CES 2006 Main Show Floor

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CES 2006 Main Show Floor - Part I

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Bradford Day
Kurtis

Jan. 12, 2006

Specifications

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iRiver

Curiously placed in the middle of the car audio hall, iRiver's booth stood out with high walls covered in deep red. Inside their dark booth iRiver had a DJ spinning tunes and various attractive women modeling their newest MP3 players. Their shining star this year is the U10 handheld multi-media player featuring a 2.2" 320x240 full color screen. And, utilizing Adobe's Flash Lite 1.1 platform, you can expect to see third party developers churning out games for the U10 in addition to videos.

The interface was very intuitive and the screen was bright and crisp. The features list on this puppy is a mile long, but just to name a few: FM tuner/recorder, voice recorder and 28 hours of music play on one battery charge. Unfortunately the U10 is only available in 512MB and 1GB capacities, which might limit its appeal somewhat. Despite this, units are still flying off the shelves and we hope we'll get lucky enough to have one sent our way for review. They were also showing off their T10, which is one of their players from last year.

Altec Lansing

As a follow-up to our brief visit with Altec Lansing at the CES Digital Experience we snooped around their full booth on the show floor. In addition to the multitude of iPod speakers we reported on earlier, we had a chance to test the newest revision of their gaming headset. The AHS615 is a little more stylish and comfortable than the previous incarnation. Walls and walls of iPod-dockable speakers lined their booth, as did a full range of computer speakers in 2.1 and 5.1 varieties. For their efforts, Altec Lansing received CES Innovation Honoree status for both the XT2 Laptop Speaker System and inMotion iMT1 Mobile Speaker System.

Skullcandy

Relative newcomers to the audio realm, Skullcandy has made a dent in the field. We first learned of them at CES '05 and they have since sent us products for review and they were also prize sponsors for our last contest. They had a nice little booth with a DJ playin' tunes and the racks that held their demo headsets had cool brushed metal cut-outs in the shape of their logo. This year they stuck it to the big guys by winning an Innovations Honoree award for their Proletariat NC-LINK noise canceling headphones, hardly an easy task. They do quite a job of eliminating white noise while giving your eardrums a workout with excellent sound response. The Proletariat NC's were officially announced at this year's CES.

Another innovative design, the Montoya MP3 Pro Headphones, are DJ quality headphones that smoothly incorporate a detachable USB flash memory MP3 player. Also new for this year was the LINK Pack, a rugged backpack that integrates a LINK audio system meant for use with a cell phone. Like many other new stereo headset units, the LINK system allows tracks from a music-enabled phone to be paused while you chat. But rather than use headphones, the speaker drivers and microphone are sewn into the shoulder straps of the backpack. Volume and other settings can be adjusted on the straps as well.

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Page 1: Creative / Sennheiser / Klipsch
Page 2: iRiver / Altec Lansing / Skullcandy
Page 3: AMD / Intel / Samsung
Page 4: Netgear / MSI / Patriot Memory

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1 - Posted by HVyIlTYDWxVzwVXKguD on March 18, 2008 - 1:33 pm

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