CES 2010

So I've spent the last few days fixated on whatever news out of CES 2010 I could glean from websites like engadget..... I have to admit I was checking that one as much as I could.

As much as the hype over tablets and 3D TVs captured most of the attention, I'm kinda disappointed in the overall showing at CES. Not a lot of news about mp3/digital media players... sure, I'm always looking for a PSP replacement on that front, but since 2006 when I first got a PSP(-1001), I still haven't found one. And not much to challenge this year either. I guess the focus is more on cellphones (which I don't use) that pack in that kind of media functionality perhaps diminishing the variety of mp3/video players the last few years.

I was also interested in what the next gen of netbooks was going to bring us. Answer in short: Not much. Netbooks by their nature are "meant" to be underpowered and limited so as not to "compete" with laptops. But really, the only big reveal was the new Intel N450 processor which replaces the old standard N270/N280 Atom processors. I get the feeling that the N450 is not going to be all that much faster, but it should be less power hungry, extending the battery time of netbooks by a bit. We'll have to see how it works out in real-world situations. It's kinda perverse of me to be hoping that companies would reveal new tech that would make my barely-3-month-old Toshiba NB205 obsolete. But other than the N450, there's not a lot of difference between the immediate next-gen & the current/old-gen. If I had to buy a netbook today, I'd probably hold out for a N450, but honestly, there are probably some deals to be had from N280 netbook clearance sales, and I kinda doubt there'd be much of a practical performance difference between them.



later
don