CES - Jason "Fujitsu" Schneider - Day 2

Day 2 at CES was a busy one, we spent the entire day at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), and as big as the Sands/Venician displays were, the LVCC is about 4 times bigger. Majority of the major players in the computer industry were located here, and some of the booths were very elaborate. We covered a lot of ground today, and met with a lot of exciting companies, and hopefully in the future we will have a lot of products sent our way to review.

One of the highlights of Day 2 was being able to see FATAL1TY play some Quake 4 against willing participants, well I guess calling it “playing” wouldn’t be the correct term, I’d go more with “completely worked”. Even self-proclaimed “Semi-Professional” gamers didn’t stand a chance against him. At first I thought it was going to be pretty lame watching a “professional” gamer, but when we were walking past and stopped for a minute, I have to admit it was very interesting. Each match against FATAL1TY had 4 minutes to try their hardest, but after 2 hours of matches, no one had even managed to kill FATAL1TY even once, and most every match ended with FATAL1TY having at least 25+ kills. Before I actually saw them playing I thought “How good can he actually be?”, and honestly it was pretty neat to see someone that good playing live.

Anyways, on to the hardware, here is a quick recap of some of the companies we visited today

Sandisk

Sansa View - The Sansa is a flash-based Video player, and is truly portable. It contains a 4” widescreen color display, and is only 16.9mm thick. This model is 8GB and is completely solid-state, it also has a SD expansion slot for easy expansion. Another nice features is that it has a removable rechargeable battery, which allows for a user to buy an additional battery and easily put a fresh battery in when it gets low, unlike other Video players that have internal batteries which cannot be interchanged. This item has not been released to retailers yet, but aims to be on shelves towards the end of Q1.

Sansa View - Front

Sansa View - Side

  Sansa Connect – The Sansa Connect is a Wi-Fi enabled portable MP3 player, and is able to download music directly from music services to the player with any wireless connection. Unlike the iPod which requires you to use only iTunes, the Connect is able to use multiple different services. The whole idea behind the Sansa Connect is the flexibility, and has a lot of very nice features that some of the others do not. One unique features is the ability to see other players in the area and see what they are listening too, as well as you are able to send song recommendations to other players in the area that you’ve added to your friend list. This is definitely a player that will be worth checking out when it releases towards the end of Q1.

Sansa Connect - Friends List

Sansa Connect - Main Menu

Sansa Connect - Navigation

Sandisk Sansa Express – This is the little brother of the Sansa line, and is available in the 1GB capacity at the moment. It contains a 4-line OLED screen which provides for very bright display. It also contains a internal rechargeable lithium battery which provides approximately 15 hours of playback, as well as a built in USB adaptor, so your won’t need to use a cable, just plug it right into your computer.

Sandisk Cruzer Contour – This is a newly released USB flash drive, which features a new sliding USB connecter. It is a very sturdy drive, and has a metal frame, and is a very classy looking drive, definitely worth checking out.

All four of these products were unveiled at CES 2007, and should be hitting the shelves in the next couple months. Sandisk also has a new line of flash-based laptop HDD’s that they will be releasing in the future, we were able to take a quick look at a prototype, but this will definitely be a product making a huge impact in mobile computing in the future.

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