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Samsung M800 and F490 touchscreen cell phones show up.

Geez, you release one little iPhone, and suddenly everybody's got to have a touchscreen function.  Samsung hasn't made it official yet, but our friends at Mobiledia have broken the impending arrival of the Samsung M800 for Sprint, and we have to say it looks a lot cooler than most of the other iPhone wannabes that have popped up lately with that slick full-color display going on.  But while details on it are sketchy at best, it's following right on the heels of a last-second CES reveal of the M800's big brother, the Samsung F490.  And this one we know a little something about, since we've been teased by it before.

It's tough to get too excited about that display (which looks cribbed off the PlayStation's menu system, whether it is or not), but it'll be rocking a 5-megapixel camera to the M800's 2-megapixels and have haptic feedback on the 3.2" touchscreen (i.e. you'll feel a buzz that lets you know you're doing something) that, yes, has both landscape and portrait modes.  The downside?  There's only 130MB of internal storage, more with microDS, and it might indeed be tri-band GSM/EDGE only.  Why, God?  Why?

Well, as a saving grace, you can get a SquareTrade cell phone warranty on them for less than any form of cell phone insurance you can find, even if you add Accidental Damage coverage to the package.  Plus, we turn around your claim in just five business days, guaranteed, or your warranty and the service are free.  Good luck getting that from T-Mobile.

Release dates for the M800 is nonexistent as yet.  Those European people will get their mitts on the F490 before we do (i.e. February), and it'll run at $734 without contract.  Pricey, but throw in a few contract deal enticements and a not-AT&T carrier, and we might be swayed.

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Samsung touchscreen phone, cell phone warranty

Creative's inPerson video conference portable: Hands-On.

We finally moseyed over the Creative booth at CES to have a look at and feel of their new inPerson wireless video conferencing portable, and found our naked glee tempered slightly by what we want it to be.

The inPerson is a big step away from Creative's usually line of audio/visual gear, but it's not exactly new technology; it's old technology used in a new, exciting way.  They've essentially put a VoIP box together with a webcam and made the whole thing wireless, with WiFi or LAN, so you can tote it with you to another company's office and set up an instant video conference with home base.  And while it's nice if both parties have an inPerson, it's not vital.  You can log on with a normal camera and video conference all Skype-like.  Everything will run on Creative's own servers.

It runs nice, too.  We didn't test out the four-at-once max capability, but a one-on-one ran at a pleasant 19 frames per second - a LOT better than Skype - on a high resolution 7" screen.  There's a function for adjusting the bitrate to best suit your signal, but the inPerson won't adjust automatically; it's strictly manual.  Given how the inPerson is designed to be taken strange places, that seems like quite an oversight.  Unfortunately, not the only one.

InPerson's UI is pick-up-and-play easy, with the remote or on the pad - no touch screen, but given the whole video conferencing thing, that's probably for the best.  There are two built-in microphones, but as the floor at CES was a tad noisy, we opted for the included headset.  Voice quality was good, but there was a very noticeable sound lag from the video image.  The VGA camera moves with the cover hinge, so it's adjustable on the vertical axis but not the horizontal.  Creative compensated nicely here with a wide angle lens that would do a decent job of capturing a boardroom table.  The guys at the booth were fairly cagey about battery life (they kept telling us "standard battery life," but didn't say standard to what), but we've heard two hours tops.  Good thing you can plug it in.

The really glaring omission here is the lack of call waiting.  Nobody can call into an inPerson video conference in progress.  The host has to call out and invite people in, and that just doesn't make any kind of sense to us.  Creative told us a call waiting feature was in the works, but frankly, it had better go live before the inPerson ships.  It's a Grade-A omission for a conferencing device of any kind.

If that gets fixed and the pictures move as smoothly in the wild as they did at Creative's CES booth, this one could be a big winner.  At $700, it's cheaper than any other video conferencing equipment out on the market, its portability makes it infinitely more adaptable, and the $10 a month subscription fee is but a pittance.  When call-ins become possible, we'll probably get one for our own office, and we'll put one of our own warranties on it.  With Accidental Damage coverage, naturally.

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Eight new Magellan GPS models debut at CES.

Holy crap!  The GPS market just got even more crowded and highly expensive with the CES debut of eight new Magellan GPS devices. 

Sure, they start small with a redesigned el cheapo Roadmate 1212 priced at $299, and let you pony up an extra $30 to get live traffic reports on the RoadMate 1230.  Sure, they're introducing a new 1400 series RoadMate that basically just ups the 1200 series screen from 3.5" to 4.3".  Sure, the 3200 series is getting a new addition with a voice-enabled Maestro Elite 3270.  But that's where the sanity ends and they start going all kinds of crazy on us with their new Maestro 5300 series. 

Take a deep breath here: the Maestro 5310 and 5340+GPRS come with a 3-month real time traffic subscription, text-to-speech, a programmable and "patent pending" OneTouch interface for favorite functions and/or searches, PC connectivity to upload addresses and notes, a built-in AAA TourBook travel guide and Google Local Search, so you can instantly locate any business, restaurant, or event in your vicinity.  Loosely translated: the 5310 will price at $700 - that's $200 more than any other North American GPS they offer.  The 5340, which comes with even more real-time features, hasn't even got a price tag announced as yet, which makes us giddy with terror.

Abject horror aside, this is a pretty interesting move to make.  Magellan clearly thinks there's an open market for an upscale GPS system, one that does just about everything you want to happen in a car (save for the actual driving, but GM's working on that), and they're not shy about charging you accordingly.  As such, it might be a good idea to slap a SquareTrade GPS warranty on that investment, and consider putting Accidental Damage coverage on it as well. 

So, with Goodyear getting in the GPS game and everybody else eyeing the market greedily, it should be fun to see how market leader Garmin responds.  And how quickly.

 

UPDATE: the 5340 will price out at a cool $1000.  Nope, they're definately not martketing these at collage students.

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Magellan GPS warranty

LG takes the lid off its HSDPA Ultraportable Computer.

Looks like those rumors were true after all.  Jkkmobile just posted art and specs on the much-hypothesized HSDPDA ultraportable computer from LG, and it's enough to actually get us excited about ultraportable computers again.  It's just shown its face at CES, and there's the nitty-gritty: it's sporting a 4.8" 1024 x 600 touchscreen and a sliding QWERTY keyboard, with Intel's brand new Menlow platform running Vista off a 40GB drive under the hood.  It's also got 1GB of RAM, WiFi, HSDPA, Bluetooth, and a whole lot of pretty on top.    

Jkkmobile's also rightly suggests that LG's HDSPDA ultraportable will go for less than OQO's comparable model.  Naturally, we'd suggest using that extra cash to put a low-cost, premium quality SquareTrade warranty on it, too, with or without Accidental Damage coverage. 

The world is a'shrinking, folks.

LG ultra portable, CES LG, OQO ultraportable

Asus M51 Laptop series goes upscale.

Considering Asus is moving a lot of weight around in the ultra-cheap laptop market, it's tempting to forget that they do non-cheap premium laptops as well.  Case in point, their freshly announced line of Asus M51 series laptops, three pieces of hardware that are definitely not going to price in the $700 range.  All three are going to have 15.4" screens, the typical Asus 180-degree built-in 1.3 MP camera, fingerprint scanner security and a separate numeric keypad on the keyboard (we like this), but the internals size up a little differently depending on the model.

The top-of-the-line M51SN, for example, sports a Penryn processor that powers up to 250GB of hard drive space, optional Intel Turbo Memory Technology with 1GB of NAND Flash, NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GS graphics, up to 4GB of RAM, and your choice of DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray drives.  Given the recent shift in the wind, a Blu-Ray might be more prudent than HD-DVD.

The smaller Asus M51Sr and M51Se, on the other hand, scale down with Intel Core 2 Duo processors (if you call that scaling down) and ATI Mobility Radeon 2400 graphics.  No word on release dates or prices yet, but it's expected Asus will keep things fairly reasonable, which means the SquareTrade laptop warranty you put on them will be more than reasonable.  Nobody out-reasonables us.

Asus laptop warranty, Asus CES, New Asus

Goodyear gets its GPS on.

If, right at this very moment, you're saying to yourself Self, doesn't Goodyear make tires?  How is it they're suddenly getting into the consumer electronics market? then you're totally ignoring the fact that tires and GPS devices are both car-related, and Lord knows Goodyear's put enough tires on enough cars to know everything car-related.  Right?

So we'll see the official debut of not one, not five, but eight Goodyear GPS devices at CES, from the no-frills GY100K keychain (SiRF Star III, Bluetooth, 10-hour battery life) to the more robust GY540 with its 4.3" touchscreen, 2GB internal storage and MP3/AVI playback and a remote control to clip onto your steering wheel, among other things.  The official press release refers to this as a "rugged GPS system," which make mean it'll take a fair amount of damage, or it could just refer to the fact that they whole thing is encased in rubber.  Hey, it IS Goodyear.

Nevertheless, given that this is a new and untested product, it might behoove you to put a SquareTrade GPS warranty on it.  That "protective rubber" might mean you don't need our Accidental Damage coverage, but if they thing just stops working due to normal use  mechanical/electrical failure, you'll be totally covered for not a lot of money.  And then you can go buy a Garmin with your refund.

GPS warranty, Goodyear warranty, Goodyear insurance

Olevia's new HDTVs set for CES debut.

It's only natural that after Wired Magazine ranked the 47" Olevia 1080p LCD HDTV over competition ranging from Sony, Sharp and Panasonic to Toshiba, Philips and Samsung, that Syntax-Brillian would move to capitalize on their good buzz.  And they're planning to do it with five new 1080p LCDs running with 120Hz motion processing technology.  Sizes will go from 42" to 47" to 52" and 55" and ending with a new 65" with everyone sporting JPEG/MP3 support. 

No word on prices yet, but Olivia tends to price under the better-known names (their current 65" prices out at a low-for-its-range $5500) for now.  That might start to change as word gets out about the quality of their work.  Naturally, you'll be also be able to put a SquareTrade HDTV warranty on them, though our prices haven't really changed since word got out about the quality of our work.

We'll keep our ears open, because these will definitely be worth a look when they debut at CES.  Expect a street date sometime in Q2 2008.

HDTV warranty, LCD warranty, television warranty