Now that I've had a week to recover, let's do a damage estimate...

A Sirius Letdown.

I found the Sirius' S50 (like much of this show) to be underwhelming. While this unit is quite sexy and small, I found out what its achillies heel is: you must have the unit docked to listen to live satellite radio. Yes, it can record shows from satellite and play mp3s, but no radio while undocked? Bummer.

Can it be more useless?

This Saturn did have a usable back seat at one time which is now a dedicated nitrous exhibit. Good thing those fancy door hinges are installed so the nitrous can easily get in and out for quick refills.

Alpine has always had something crazy. This year crazy has become ludicrous. I'm pretty sure this car no longer has an engine, strictly by noticing it has no steering wheel. But it has 5 huge LCD displays on the dash to make up for that.

The latest addition to the Lamborghini Scissor doors: the upside down door! No comment.

By the way, As you've seen, I haven't taken a liking to much that was offered in the car audio section. Every year the cars seem more crazy and equally more useless (no engines?). I much rather prefer going to the SEMA show (Automotive Aftermarket Convention). Yes some cars at SEMA are merely showing prototype products or are strictly show cars, but a lot of it is real. Hey look at this, get this part and now you have 800HP. While not entirely practical, it seems better than listenting to your 5000 Watt stereo while pushing your car Flintstone-style.

The best car accessory I saw at the show was 1) not in the car section and 2) not in production yet. Pharos had a brochure on their latest GPS device. At the show I saw a lot of LCDs embedded in rear-view mirrors for rear-bumper cams. But they took it a step further and made the LCD a GPS navigation display. I can't wait to see this thing when it's available.

Before leaving the car audio section, we stopped by Honda to see their robot, Asimo, but apprently we missed the part where he was dancing. If there's one thing CES is famous for in my book, it's dancing robots.

High Definition, 1080p, HD-DVD & Blu-Ray

The big and obvious push in the main arena was in home theatre, specifically HDTV. Seeing as the government is going to be phasing out analog TV signals, why not hype up what's next. Now they're hyping up a resolution for which there is no readily available source signal, 1080p. 1920x1080 progressivly scanned lines of resolution. Yum. Of course I'll be waiting until the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD war has settled before even considering the coupling of these two display and disk technologies in my living room.

Everyone had some world record breaking device: World's largest 1080p plasma TV, largest LCD, largest projector. Texas Instruments is pushing their DLP technology big time, which is awesome with 3 DLP chips, but can have ill side-effects with just one (I am one of those guys who sees the "rainbow effect"). Check out this projector, I don't remember how big the screen was, but it was almost movie theatre sized. Of course it can go this big because of the lumens: 25,000, but this comes at a price: $155k.

What about world's smallest projector? This little guy can fit in the palm of your hand. Perfect for those times where you want to give your powerpoint presentation on personal hygene to those bums on the bus.

On with the show!

Then to the Microsoft booth. Grrrr. I am deeply saddened that it seems the new Treo has ditched Palm OS and gone Windows. Apparently Palm is no longer up to the task. However I was delighted to see my good friend Jason's demonstration software running on this treo:

They also had some pretty cool laptops with LCDs on the top that indicated certain statii (in this case your outlook calendar meetings for today - LAME).

Also another had a detachable display that was actually an MP3 player.

The much hyped Vonage Wi-Fi phone from last years show is now available for mass consumption. I might have to add this to my service.

nVidia has now found a way to bridge 4 SLI cards in one box. I think this puppy requires a special motherboard to accommodate all the bus bandwidth. But I'll be damned if it can't do Doom II at a million frames per second.

This last one is for my friend Chris, who has tried home-brew liquid CPU cooling before with disasterous results. Zalman has this cooler rig that has an external radiator and will cool your CPU, northbridge chipset and video chipset. It also has a failsafe valve (looks like an inline fuse in the picture) to prevent major leakage. So if it breaks you'll only get 1/4 cup of liquid on your motherboard instead of a gallon. Hmmmmm....

Oh, but wait! On the way out we saw CES's target consumer! Or at least his vehicle. I'm assuming it's a him, since like 9 out of 10 showgoers are male. It had (as I count in this picture) 8 antennas!

He has every add on accessory known to man on the inside. GPS, Radar Detector, CB, etc. I actually can't think of 8 devices that all require seperate antennas.

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