Archive: CES 2008
Catching Up on Your CES Queries
LOS ANGELES--After the hype and hubbub of CES, I needed to spend a little downtime someplace quiet, where nobody's rushing around and nobody's obsessed with their marketing or image. And here I am! (In case you were wondering why, I'm staying in L.A. with friends for a few days...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 11, 2008; 01:38 PM ET | Comments (5)
Signing Off From CES
LAS VEGAS--Another CES is in the books. It's been fun drinking from this firehose of technological goodness, but now it's time to close the laptop, take the business cards out of my shirt pocket and stop wearing the CES badge holder everywhere I go. It's been fun. It's been...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 10, 2008; 03:37 PM ET | Comments (7)
Boot Up To Sit Down
LAS VEGAS--I finally got to the lower level of the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, traditionally the home of the weirdest gadgets at CES, on Wednesday afternoon. Two of the odder items I found were chairs -- computerized, electrically powered chairs. The Las Vegas Convention Center's...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 10, 2008; 10:30 AM ET | Comments (2)
Tased and Confused
LAS VEGAS--My "best product demo" award for this year's CES has to go to Taser International, the manufacturer of those hand-held stun guns. At its booths, volunteers could sign up to get Tased at a low voltage. I had the fortunate timing to show up as one such individual...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 10, 2008; 07:34 AM ET | Comments (16)
CES for Your iPod
LAS VEGAS--If it's Thursday, it's time for the Tech Podcast. This week's report focuses on the Consumer Electronics Show and answers another reader's question. Listen to it here or subscribe via RSS or on iTunes....
By washingtonpost.com Editors | January 10, 2008; 07:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Walking Through the Convention Center
LAS VEGAS--It's easy to throw around numbers to describe the scale of CES: 140,000 expected attendees, 2,700 exhibitors and so on. But It's easier yet to show you just how overwhelming it can be to navigate your way through all those people. The video below shows what it was...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 9, 2008; 09:00 PM ET | Comments (3)
Checking Up on HD Radio
LAS VEGAS--For each of the past three years, the folks at Columbia, MD-based iBiquity Digital have promised that a flood of new HD Radio receivers would be coming soon. But each year, the flood has turned out to more like a trickle, leaving fans of these new digital broadcasts--which...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 9, 2008; 05:21 PM ET | Comments (31)
The Definition of Flat TV Flattens
LAS VEGAS--For years, "LCD or plasma?" has been the "paper or plastic" of the HDTV business. The two flat-panel technologies have offered roughly comparable picture quality and pricing, so many people have puzzled over which one would be right for them. To further complicate things, you could also opt...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 9, 2008; 11:40 AM ET | Comments (14)
CES, Performing Arts Hotbed
LAS VEGAS--It's a noisy place, down on the show floor of the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Between the audio blaring from every speaker in sight and the chatter of thousands of attendees, it can be hard for an exhibitor to get anybody's attention. So many...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 8, 2008; 05:00 PM ET | Comments (2)
Web-ifying the TV
LAS VEGAS--For all the people who like to watch television with a laptop open on the coffee table [raises hand], your next TV set may be waiting on the show floor here. A few different manufacturers are demonstrating sets that can link to a home network and display Web...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 8, 2008; 04:30 PM ET | Comments (4)
FCC Chair Talks TV, Opines On Openness
LAS VEGAS--Late yesterday afternoon, I sat down with Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin to talk about a a couple of perennial CES topics -- the digital-TV transition and "openness," the idea that a product shouldn't be tied to any one company's service. By the numbers, the switch to...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 8, 2008; 01:40 PM ET | Comments (36)
Rock and Rolly From Sony
LAS VEGAS--The most curious gadget I have seen so far at CES is a small, spinning cylinder at Sony's booth called the Rolly. It's a combination of digital-music player, portable speaker set and, um, dancing robot. As the Rolly plays a song stored in its 2 gigabytes of flash...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 8, 2008; 10:26 AM ET | Comments (6)
A (Very) Big-Screen TV
LAS VEGAS--This year's winner of the recurring "who can make the biggest TV of them all" battle is Panasonic, which is showing off a prototype plasma flat-panel set that measures 150 inches across (or, if you prefer, 12.5 feet or 4.17 yards). Technically, it's not a HDTV: Its resolution, at...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 7, 2008; 06:30 PM ET | Comments (6)
Warner Waves Goodbye to HD DVD
LAS VEGAS--Right before CES, Warner Home Video ended its neutrality in the high-definition video format war. Instead of shipping movies in both of the two competing, incompatible formats--Blu-Ray and HD DVD--it announced that it would ship high-def copies of its titles in only Blu-Ray, starting in May. I sat...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 7, 2008; 02:07 PM ET | Comments (51)
CES, Day Zero
LAS VEGAS--Technically, the Consumer Electronics Show hasn't even started yet. When I took a shortcut through the convention center late yesterday afternoon, workers were still finishing off the massive booths set up for each company, applying some extra paint here and placing an exhibit into position there. So, of course,...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 7, 2008; 02:41 AM ET | Comments (1)
CES Game Plan
Inch-thick stack of business cards to hand out? Check. Comfortable walking shoes and hiking socks? Check. Clif Bars in my laptop bag for when I don't have time to eat lunch? Check. Inbox full of "can we schedule a booth appointment?" pitches from tech publicists? Check. Yup, it's almost...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 4, 2008; 11:11 AM ET | Comments (23)
