Whew…. finally made it to the plane. I took BART this morning to the airport and naturally it was late getting me there. I’m finally getting a chance to kick back for the first time in a few days. CES and Macworld were hectic and my social calendar was pretty full while back in San Francisco for the first time since the move to Seattle.

I’m hoping to get the remaining posts up from CES and MacWorld by the weekend, so stay tuned true believers. Also, I’ll have a bit more in-depth look at the new features of iLife ’06 as it should be sitting on my doorstep when I get back

Now, while I was out pounding the floor of CES doing my little blog, my friends over at Engadget left no stone unturned. My devoted fans (errr… fan) may not be interested in all the things that Engadget covered, so here, dear reader, is an abridged set of links to Engadget to the best of CES.

Keynotes/Interviews

• Bill Gates Interview
• Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote
• Live coverage of Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer
• Live coverage of Michael Dell
• Live from Yahoo’s keynote with Tom Cruise
• Live coverage of Google Keynote with Robin Williams
• Backstage at the Google press conference

Booth Tours

• Panasonic
• Philips
• Toshiba
• Sony
• Samsung
• Pioneer
• Microsoft
• LG
• Kodak
• Intel
• HP
• AMD

I’ll be posting more today and tomorrow, but for now, we’re stone cold chillin’ in Frisco waiting on Stevie’s big announcements on Tuesday. Hope to see you there.

and everything else is really, really messy. If you’ve ever taken a look at the back side of my receiver it looks like something that NASA would use to launch rockets. Between 5 cables for audio and 3 for video for one frickin’ source, it makes one wonder if Monster Cable has been subsidizing A/V component development for the last 10 years.

These pictures speak volumes about the simplicity the industry is aspiring to and god, I hope HDMI is powering everything in the next few years.

Friday evening, we ran into nerd celeb, Patrick Norton while attempting a death defying street crossing in Las Vegas heading for the Wynn casino to catch Avenue Q. Patrick Norton, in case you don’t know, was the former co-host of the late TechTV’s show, The Screen Savers. We chatted for a bit and got an interesting insider’s take on the demise of TechTV and what makes interesting tv for G4′s key demographic.

If you were into the Screen Savers, check out his new show, dl.tv and take it with you on your iPod.

I had a long chat with one of the Creative folks and tried really, really hard to like the Creative Zen Vision:M. I mean, how hard could it be to create a usable device that plays music and video. I mean, the iPod is nice and all, but this is easy, right?

WRONG. This device is not intuitive to use, it is heavy and it is thick, all things the iPod is not. When I was done with the Vision:M, they brought me the older model, the Vision to check out. The device was turned off and it took a full minute to boot into a workable state. Call me impatient, but it felt like an eternity compared to the iPod.

Please Creative, make a good media player. Competition is good for the industry.

…pretty smoking Dell. Dell has their new Alienware killer, the XPS 600 Renegade with 2 nVidia GeForce 7800 SLI (and up to 4 video cards) and a Pentium 4 tweaked up to 4.26Ghz. It’ll only cost you $4-7k, but aren’t you worth it?

Personally, I just want the paint job.

They Sony booth is always a big pain in the ass, teeming with waaaaaay too many people. They always have something cool, new and shiny to play with. This week, they introduced the US version of the Sony Reader, their implementation of E-Ink in a book reader format. I finally got my hands on one today.

First off, believe the hype. This machine is very sleek, the text is crystal clear and they’ve removed a variety of the the BS restrictions that the Japanese model had(very strict DRM, only used Sony proprietary book formats) and they added a bunch of new features including an RSS reader and the ability to open .doc and .pdf formats. I imagine it will be a little spendy (I recall $300 or $400), but for the first of its kind, not so bad. We’ll see if this thing does better than ebook readers of the past

(Man, I get more and more sweary in my post titles the later that it gets. Maybe its the crappy wifi and crappier Muzak). Gotta check this out tomorrow, but apparently, TiVo is showing off their Series 3 CableCard 1 and 2.0 HD PVR at CES. According to megazone, this unit will have 6 tuners (2 NTSC, 2 ATSC, 2 CableCard). I’m sure they won’t all work simultaneously, but 2 should work. I hope this means I can chuck my Craptastic err… Comcastic box sometime soon. Unfortunately, TiVo has a bit of a reputation of showing off the vapor at CES, so no ship date or price.

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(Via Zatz Not Funny.)

We’ll be updating pics and posts throughout tomorrow (wifi willing) so check ‘em out while they’re hot. Special props going out to photographer extraordinaire, Suzi Blakely for putting up with me dragging her all over the show floor at this latest nerd fest.

Gallery

MUSIC UPDATE 2“Take These Broken Wings” – Please, somebody, make it stop!

Just to keep it nice and confusing, Microsoft has announced an HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. The announcement talks specifically about movies rather than games, so this unit better be cheaper than standalone units, or MS has a nice Sega CD on their hands.

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Normally, I walk through the car tech section with ear plugs and sunglasses to avoid being blinded by the bling, but today, we had to stop to check out the rims stereo system in this car. I suppose with my unhealthy obsession with superheroes and unlimited funds, I might be tempted to make a Stewtopiamobile like this one.

More photos after the jump.

Totally Shaq-tastic.

So it looks like I’ll be hanging out in the lobby to make posts this evening. The Hilton Grand Vacations at the Flamingo (say that three times really fast) claimed to have Wi-Fi in all the rooms. I suppose by “in all the rooms” they meant in the lobby, then I guess they aren’t lying liars. Oh well, I didn’t want to go to bed anytime soon and God knows I love my fellow man(who are these retiree vacationers that didn’t know the biggest trade show of the year was going on right now?).

UPDATE: They just played Phil Collins’ “Groovy Kind of Love” on the Muzak. I think I’m going to poke my eyes out with my Treo.

Ok, normally I don’t get really excited about bigger, better, faster(Ok, that’s a lie, but generally I expect it.) CES is the place for the big electronics companies to show you who has the biggest screen, but I think that LG has the biggest plasma by far. Now, 50″ plasmas are nice and all, but let’s say you need a really, really, really big tv to bling out your media room, this 102″ monster is for you. No price on this sick tv, but if you have to ask…

One more picture after the jump.

Looks like we finally have some shipping dates for HD-DVD players. Coming in March, Toshiba will ship both the HD-XA1($799) and the HD-A1($499) with the XA1 coming with better stabilization and quad DSP decoders for better audio. Both have audio decoders for an alphabet soup of audio standards and only HDMI for video output. Looks like you early adopting, component video only early adopters will be shelling out cash for a new TV as well. Oy, at least these things are under a grand…

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(Via I4u.)

OK, so a whole bunch of movies were announced today for the not yet shipping soon Blu-Ray HD players. Here are some of the worst of them.

• Hitch
• A Knight’s Tale
• Resident Evil: Apocalypse
• Species
• SWAT
• Fantastic Four
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

This craptastic lineup makes me wanna run right out and spend 1000 clams on a new player. Seriously studios, can’t we do a little better than this? Even the “A-list” contains tired movies like Terminator 2.

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(Via HDBlog.net.)

XM Radio has announced a variety of new equipment today. First up, from Samsung, 2 new portable players, the Helix XM2go that will play live XM, up to 50 hours of recorded XM and MP3 files and second, the Nexus, which will play live XM while docked and record XM and MP3 files on the go.

Next up, the suspiciously similarly looking Pioneer Inno XM2go, has all the bells and whistles of the Nexus and the same price of $399. All of these units should ship this quarter.

Lastly, and perhaps most interesting, is XM Passport. XM passport is a tiny, half dollar sized XM tuner designed to go from device to device so that users will only need one subscription for many devices.

Samsung Helix and Nexus
Pioneer Inno XM2go
XM Passport

I’m making the trek out to Las Vegas this Thursday through Saturday for the annual CES convention. If you’ve never been to a a CES, it is the largest technology show in the US attracting over 100,000 people to the city. I’ve heard it best described as a “museum of the next 18 months,” although many of the products seen at CES don’t ship for even longer than that (large format OLEDs, anyone?)

I haven’t been to CES in a couple of years, but the show rarely disappoints. I’ll be blogging the event and keeping folks up to date about announcements at the show.

If you are going to CES, drop me a line.