Pepcom Digital Experience 2006

Articles: Event Coverage

CES 2006 | CES 2005 | CES 2004 | QuakeCon 2005 | CES 2007

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian

Jan. 6, 2006

Specifications

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Alienware

Alienware was showing off five new notebooks and a couple desktop systems at their table. The new Sentia models (m3200 and m3400) weigh in at just 4 and 4.5 lbs respectively. The m3200 features a 12.1" wide-screen LCD with ClearView technology, 4 hrs of battery life, Pentium M processor, up to 1GB DDR2, and integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900. The m3400 sports a 14" wide-screen LCD with ClearView, a built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam, built-in 4-in-1 media card reader, Intel Pentium M processor, up to 2GB PC-4200 DDR2, and integrated Intel GMA 900 Extreme Graphics. The Sentia models obviously aren't going to be for the gaming crowd, but they should make nice light-weight business professional laptops.

Alienware is releasing three other notebooks, with the most interesting being the Aurora m7700. It is more powerful than the Sentia models and sports a 17" wide-screen LCD with ClearView, an AMD Athlon 64 FX or Athlon 64 X2 (dual core) processor, up to 2GB dual channel DDR 400MHz, and a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX. Unfortunately, I forgot to find out how much this thing weighs, but it's obviously not going to be ultra-portable, nor is it going to have phenomenal battery life with so much power.

Finally, Alienware is launching a couple of desktop computers, the Area-51 5400 and the Aurora 5500. In my opinion, the Area-51 5400 was the more interesting of the two. It's pretty similar to Apple's new iMac, and it sort of looks like it too - all of the components are integrated behind the screen, creating a fairly portable system. The keyboard underneath slides in and out so you can stow it away to conserve desk space when not in use. Powering the Area-51 5400 is Intel Centrino mobile technology, and the system supports up to 2GB DDR2 533MHz, up to NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 Go 256MB, up to 160GB 5,400rpm HDD, up to 5.1 surround sound, and you can opt for Windows XP Home, Professional, or Media Center Edition. The Aurora 5500 uses an Athlon 64 FX-55, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, up to 4GB RAM, up to 400GB SATA, GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB, and Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro.

Archos

Archos caught my eye with a couple new products, the AV 500 "pocket" digital video recorder and the AV 700 "mobile" digital video recorder. The AV 500 has a 4" 480x272 (16:9) LCD with 262k colors, 30 or 100GB of storage, "near-DVD video quality" recording (720x480 @ 30fps), USB 2.0 connectivity, built-in speaker, and battery life is up to 15 hours for music and 4.5 hours for video. The AV 700 is similar but with a 7" 480x234 (16:9) LCD with 262k colors, and 40 or 100GB of storage.

Kodak

The big buzz at Kodak's booth was their new EasyShare V570 point-n-shoot camera with dual lenses. One of my questions was apparently the most common - "do both lenses work at the same time?" The answer was no, the camera just switches between the lenses when zooming. This is really the answer I expected but I was sort of hoping for something really crazy. There is a 23mm ultra-wide angle lens and a 39-117mm (3x) optical zoom lens on this camera, and Kodak made claims that the 23mm lens provides 70% wider coverage than comparable point-n-shoots.

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Page 1: Introduction, Logitech & Motorola
Page 2: Energizer, Western Digital, Altec Lansing, & Sonos
Page 3: Saitek, NETGEAR, & Lego
Page 4: Alienware, Archos, & Kodak

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1 User Comment

1 - Posted by Rich on January 7, 2006 - 3:37 pm

I am sooo going next year! No one told me there would be Lego there.

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