forthcoming TiVoToGo service.

Sonic Solutions authors the software which plays the proprietary TiVo format, and as an added security measure, a USB dongle specifically tied to your TiVo unit (users may have a maximum of ten) is required to initiate playback of the video. This means that no one else can play your recordings without your dongle, and helps TiVo sidestep any copyright issues they may have had. The TiVo staff did indicate that these videos are transferable to DVD-Rs and CD-Rs for viewing on standalone dvd players.

With this newly available connectivity, we will also be able to stream audio, video and images from our home network to the TiVo. This way, TiVo can be used as an all in one media center for digital content.

In the future, we can also expect to be able to control our TiVos with our cell phones as well. Its going to be a good year for the DVR.

Portable Media Center Devices

These days the fine line between consumer electronics and PCs is slowly being blurred; the whole point behind Windows XP Media Center Edition OS, which helps being the PC into the living room/home theater environment. At CES, Microsoft has announced a new type of MCE device, one quite different than the MCE PCs that we have been seeing to date. The new MCE devices that Microsoft has been touting are of the handheld variety, resembling something like a miniaturized Sega GameGear. These portable media center edition devices are able to perform similar functions as their desktop big brothers just on the go. Pictures from your camera can be viewed, FM/AM radio access, video playback, watch recorded TV content, with certain limitations naturally. Video, however, must be in the WMV format. From what we understand, the same file format used to record TV content in Microsoft Media Center Edition OS is likely going to be supported.

So far, we have learned that these devices will likely start off with a 20GB mini hard drive and then scale up. The samples we have seen thus far are from Creative and FIC, and both are very much in the development stages. Instead of running an embedded solution of Windows XP, these devices are running Windows Mobile 2003 with the MCE software module. There seems to be some requirement in terms of the buttons a home button, fast forward button, rewind button, play/pause button, and quad-directional pad. As far as hardware requirements, there aren't any that we are aware of other than the CPU and LCD. All of the samples seem all be using Intel's Xscale processors, which are also used in PDAs.

There are still several issues to be worked out, such as the UI interface, which lack radio functionality. Since these are engineering samples, several things such as stretching the UI and enabling radio functionality are going to be worked out by system designers.

Creative's solution interfaces via USB, while FIC also provides Firewire support. The difference in the FIC solution is that they are using the mini USB and Firewire ports to conserve space, this means while space is saved that special cable needs to be used. Creative's full size USB port implementation makes it easier to pass between multiple systems easily with any USB cable.

At FIC, there are options available to ODM customers, who may prefer to sell their Portable Media Center devices with a different design other than the one used by Creative or FIC.

The portable Media Center devices will retail starting at $499 and going up to $700+ at their release later this year.

Music and Audio

Other than the Portable Media Center devices, there are several vendors showcasing MP3 players. It seems that the second motherboard manufacturer to join MSI in flash MP3 players will be FIC with their new line of MP3/flash/Bluetooth devices. The concept for FIC is to have the MP3 player hook up to your desktop computer or cell phone via Bluetooth protocol. The name for the player has not yet been determined, but they will start off in the 64MB capacities from what we have been told. The introduction of the iPod mini makes the MP3 market more interesting since Apple is going after the small profile MP3 player market, but the sub 100 dollar market is still very competitive. Bluetooth may likely give the FIC the distinction they need in this market.

Streaming Music

Aside from the usual array of routers and switches, Netgear was showing off their MP101 wireless digital music player. This device is able to stream audio content from your wireless network (it can decode a variety of formats and works with RealNetworks Rhapsody service) and play it out to your home stereo. The interface is consistent with home audio equipment and would fit in nicely with anyone's stereo setup.

Yamaha has a wired solution for your digital home audio content needs. Their Music Cast hardware consists of a server (the picture shows the front on top of the back) and multiple networked amps controllers and speakers that can be installed in the walls of your house.

DLink has quite a variety of products including video phones and a plethora of other interesting devices. The wireless theme was strong with everything from WiFi enabled ticket printers and stereo amps to full wireless media center boxes that can be attached to a television and stream media to your home entertainment setup.

As for Creative, they are showing off a nice remote controlled networked stereo amp which communicates with a remote (via RF; presumably proprietary). The remote has an lcd display that allows you to select any shared audio on your home network to be played on the speakers. The Hand of Anand^TM is sold separately.

Odds and Ends

EZPNP

If you burn CDs or DVDs like they're going out of style, EZPNP makes a few products that will really pique your interest. First we have a couple towers that will burn 5 or 7 DVDs at a time from one.

Not everyone needs volume, and for the simple CD copy without a PC, the smaller version is the way to go.

The most interesting product we saw was this stand alone CD burner that takes CF cards and burns their contents to CD. Of course, it also comes with an adaptor to allow the use of all different flavors of flash memory. This product makes it incredibly easy to create photo CDs for friends and family using your digital camera.

Graphics at Leadtek

Over at the Leadtek booth we were able to take a peak at a PCIExpress version of the NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200. NVIDIA won't be releasing GPUs with native PCI Express initially, but will rely on bridged solutions to handle the translation from the multiple serial busses to the cards native AGP interface. In the image below, we can see that the bridge chip has a heat sink on it. We were unfortunately unable to coax anyone into letting me pull the black metal off for a picture of the bridge chip itself.

Though we didn't demo the device at the show, the head mounted binocular display looked pretty cool.

Portable Video Players at CMC

CMC (and many others) have portable video players lining their walls. This model plays MPEG4 encoded files.

In the second half of the year, we will start to see a battle in the consumer electronics market between application specific portable audio/video/camera devices and the much buzzed convergence of portable Media Center. Of course, the war is over before it began, but we have yet to see is how long the battle will last. This factor will be life and death to companies perched staunchly on one side or the other.

SPECTEC: GPS on your PDA

Not that SD/IO is widely used, but if you have a compatible PDA and you've always wanted to add GPS to its functionality, this will be very interesting to you.

Also offered is an SD/IO camera that doesn't look half bad.

ATI: Quake on your Cell Phone

Ever want to play quake on a cell phone? If an OEM picks up ATI's design, we might just be able to do so. Here's a shot of their hardware running MotoGP.

The ATI Imageon 2300 drives the 3D graphics acceleration on the cell phone platform pictured above, running MotoGP in OpenGL ES mode at around 25 fps. What is even more impressive is that the same hardware can run GLQuake I at around 35 - 40 fps; if you remember back to the days of GLQuake, 35 - 40 fps is about the speed that a Voodoo1 would have given you at 640x480.

The person delivering the Quake demo was held up in airport security and could not get the unit here in time for us to provide a picture for you all, but multiple ATI sources confirmed the impressiveness of the demo.

Final Words

The king is dead! Long live the king!

That about sums up the experience we had at CES this year. We are certainly not ones to admonish buzz words for the sake of buzz words, but as the inevitable drive towards convergence pushes forward, more and more computer hardware will be packaged into shinny plastic handheld boxes that do more and more for their users. It was almost inevitable that CES would eventually overshadow COMDEX; the change of ownership of the latter just sped the process along.

Overall, we were pleased with what we found in Las Vegas. More and more devices are becoming network aware, and others are adopting wireless. More and more different devices are being shoved into one tiny package. And the consumer reaps the benefits. This year will be more about the evolution of technology rather than an abrupt revolution. Convergence has been talked about for years, and we are finally starting to see the signs of real movement in that direction.

Hopefully we've been able to offer a glimpse into the coming year of cool gadgets and convenient computing. Next year promises to be even more exciting, and we'll be there once again to offer in depth coverage.