FPSLabs : 2007 CES Coverage Day 1

What we’ve seen during our first day on the 2007 International CES showfloor.

Although we made the beginner’s mistake of not having a game plan for Day 1, we still took a peek at a lot of really cool things on the show floor at the 2007 International CES. We wouldn’t go so far as to say that we saw a good day’s worth of what there was to see. The fact of the matter is that nobody in the world could take a meaningful look at everything on the floor at CES. However, the “cool things to floor space” ratio at CES is absurdly high, so we didn’t have to go very far to check out a fair amount of new products. With any luck, today’s coverage will be the absolute worst of the four days of coverage you will be getting from us at this event. We spent a lot of time setting up meetings and chatting people up today. So without further adieu…

Creative, Logitech, Dell, AMD/ATI
Our primary objective for Day 1, besides getting completely lost, was to check out some of the big names in two of the South halls. If you’ve read our blog from day 1, then you know that we have been experiencing some technical difficulties that limited our coverage on day 1. As a result, our report here on the Creative, Dell, and AMD/ATI displays will be briefer than we would like.

First up is Creative. Creative’s booth was nestled well within the madness of the South hall, surrounded on at least two sides by cell phone and iPod accessory companies. One of the main focuses for Creative was their X-Fi series of products. On display were each of the now 7 flavors of X-Fi sound cards. Accompanying this display was a setup of the X-Fi Sound System Z600 and the Xmod control module, which together create a very high-end audio experience. Creative was offering “Xtreme Fidelity” experience things in a separated room in their booth, but the line was quite long so unfortunately we did not have the time to check that out. The Creative booth also had two “stages” setup. CES attendees could sit down in front of one of these stages for an X-Fi instructional briefing type of thing. We are not so sure on the details of that because we weren’t able to catch it underway. The other stage was Fatal1ty’s shootout stage.

It seems like every event we attend these days we run into our old boy Jon. Aside from Fatal1ty’s 1v1 shootout setup, he also has some duties over at the WSVG tent, but we will have to get over there sometime later in the week. Fatal1ty’s Creative product lineup was being proudly displayed near the X-Fi setup. Both of Mr. Wendel’s signature mouse products were there, as were the Fatal1ty Gaming Keyboard and the relatively new Fatal1ty Gaming Headset.
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Near the Creative booth was the setup of Logitech, a company we are all quite familiar with. Aside from the normal gaming products, Logitech also had the diNovo Edge multimedia keyboard on proud display. The diNovo is a really sleek keyboard that is designed to be used with HTPC setups. It can be stored in small spaces and has a really advanced navigation control system.

Dell’s booth was displaying several new Dell products, including the 3007FP 30” Widescreen display. It is crazy to actually see how big 30 inches really is. There were also several painted Dell chassis that were up for raffle. Since collectively we are some of the most unlucky people in the world, we didn’t even fill out a ticket. There was also a special painted XPS laptop. Today Dell will be unveiling some of their new products, including the new 27” widescreen display. We probably won’t be there for the unveiling because our schedule today doesn’t bring us over to that area until later in the day.

AMD/ATI had a large booth with many different things on display. There were a few 4×4 setups and some CrossFire setups as well. There were some new motherboards being shown, but nothing ground breaking or brand new. We didn’t get a chance to check out the R600 yet, and we actually got some news that we weren’t going to be able to at all, but we are totally going back to see if we can catch a sneak peak. We shall prevail!

We also had a good meeting with Antec, but we are going to work up a separate feature for that so it won’t be included in this particular article.
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At E3, we had the initial intention of focusing our coverage on the big names and the big stories. By the end of the event, we had discovered that some of the best things at the show were down in the Kentia Hall away from the glitz and glamour of the multi-million dollar displays. While CES is more of a juxtaposition of big and small companies occupying the same space, there is still another, and just as important, type of company roaming the floors at CES. We’re going to call these companies the “up and comers”. We would also like to say that we will be including an “up and comer” company in our coverage each day, but they are not the easiest fellows to come across. It was a fortunate series of events that led to our meeting with the guys from TAB-N-TURN.

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you have a stack of erroneous CDs and DVDs somewhere in your general vicinity. Chances are also good that you have these CDs and DVDs “organized on a spindle”. We know we’ve been there - we have several such spindles strewn about our offices. If either of these two things are true for you, it is pretty safe to say that you have absolutely no idea as to the location of essential media on those spindles. If you’re like us, you take at least a few minutes flipping through each disc on the spindle searching for the desired media. What TAB-N-TURN has done is created a means by which to not only organize a spindle full of discs, but do so safely and easily. We thought it was a really cool product with a lot of potential and we haven’t seen anything quite like it before.