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CES 2011. Day 2. Miscellaneous

The life of journalists at exhibitions is difficult. Unlike some of our colleagues, who are blessed with ~~a lot of money~~ comfortable work trailers we have hardly any place to sit. When you stumble into your hotel room after 8 hours of walking the show floors you have to write articles instead of having a beer like you want. Awful! Despite that I will tell a few words about what I have seen today. Some things cannot be overlooked.

Parrot

Again I have to mention this French company. If you remember we reviewed AR Drone before, which seems to be rather amusing. Unfortunately, it comes with a price tag of $300. So far in the US Parrot managed to sell AR Drone only through Brookstone, which specializes in giftware. It is good, but could be better. Taking into account the publicity around Drone at CES 2010 the company decided not only to rent a big stall, but to arrange several outdoor sites to showcase its hopeful. Unfortunately, considerable investment into promotion at exhibitions does not necessarily translate into sales. It is difficult to influence the overall consumer sentiment and find many people who are ready to pay $300 for what is essentially a toy.

In the street

Apart from Parrot several other companies set up trailers outside.

For example Timbuk2 from San Francisco offers stylish and durable messenger bags.

Ginnar with its fantastic double-decker, manufactures glasses to wear while working in front of computer screens. Haven't you ever heard about them? Neither have I. Now we did.

Then we have a nice example of attempts to save up and protect the environment at the same time. Goal Zero produces solar batteries for charging. Or somebody in China produces it for Goal Zero who then sells it as its own. It's complicated these days. When you read their name and slogan together it becomes even more complicated. Goal Zero Power Anywhere.

Alcatel

Traditionally, we cannot ignore such important Chinese company as Alcatel. Just anybody else and their dog these days, Alcatel tries to concentrate on Android phones. It offers an array typically Chinese models. Alcatel also comes up with tablets on Android, but their screens leave much to be desired.

Tablets

Speaking about tablets it looks like this is not the Year of a Blue Rabbit, that of a Bad Tablet. The exhibition exposes you to dozens of models on Android and Windows 7. Frankly speaking, I am fed up with them. To understand my feelings look at models from Viliv and Colby.

Bling

As time goes by people still appreciate the true beauty.

Cricket

US CDMA carrier Cricket unveiled its new plan Muve Music: unlimited calls, SMS (including international ones), 3G data and unlimited music downloads for $55 a month. The carrier made an agreement with 4 leading record companies: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Music. Music is available only to owners of Samsung Suede (SCH-R710) and it is stored on a 4GB card without the way to copy it.

The phone got an interesting feature – you can easily cut a fragment of a track and use it as a ringtone.

Haier

As you know Haier is the biggest manufacturer of refrigirators in the world, so there is nothing surprising that they too decided to come up with several Android phones.

Apart from that we saw A57W model with AWS 1700 MHz support, which means it likely will be launched by T-Mobile.

LG

Look at some live pictures of Optimus Black, Revolution and Quantum in my working hands. It offers one more direct comparison of SuperAMOLED, Retina and Nova from LG.

Samsung

Meet a couple of new handsets: 4G LTE Smartphone (I wonder how much time marketing people needed to come up with this sophisticated name) and Infuse 4G. Infuse was hidden behind glass, while I managed to get hold of 4G LTE Smartphone with SuperAMOLED+. Pay attention to the speed test.

Sony Ericsson

We made a mistake when we expected to see Android 2.3 in Arc (X12) as late as this summer, but engineers from Sony Ericsson made a heroic effort, got rid of Mediascape and will offer their handset with new version in March. Unless we have a delay like with X10 and the model will be released closer to the summer. Let's hope we'll be wrong again and the phone will be available in time.

The phone is very pleasant in terms of design and the speed is impressive too. What I didn't like was cheap plastic. I wonder if a camera module is really worth its Exmor R label, or it is another PR trick like Mobile Bravia Engine.