CrunchGear

Hooray for Tuesday! It’s now the morning of January 9 and I’m headed to a 9 a.m. meeting with Samsung Mobile, but my cab takes the Strip to get to the LVCC making me late. (In case you missed the previous entries, here are Jan. 7 and Jan. 8, parts one and two.)

Despite the continued accolades heaped upon Samsung’s phones by others, I’ve always been
a bit sour on them. Great designs, but there’s always something that’s just a bit off. Nothing too terrible to discourage people from buying them (except for that flat, little proprietary headphone/USB/charging jack they insist on using), but still.

Anyhoo, I was mostly there to get some “face time” with the reps that help me do my job all year round, since it’s now Tuesday and we’ve already covered all the major announcements including The Simpson’s phones, um, twice.

Samsung X830 is just a kick-ass piece of design work. It’s a music player navigated by a click wheel that handles MP3/ACC/ACC+/e-AAC+/WMA files. It’s a tiny phone with all the major trappings you could want in a tiny pocket phone. And it has two separate interfaces—one for the phone, one for the music player—so there’s no need to open the phone to listen to music. Sadly, it will likely never show up in the U.S. on a carrier. Such is life.

The other hardware things to come out of Kodak at the show (aside from some fashion bags, if you consider that hardware) are the EASYSHARE V1003 ($250) and V803 ($200) Zoom digital cameras that have 10-megapixel and 8-megapixel resolutions respectively, with 3X optical zoom lenses and come in a choice of eight colors. As typical with Kodak’s digicams, they’ll feature good on-camera, ease-of-use features like 22 scene modes, blurry picture alert and digital red-eye reduction.

Next I stop at the Renaissance Hotel that’s just outside the LVCC South Hall for two meetings: Buffalo Technology at 11 a.m. and Dell at noon.

They also dropped a couple consumer network attached storage drives: The LinkStation Live available in capacities of 250GB (HS-DH250GL; $229), 320GB (HS-DH320GL; $249), 500GB (HS-DH500GL; $349) and 750GB (HS-DH750GL; $749?) and the TeraStation Live is available in capacities of 1TB (HS-DH1.0TGL/R5; $699) and 2TB (HS-DH2.0TGL/R5; $1,299). You can use them as iTunes servers for direct access to music stored on the devices and you can store photos and videos directly from a digital camera. And they’re all DLNA’d (Digital Living Network Alliance) up so they’ll work with other devices, computers, etc. that meet the DLNA standards for interoperability in your “digital home.” There’s a new LinkTheater Wireless-A/G Media Player, too. You can read more about it here.

While Dell’s newest gaming desktop, the XPS 710 H2C, was announced at CES, it’s not the first time I saw it. I haven’t tested one yet, but I hasten to say it’s the best gaming box/performance system they’ve built to date. Good design. Big, solid build. All the components available for great gaming (including overclocked graphics and CPU). And now, thanks to CoolIT, quiet liquid cooling. I would sooner buy the 710 H2C than an Alienware, that’s for damn sure.

Well, I head off to the Venetian/Sands Expo Center now, so check back for the second half of my day later on.