So unconventional
The giant halls of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas were filled with the usual suspects: ever bigger TV s (Sharp's 65-inch LCD screen), ever smaller music players (MPIO's matchbox-size MP3 player), and ever cheaper digital cameras (Concord's 3-megapixel model for just $100). But one of the more memorable demonstrations took place outside the convention center. Blake Krikorian, CEO of Sling Media, gave a tour of the Vegas strip in a Mercedes SUV, watching TV shows on handheld and laptop PC s while an associate drove the vehicle. No big deal, right? The trick is that he was watching shows being broadcast live to his home back in San Francisco and then zapped to his car wirelessly.
"Placeshifting," as Krikorian and others have dubbed this trick, was one of the new ideas at this year's CES, where more than 100,000 digerati flocked to see what's coming. The idea is to take TV beyond the anytime-you-want-it appeal of devices like the TiVo to the any where -you-want-it level. Sling Media's Slingbox should be on the market this year for $250 and is a small device that transmits a video signal from, say, a cable box in the living room to another device somewhere else via a home network or the Internet. The time-shifting pioneer TiVo, meanwhile, took a different tack on the idea and launched its TiVoToGo service, which lets some users (not DirecTV satellite customers) dump shows directly into devices like laptops.
Other intriguing products at the show also looked to add new utility to some devices and a dash of style to others. The Internet could soon be changing the way more people make telephone calls, in both price and performance. Traditional phone maker VTech will try its hand in the voice-over-the-Internet arena with new home cordless models that connect to services offering cheap or even free calls. And Motorola, the leading U.S. maker of cellphones, is using Internet calling with its stylish Ojo Personal Videophone ($800, plus $15 a month), which allows face-to-face chats long distance.
Fashion was a surprising watchword for Motorola, which also unveiled high-tech ski clothes, such as a jacket with built-in speakers in its hood and a cellphone mike in its collar. Meanwhile, new light-emitting diodes, tiny bulbs that last much longer than traditional incandescents, elegantly slim down the Z-Bar Lamps ($100) from Koncept Technologies. And the Italian designers at Mel Audio sculpted older technology into modern art with their Immagine Go El i turntable designed for a select group of vinyl aficionados. But such good looks come at a price: The turntable alone sells for about $5,500, and you'll have to add perhaps $2,700 for the tone arm. Talk about a price that'll make your head spin.
This story appears in the January 17, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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