The winner of best Engrish in a CES booth goes to…

We’re all a bit hungover today so we’re busy milling around snapping photos of booth babes and finding whatever hidden gems we may have missed over the last few days. In the meantime check out the above video. It basically sums up how we all feel.

CES 2008: Belkin’s Podcast Studio: You know, for podcasters
Look out Eee, a $399 tiny laptop from Everex is afoot
CES 2008: Kevin Costner’s a total rocker!
Optimus Maximus touched at CES

Biggs doesn’t see the point of Jook and neither do I. Well, I guess it’s sort of cool, but everyone and their mom has to have one for this to work. I guess it’s better than sharing my earbuds with someone like a 16-year old at the mall.

Blogging is hard. Look at the crowds we have to face just to bring you all the goodies you’re getting today. Just look! So later tonight we’re going to have drinks and stuff. And, if you’re in the Las Vegas area, either for CES or you live here, we’d like you to join us. It’s your chance to meet the bloggers behind the blog and then we can blog about it on our blog.

Meet us at 9:00PM at the Monte Carlo Pub & Brewery. I like vodka sodas with a lime, just so’s ya know.

Biggs, Devin and I trekked over to the Sands to try and get into some AVn mischief, but, sadly, we were denied. Instead of scantily clad women we found iPod/iPhone docks from China. There were pigs and something resembling Inky. I’m completely delirious and need to go home.

I really think there’s something wrong with Biggs. The gallery is clearly evident of that. He randomly sings karaoke and then attempts to kill me with Halo Covenant weapons.
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Hands down, one of the coolest things I’ve seen at CES so far this week is the Belkin Podcast Studio. It’s a handheld unit that you attach your iPod to. Using a pair of swiveling integrated microphones on each side, the device records what they hear in stereo as an uncompressed WAV on to the iPod. You can even control the pitch and volume, as well as the stereo balance.

Besides the integrated mics, the Podcast Studio has dual XLR and 1/4-inch microphone jacks at the top, so you can use your own high-end gear.

It’s not for everyone, but the idea impresses.

This is not a new idea by any means. I just wanted to reassure everyone that it still evokes a chuckle and a knowing head nod to see R2D2 effortlessly tossing moving images up onto a white screen. It’s what he was meant to do. That is all.

I’ve been seeing a lot of these headphones with built-in storage and digital audio playback today. They’re almost everywhere, staring at me as if I’d tried to date their sister. Leave me alone, hundreds and hundreds of similar headphones!

This pair, in particular, is made by a company out of Hong Kong called Majesty Industrial. They come in a myriad of storage sizes running up to 4-gigabytes. This set here contains 1-gigabyte of storage and has a built-in 96×32 LED-backlit display, 6-tone equalizer, USB 2.0 connection, lithium-ion battery, and WMA/MP3 support.

The nice lady in the booth thought I was a distributor so she quoted me at $18.60 per unit for 1000 of these things. I kept trying to tell her I was a reporter and I think we finally reached a common understanding of one another but not before I’d talked her down to $18.60 per unit for only 500 of them. My point is that if you see these stateside, they might cost under $50 and maybe I’ll be selling them (probably not, though). There are a bunch of other colors too, including white, blue, and red.

We’ve all seen heated clothing before but there are a couple of somewhat unique about this line of jackets and gloves. First, the gloves have heating circuits that go all the way to the fingertips. Most other heated gloves center on the palm of the hand but these ones keep the part of your hands most susceptible to cold — your digits.

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You read blogs like CrunchGear because you value our opinions on the gear that we review, we’re experts and break things down into easy to swallow pieces. But you don’t come to CrunchGear to read our music reviews, that would just be silly. So just let it be enough to know that we saw a bit of Kevin Costner’s band. I hope their songs are in Guitar Hero VII.

Here’s a little device set to hit the Korean market in about a month and possibly the rest of the world this summer, pending a distribution deal. It’s manufactured by Kaon Mobile and is about the size of a smaller UMPC, featuring a sliding screen similar to the Sidekick Slide. It’s a slick looking little machine that caught my eye quicker than a booth babe holding a box of Dunkin’ Donuts.

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Digital photo frames are a dime a dozen, especially at CES, but Sungale out of China, who’s here at CES looking for distributors, has one that I’d actually consider. It’s a regular 4, 4×6-inch frame, with the lower-right hand photo being a digital screen. The rep said they’re also working on a version where all four photos frames within the larger frame are digital, but are afraid they won’t find any buyers in the USA. Get on it, people, this thing is cool.

Sungale, inc.

It’s out there, and it’s just as glossy and beautiful as you think. The keys are somewhat bigger than a normal keyboard, probably by 15% or so; they had a regular size one there for comparison. The screens were crisp, bright, responsive, and very high contrast.

It really does look like a $500 object, and if you can afford it, I’d say go for it. Their booth girls were nice and glossy too, definitely not local.

Since the Wii was released, we’ve wanted Zappers. And some have come, some have left, but they’ve all been pretty basic. Pega from Honk Kong has taken the Zapper to its logical conclusion, and I’m thinking I should get a Wii just for these guys. Word.

Pega

Razer distinguishes itself from every other PC peripheral maker by focusing on making higher-end products…like this one! It’s the Destructor, a “gaming-grade” mouse surface. (I don’t play twitchy PC games, so I’ve no idea what the difference is between “gaming-grade” and the everyday kind.) Razer claims that the technical wizardry—optical and laster mouse optimization, “ultra wide” size—of the Destructor allows for up to 25 percent more accurate mouse tracking. It even comes with a protective case—that’s how serious this is. Or is supposed to be; I haven’t used it to say one way or another.

Wanna see my *crazy* mousing surface? Of course you do.

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Is there a doctor in the house? Can we declare HD-DVD officially dead now? I just walked by both the HD-DVD booth and the Blu-Ray booth on my way up to the Blounge (Blogger’s Lounge), and snapped these two shots.

In short, the HD-DVD booth felt like I was at my grandparents’ funeral, while the Blu-Ray camp felt more like a birthday party.

The SoundTech Ediface is an interesting device. It’s basically a pickup that attaches to any guitar and then converts what you play to digital format. It comes with a game called Guitar Wizard that “allows users to jam along to popular songs while learning to play a real guitar.”

The Ediface is compatible with popular audio recording programs like GarageBand and Sony’s Acid Music Studio so you can play your guitar and have it output sounds like woodblocks, piano keys, and screaming cats or whatever other samples you’d like to use.

It’ll be available in the next few months for under $300.

The video is kind of Le Boring but go ahead and take a look at Audiovox’s Small Wonder camcorder. It’s small and it’s certainly a wonder. $149.

We’ve told you about XStreamHD once or twice before. You can forget the format war because we all know physical media is going down the pooper. I like where XStreamHD’s head is at with streaming 1080p video and 7.1 channels of DTS-HD Master Audio (lossless audio). But it does more then movies, too. You can watch TV, listen to your music and play games via satellite. Did I mention it acts as a DVR and it has an integrated PBX phone system for VoIP? And you can record three HD broadcasts at once. It even plays nice with DLNA devices like your PS3.
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