The Gadgets Page

The winner of the most pervy display at CES this year goes to Ultmost.

Instead of half dressed booth babes, they decided to go with nearly full frontal nudity. Who thought it was a good idea to insert their video projector over a naked woman?

The best part is that it DIDN’T WORK. The convention going crowd is so desensitized to this sort of thing that the Ultmost booth was ALWAYS empty. I would see a couple people roaming around the projector, but I think they were Ultmost’s exhibitors. We went to The Sands three times over the five days of CES and never once did I see someone with a Buyer badge at their booth.

In the end, the booths that get crowds at CES are the booths with interesting TECHNOLOGY. Give them something fun to do at your booth and you have a chance of catching them, but trying to attract them with booth babes and nearly naked posters is a mistake every time.

At $99 street price at the time of this writing, the Corsair Flash Voyager is bulk flash storage on the cheap. With a read speed of 27MB/sec and a write speed of 11MB/sec, its performance is typical of mid-speed USB drives.

But with this much storage, performance becomes critical. You purchase large capacity drives because you have big files you need to move. I copied a 27GB virtual machine data file to the drive, which took 40 minutes. My A-data 32GB Expresscard drive (through a USB interface), on the other hand, copied the same file in 20 minutes, and a RAID-0 drive of 4 USB flash drives copied the data in 15 minutes (which is essentially the USB bus limit for data transfers).

It’s always disappointing when I plug a drive in and I’m reminded of the difference between what the package says and what the drive is. A 64GB drive really equals 60GB of data, which is the amount that will show up in your operating system when you mount it. Whether or not you’re being ripped off depends on the definition of a gigabyte: To everyone in the computing world except drive manufacturers, a Gigabyte is the binary 2 raised to the 30th power (1,073,741,824). To the drive industry, a gigabyte is the decimal 10 raised to the 9th power (1,000,000,000). In the days of megabyte hard drives, the difference was negligible but in the days of terabyte drives, the difference will hold an entire operating system installation. Drive manufacturer’s say they can’t change or they’ll look bad in comparison. I think it’s an issue the FTC should rule on so that all manufacturers have to change at once. But this is a review, and not a rant on ancient numerical injustices, so I’ll go on.

Like all flash drives, the Corsair Flash Voyager 64GB is highly reliable. However, out of the eight Corsair Flash Voyager drives I’ve owned, one failed suddenly. Despite the promise of a lifetime warranty, the warranty was basically impossible to execute, with the company sending forms back and forth and then basically doing nothing until I gave up on it because it wasn’t worth my time. I wound up returning it to Fry’s Electronics, who happily exchanged it even though it was beyond their return period.

The CEA sent me a survey. They asked me this question:

Do you have any additional comments or suggestions to improve the International CES for press attendees?

Unfortunately, they didn’t give me enough room to give a full answer, so I’m posting it here and linking to it.

There was very little that I saw at CES this year that I didn’t already know about. CES doesn’t get the word out about products anymore because companies do it themselves on the Internet.

The good thing about CES is that you can actually TOUCH and play with the new products. Companies are having more problems with having products available to try out in stores than distribution.

We all could buy anything we want online, but being able to play with it first is getting increasingly more difficult. Electronics manufacturers need to find a way to get past that and the Internet isn’t going to help them there.

We don’t want to buy things and return them if they don’t work out. We just want to have five minutes with a product in a store to see if it will work for us or not.

CES is the ONLY place where we can do that, and that’s only with the exhibitors that don’t put their stuff under glass. Getting more exhibitors to set up areas where customers can play with their products is the smartest thing that the CEA could do right now.

There are people out there who think that the era of the trade show is dead. I’m not one of them. There are many reasons to converge on one place:

• Camaraderie: Seeing other people in your industry. Never discount the power of networking.
• The Touch Factor: Being able to play with new products in person.
• Pulse Taking: A trade show gives you a visual indication of what people think are interesting. Just by following the crowds, you can track the trends.

For all of you out there who saw the lack of crowds and exhibitors, that’s more an indication of health of the industry than an indication of the health of trade shows in general.

Hands down, my FAVORITE booth at CES this year was Mattel.

They had a new toy that’s going to be out in the Fall of 2009 that blew my socks OFF. It is called B-Nails.

It prints cool designs on your fingernails. This nice girl demonstrated it to me.

First you stick your finger into the machine. It takes a picture of your finger.

Then you choose the design that you want on your fingernail.

I chose this classic Barbie silhouette. At this point, you can resize the image so it will fit on tiny little girl fingers or big fat thumbs or anything inbetween.

After it prints on your finger, you cover the image with clear polish. I couldn’t feel it printing on my finger. There was no heat and I didn’t feel the ink squirting.

Unfortunately, I painted my image too soon, so it smeared a bit.

I had better luck the second time. I sized the image a little too small that time, but it worked perfectly.

They had this toy connected to a PC and running software to control it, so I suspect it will be like the Barbie iDesign and work on Windows only. Hopefully, they won’t make us upgrade to Windows 7 just to play with it.

I am continually impressed with Mattel and their ideas for toys for little girls. B-Nails is just another great toy to add to the list.