Hardware: Opinions

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Let Loose in the Toy Department: Report From CES 2008
By Eric Grevstad
January 15, 2008

All in, again: Once more the Labs, Weather, & Sports Desk has surfaced in Sin City -- nodding to the cheers from HardwareCentral fans on the Strip, begging the MGM Grand dry cleaners to hurry with a sport coat perfumed by a chain-smoking limo driver, asking the questions no one else dares to ask ("Since the Las Vegas Monorail has no drivers, why does it have headlights?").
Yes, the annual epic known as the Consumer Electronics Show rolled out the 1.9-million-square-foot red carpet for 2,700-odd vendors last week. Something like 130,000 attendees ogled everything from Panasonic's 150-inch plasma HDTV to Intel's new 45-nanometer-process, hafnium- rather than silicon-transistored "Penryn" CPUs.
The latter include four Core 2 Duo and three Core 2 Quad desktop processors with 6MB and 12MB of shared Level 2 cache, respectively; one dual- and three quad-core Xeon server processors; and one Core 2 Extreme plus four Core 2 Duo parts for notebooks. Clock speeds climbed as high as 3.0GHz for dual-core and 2.83GHz for quad-core models. All 16 support what Intel calls HD Media Boost SSE4 multimedia instructions and an energy-saving Deep Power Down mode.
For even more energy efficiency, Intel announced that its Ultra Mobile PC (think 7-inch screens with Windows) and Mobile Internet Device (think 5-inch screens with Linux) partners would ship products by midyear featuring the chipmaker's all-new "Menlow" platform. The setup combines a single-chip chipset dubbed "Poulsbo" and a 45-nanometer-process CPU codenamed "Silverthorne," which takes one-fifth the motherboard space and one-tenth the power of Intel's ultra-low-voltage processors from 2006. Hitachi subsidiary Clarion Corp. previewed a 5.2-inch touch-screened MID called MiND (Mobile Internet Navigation Device).
Will Blu-ray Reign?

Pundits were buzzing about the news that Warner Brothers had become the fifth major movie studio committed to ship high-definition movies in Blu-ray format, leaving only Paramount, Universal, Microsoft (with the Xbox 360) and Toshiba to wave the HD DVD banner.
Never saying die, Toshiba added a new 17-inch-screened flagship to its Qosmio media-center laptop line: The $3,200 Qosmio G45-AV690 is the first to feature an HD DVD-R/RW burner. Other specs include Intel's new Core 2 Duo T9300 (2.5GHz, 6MB L2 cache), 3GB of memory, twin 160GB hard disks, a 512MB Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics controller, and an external HDTV tuner.
Elsewhere on the media-center beat, Logitech introduced a palm-sized gadget for home entertainment buffs who don't want to keep a full-sized keyboard beside the couch: The DiNovo Mini ($149) is a backlit Bluetooth keyboard with a round ClickPad that switches between notebook-style touchpad and remote-control-style compass navigation. Jumbo Page Up and Page Down buttons are handy for changing channels or surfing Web pages.
Intel's Viiv brand for multimedia home PCs, trumpeted at CES 2006, has slunk away in embarrassment, but AMD announced that its AMD Live! counterpart will henceforth be known as AMD Live! Ultra. The branding campaign focuses not just on AMD-powered PCs as before, but on models based on the company's new "Spider" desktop and "Puma" mobile platforms, which combine a multicore AMD processor with an AMD chipset and ATI Radeon HD graphics adapter.
There's also a software alternative to Windows Media Center called AMD Live! Explorer, which lets consumers browse their music, photos, and videos in a rotating carousel format or access the Internet while watching TV or video. Participating PC vendors such as Acer, MSI, and Alienware will have the option of customizing the Explorer browser with their own bundled applications.
Roam Through Rooms

We lost count of all the times company PR reps buttonholed us to describe products for the digital and/or connected home. The Media Center Extenders that Microsoft touted a year ago to route Windows Vista Home Premium music, movies, or TV from the PC to other devices are finally shipping; Dell showed off an XPS 420 desktop configured with AMD's ATI TV Wonder digital cable tuner and Linksys Media Center Extender to transfer live or recorded HD video over a wired or wireless network to any TV in the house.
TV tuners were everywhere, although most teamed their NTSC analog TV capabilities with over-the-air (ATSC) and unencrypted ClearQAM HDTV reception, leaving out the premium HD programming viewable with the ATI TV Wonder (an OEM, not retail, product). AverMedia Technologies' AverTV Hybrid VolarMax ($90) and Hybrid NanoExpress ($130) are, respectively, USB and ExpressCard tuners that can save TV at 320 by 240 resolution for viewing on an iPod.
Hauppauge Digital introduced a PCI Express TV tuner at the low price of $49; a dual-tuner PCIe receiver for $149; and ClearQAM-capable USB tuners with ($149) and without ($99) hardware MPEG-2 encoding. Later this year, Hauppauge will ship a $249 HD PVR (personal video recorder) with YPbPr component connections that saves high-definition TV as H.264 video in real time.
HP added Media Center Extender technology to its latest 1080p MediaSmart HDTV sets (and announced that from henceforth all its TV sets would be MediaSmart models), while unveiling a MediaSmart Receiver to bring WiFi-streamed movies, music, and pictures from home PCs to existing HDTVs. The earliest adopter of Microsoft's Windows Home Server, HP will configure new and download-upgrade existing models of its MediaSmart Server with server-side virus protection from McAfee.