Heaps of stuff as Charlie buttonholes Eva Glass
By Charlie Demerjian: Saturday 10 January 2004, 09:41

THE NEAT STUFF at CES keeps on coming. One of the first to grab my eye since the last instalment is the Voq phone by Sierra wireless. It is a camera phone that does everything that you would expect from a modern phone, and when you want to use the 'smart' features, has a fold out keyboard. Others have done it before, but this one looked better than the rest I have seen at the show. (See picture at base of this story)

Rio, the MP3 player people, came out with a new version of their Nitrus mini hard drive based player. This new model ups the ante from 1.5GB to 4 GB by switchig from a Cornice drive to a Hitachi one.

One of the coolest things there was the new Eyetop Centra. If you haven't seen these devices before, go to the site and look. The Centra is a pair of eyeglasses with a projector on the side. It projects a 320x240 image onto the glasses, so you see an image floating in front of you. Very handy, very private, and at under $400 when it comes out this spring, worth a strong look. The only problem I found is that it does not agree with some people's eyes. Try before you buy, but most people who used it had no problem.

The next booth was a company called Jakks Pacific, a toy company which also makes retro arcade games. It had an Atari, a Namco, and other games machines in a unique format. These guys took an old Atari 2600 joystick, thickened the base a little, and put in four or five arcade games. Plug in a battery, wire two cables to the TV, and away you go. Pacman, Dig Dug, and a host of Atari 2600 games awaits you. At $30, these things are a steal. Highly recommended.

If you think about it, the Eyetop Centra and the Jakks Pacific games would make a mighty compelling combination, don't you think? I did, so I dragged the Jakks people over to the Eyetop booth, and magic. It worked like a charm. Plug the cables into the eyetop video in ports, and away you go. Setup was almost 15 seconds, and you were playing your own private PacMan machine. If you are into retro arcade games, this is a match made in heaven.

Susteen was showing off its DataPilot -- a hardware/software combination made to take the data off of just about any cell phone or PDA, and sync it to just about any other cell phone or PDA. If it works as advertised, it will solve problems for just about every person I know. Who doesn't have three address books in three places? I have a copy, so look for a review when I get back next week and have time to go over it.

Hawking, the networking people had a bunch of ethernet and 802.11 products at the show. One that caught my eye was the HAI15SC Hi-Gain Corner Antenna. This is a little device meant to narrow down the angle covered by an access point so you can put one in the corner of a large room, and cover it all. With 15dBi gain, it has a good chance of doing what you want.

There are many many more things to come, look for more soon. CES is awash in cool things, everyone should find at least a single item to make their lives a little better.