Well, we finally got through the line to convert our e-tickets to passes — this took like 30 or 45 minutes. We took our passes to the entrance of the show and people right in front of us were handing in their e-tickets and getting right into the show (without waiting in the ridiculous line). This was was very frustrating. The pass taker just said “Oh, we just started doing that 20 minutes ago.” It would have been nice if somebody mentioned this to people in line. Very poor management.
Well, so, all that said we got into the show. The show is sort of a mini-CES without the audio gear, car audio, high end audio, 5 million flat screens, 3 million sub woofers, 2 million Asian booths. What did this leave? Mostly computer and gaming stuff. This isn’t all bad as this is the stuff that primarily interests me, personally. It took us a two or three hours to go through the entire show.
So, what was cool?
- The Xbox 360 had a presence, but, I was hoping for a larger appearance. I did see the King Kong running on both the Xbox and Xbox 360 and the Xbox 360 version did look considerably cleaner. There were a bunch of Xbox’s running various games, but, I didn’t see many 360’s. Maybe I just missed them, oh well. I got my Xbox 360 T-Shirt, so that’s nice.
- The Creative Zen Vision, a portable video player — I would really consider getting one of these, but, to load media onto it you need to run custom Creative software, which I find annoying (it should just act like a hard drive).
- Headbanger ear buds. They have a built in subwoofer and sound really nice. They provide some amount of audio isolation and are pretty affordable compared to other headphones that offer sound isolation. I have a pair on order from Amazon, we’ll see how I like them in action.
- The Divx folks pointed me to the Philips PET1000 Divx capable portable DVD player with a 10.2″ screen. Too bad they didn’t have one. It isn’t cheap ($360) sounds cool.
- The Pepper Pad. This is a nifty Linux tablet device, good for surfing, email, etc. Not really a full blown computer. It looks cool, but, is 802.11b only (not 802.11g, wtf?). The video playback support is very limited. They need to do a lot more with it. Oh well.
Well, those were the highlights for me.