Now we're back in the UK, and recovered from most of the jet-lag, time to post a quick round up of posts written in other places about our trip to that mecca of gadgets, the monstrosity that ate Vegas, CES 2011... That and over 30 miles of hard core trekking around 7 conference halls and several Vegas hotels hunting stands, meeting rooms and press conferences.

Blog posts:

CES - It's a marathon, not a sprint.

So that was CES 2011. We’re finally sat in our hotel room resting our feet, and calculating the number of steps and miles walked. We’ve met with so many companies we’ve lost count – and have filled a large sports bag with press releases (on paper, CD, and memory stick). It’s been six solid days, from before the show opens to when we finally put our PCs away well past midnight…

As we look back on the themes and trends we spotted as we walked the halls and the press events, perhaps it’s a good idea to pass on the tips we’ve learnt over the last few years on just how to survive the monster that is CES.

Read more.

News stories:

CES: Dell unveils 7 and 10-inch Android tablets.

Dell announced a new 7-inch 4G tablet and a prototype of a business-focused 10-inch device at CES 2011 on Thursday.

The Dell Streak 7 is a 4G Android tablet, to be made available initially for T-Mobile in the US. Powered by Nvidia's Tegra 2 dual-core ARM processor, it has a 7-inch HD capacitive touchscreen.

Michael Tatelman, vice president and general manger of North American consumer sales for Dell, stressed the screen's robustness. "It uses Gorilla Glass, which will take the rough treatment that these devices will get," he said at the press conference at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas.

Read more.

CES: Windows to run on ARM chips, says Microsoft.

Microsoft has demonstrated a future version of Windows running on both ARM and x86 processors, and has announced partnerships with ARM processor vendors Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia.

The software maker's president, Steven Sinofsky, presented the demo at a CES 2011 press conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Sinofsky said that neither user interface nor development approaches were being shown.

"We're looking at the hardcore engineering work we've been doing to work on a new class of hardware, where customers are demanding a tighter integration between hardware and software," he said.

Read more.

CES: Asus launches Honeycomb tablets.

Asus has introduced four new tablets, three based on the upcoming Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system and one on Microsoft Windows 7.

The Eee Pad Memo, Eee Pad Transformer, Eee Pad Slider and Eee Slate EP121 were unveiled at CES 2011 on Tuesday. They will take on rivals from Apple and Acer by presenting innovative features in a range of product formats, Asus's chief executive Jonney Shih told journalists at the Las Vegas electronics show.

"We admire Apple, which offers great innovation, but they provide very limited choices for customers," Shih said. "A combination of innovation and choice is a better way to serve customers."

Read more.

Photo stories:

CES: Asus Eee tablets add Android, Windows.

Asus has debuted four tablets at CES 2011, so here's a closer look at the three tablets based on the upcoming Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system — the Eee Pad Transformer, Eee Pad Slider and Eee Pad Memo — and the Eee Slate EP121, powered by Microsoft's Windows 7.

Read more.

Hands-On: Lenovo 10-Inch Win7 Tablet.

While Lenovo’s hybrid U1 Android Slate/Windows 7PC got most of the attention at CES 2011, sitting next to it in the restaurant Lenovo had taken over for the show was a slim 10” slate. This was the prototype of a Windows 7 slate, and we gave it a quick spin. Like most modern tablet PCs it has a dual mode touch screen, with capacitive touch and a Wacom-style pen. It’s a good combination, and the touch screen was very responsive – working well with mouse and pointer optimized Windows user interface. The pen worked well for entering text, using Windows 7’s built-in handwriting recognition tools.

Read more.

Reviews and first looks:

CES: AVerMedia AVerComm.

In these cash-strapped and green days good video conferencing is increasingly important, saving time and money by replacing travel with a meeting in the comfort of your own office. But desktop video conferencing quality isn't reality – and not every business can afford the complexity and the requirements of HP Halo or Cisco Telepresence.

Read more.

CES: Viewsonic Viewpad 10S and Viewpad 4.

Viewsonic's Android tablets haven't particularly impressed so far, offering the usual ODM basic touch features and running a phone OS stretched to fill a larger screen. We spent some time at CES 2011 looking at their next generation of devices.

Read more.

CES: Synaptics "Cervantes" External Trackpad.

Trackpads are ubiquitous on notebooks and the majority of them are made by hardware supplier Synaptics. At CES we saw the Cervantes reference design for an external trackpad designed to use with a desktop PC - or as a controller for home media devices like Google TV.

Read more.

CES: Data Robotics Drobo S.

With Microsoft's next generation Home Server dropping support for its storage fabric technology, Data Robotics' Drobo offers an alternative approach to building large amounts of storage using mis-matched disks. Unlike traditional RAID arrays which require all the disks used to be identical in size, Drobo's BeyondRAID storage array allows you to increase the amount of storage in an array each time you add or replace a pair of larger disks. There's no need to worry about matching disk manufacturers, sizes, or even speeds; the Drobo S handles all that for you.

Read more.

CES: iHealth BP3 Blood Pressure Monitor.

One of the trends we spotted at this year's CES was an explosion in tools for personal health monitoring, from devices that monitor homes for movement patterns to personal brainwave monitors that track just how you sleep. One thing that drew a lot of the devices together was support for cloud services, for sharing information, and the ability to use mobile devices as user interfaces.

iHealth's BPM3 Blood Pressure Monitor caught our attention, as it brought several of these trends together in one device. Looking like a piece of Apple hardware with its smooth white lines, the BP3 is an iPhone/iPad dock with a difference — under the white dome is an automatic blood pressure monitor, with all the control software running on the connected iOS device. That last point is what really makes the difference, as it simplifies what could otherwise be a complex piece of medical equipment.

Read more.

CES: Motion CL900 Tablet PC.

If there's one company you'd expect to deliver a successful, well designed slate format Windows 7 PC, it'd be Motion Computing. Specialising in Tablet PCs since the earliest days of Windows XP Tablet Edition, Motion has consistently delivered powerful and light Windows slates. You probably won't have heard of them, though, as they've been niche devices, selling into vertical industries – especially field service, aviation and health.

It’s that heritage that gives Motion's CL900 an edge over the current crop of Windows slates. It's not going to be the cheapest device out there – but it's likely to be the tablet that gives the best value for money. It's also likely to be the one that gets the most out of Intel's Oak Trail generation of Atom processors. Early Atom slates struggled to perform well, but Oak Trail is not only more powerful, with support for many key slate functions (including hardware accelerated graphics), it's also more power efficient, extending battery life significantly.

Read more.

We (along with spikeiowa) went to watch the queue at the Palo Alto Apple Store on Friday night, where the cold geeks in their iCamp were outnumbered by the media, in order to cover the iPad queuing experience for an editor back home in the UK.

To be honest, the idea of queuing in the cold for a piece of technology doesn't really work for me, but the queuees were having fun. We wandered over to look at the TV vans, only to see an empty alleyway, with a couple of traffic cones in the cone of light from over a locked back door. It was the back of the Apple Store, its clinical grey hiding the shiny objects of techolust within.

It made a cool photo...



Palo Alto, California
April 2010

Pop along to IT Pro to read the resulting article and photo gallery.

And yes, it did remind us a lot of an Easter vigil, with the faithful waiting for the newly risen Steve to appear. Quite creepy, when you think about it.

We've been ferreting through Microsoft's job adverts, looking for hints about just what might be behind the viel of secrecy that has risen over Redmond since they started work on the Windows 8 series of operating systems. One came up with something very interesting, that fitted in with conversations we've been having with other IT journalists for some time:

What’s the future of the web?

On one side there’s Flash and Silverlight and the rich internet applications world, which is working on ways of taking the web outside the browser and onto the desktop, where it “lights up” applications and plugs them into a connected world of APIs and services. On the other is the HTML5 working group, and their vision of a browser that can do, well, pretty much anything. With HTML 5 there won’t be any need for applications – it’ll all be web pages running on super-speedy JavaScript engines and with CSS for look and feel.

Here comes the difficult bit.

They’re both right. There are things a well written RIA can do that a web page can’t, and there are things that web page can do that are impossible for a traditional application. With traditional code you need to push new applications to every desktop every time there’s a change. Even .NET’s click-once and AIR’s self updaters don’t make much of a difference – you still need the latest version of the code to get the latest features, and that (with a flagship RIA like Morgan Stanley’s Matrix) can be a hefty chunk to download. At least with a web page, one change and then everyone who uses it can get access to the latest version.

It’s all a trade off. Not every web site suits every user, nor does every RIA have a fully engaged audience. That’s why so much work is going into getting those experiences right, whether its online design tools like Mozilla’s Bespin, or Sketchflow in Microsoft’s Expression or the designer developer workflow between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. But a web page and an application are outside the operating system, and if web-centric OSes ever become common, they need to have some way of supporting and interacting with the web. That’s why there’s so much interest in Google’s ChromeOS and Microsoft’s Windows 8. They’re going to be the first real operating systems of the modern web.

Read more at 500 Words Into The Future on ZDnet...

I've been playing with, and writing about, Google Wave this week.

You can see the results of that deep dive up on ZDnet:

Google Wave arrived back in May with a blast of publicity — including a keynote of its own at Google's I/O conference. The initial story from the Google team was impressive, with Wave touted as a revolution in collaboration from star developers the Rasmussen brothers (the team behind the first iteration of Google Maps).

Wave certainly builds on the company's strengths, running in the browser and hosted in the cloud. Lars Rasmussen has a lot of ambition for Wave, wanting it to replace email. At I/O, he put it like this: "While email is an incredibly successful protocol, we can use computing advances to do better. Wave is our answer".

The Wave team has thought hard about the structure of a conversation, and how this can be replicated online. Each wave is a collaborative space comprising groups of 'wavelets', which are themselves built up of 'blips'. A blip is the basic unit of conversation in a wave, hosting an XML document. Blips don't need to be human readable — they can contain files or even executable code. Developers can build on these by using what Google calls 'robots' to interact with wavelets and blips. For example, at I/O Google demonstrated a robot that could handle real-time translations.

Read the rest.

Oh, and take a look at the gallery of screenshots too...

We started watching Leverage this week. Best thought of as an American version of the BBC's rather fun grifter story Hustle, it pits the wits of a crew of assorted thieves against the dark underbelly of America's corporate kleptocracy. The thieves are the good guys, robin hooding their way through assorted cons and capers, extracting money and revenge from the corporate crooks.

Leaving aside the obvious parallels with the current state of the economy, there's an interesting thread that links this and other caper stories.

They're tales of project management.

No, really.

If you look at Leverage as an example, we have a team of misfits, creative people who under normal circumstances can't function in society, let alone as a team. Then along comes a man with vision and project management skills, who can find ways to fit those skills and resources into a project plan, and then execute it. He only operates on the fringes of the action, listening and guiding.

The same is true of George Clooney's Danny Ocean in his trilogy of films. Danny and Rusty are a project management team that builds on the strengths of the various individuals, manipulating them where necessary. Danny Ocean leads from behind.

The list goes on. How about Mickey Bricks in Hustle, running a crew and training a successor at the same time? You could argue that the fourth season of the series was Danny Blue learning project management skills on the fly. And how about Michael Caine's role in The Italian Job (and yes, even the role played by Mark Wahlberg in the film with the same name)?

I'm finding it interesting to rethink old favourites in this light - and it's giving me more ideas around the caper story I've been noodling with on and off for some time now. Somewhere out there are a firm of consultants who outsource caper management.

"Crime process management", anyone?

Sometimes you get the chance to bring several interests together. One of those was when one of our editors asked us to cover a panel at January's Consumer Electronics Show. Most people imagine CES to be nothing but halls full of teh shiny, and to be honest, that's a goodly part of the show. It's not the whole thing though - CES is so big that it manages to run two or three normal sized conferences alongside the various keynotes and special events.

This panel was particularly interesting. Inventor/entrepreneur Dean Kamen, actress Lucy Lawless, author Neal Stephenson and columnist Walter Mossberg would be discussing the influence of science fiction on technology. It was a fascinating panel, with Kamen and Stephenson providing an interesting counterpoint around their shared engineering backgrounds. It also turned out to be one that allowed us to write a piece that brought in an email interview with Charlie Stross and a brief look at one of my favourite novels.

The Consumer Electronics Show's (CES) myriad strands of conference sessions sometimes throw up the most unusual panels. One such event brought together a journalist, a science fiction writer, an inventor and an actress to talk about the influence of science fiction on the world of technology. The conversation ranged from the optimistic to the dystopian, and from the flying car to the handheld communicator.

Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, was sceptical about the role of science fiction. "The subtlety of the real world and nature and the surprising things in real science generally are even more exciting than the other stuff." But he also saw it "as a very valuable tool that will bring people to the table."

One influence kept coming back - Robert A. Heinlein's novels. Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson reminisced: "When I was a kid I read all of the usual suspects - the golden age writers - the one who stuck with me was Heinlein. I don't know why that is, but he stuck with me more than the others did."

Read on at IT Pro to see what Charlie thought...

While we've been on the road in the US, we've not been neglecting our blogging duties. Here's a selection of entries from our tech blog, hosted over at IT Pro.

On Microsoft/Yahoo!:

Anyone who’s listened to me rant over the last couple of years will have heard me say that I expect Microsoft to takeover Yahoo!. With Google’s dominance over search, and Yahoo!’s success at what Microsoft wants to build into Live, there’s a certain logic to a merger of the two businesses. Yahoo needs the R&D boost that Microsoft can give it, and Microsoft needs the online presence of Yahoo!.

I wasn’t surprised to see that Microsoft has made a formal offer to Yahoo!, offering $44.6 billion for the company.

Microsoft’s been playing nice with Yahoo! for some time. It’s Windows Live Photo Gallery handles uploads to Flick, and Windows Live Messenger can talk to Y! users. The love goes both ways too, as Y! is one of the first applications to really take advantage of the Vista UI enhancements.

Reading Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo! this morning I noticed a couple of quotes.

(Read More)

On low cost 3G data and what it means for WiFi:

The usual round of email press releases dropped into the SandM mailbox this morning. One caught our attention, from the folk at PC World, which signals something we’re pretty sure is going to be one of the big IT trends for 2008.

In a tie up with 3, they’re going to be offering a free cheap laptop (or £350 off most) along with one of 3’s 3G dongle modems. You’ll need to sign up for a £35 a month data tariff for the cheap laptop, which gives you 3GB of data (with 10p/megabyte for anything over) at up to 2.8Mbps.

Ignore the free laptop (after all, PC World have a lot to get rid of, if you remember their recent results!) - it’s the 3G modem that really interests us.

(Read More)

On bad tech patents:

The latest patent idiocies could put phone prices up and increase your security bill. And only one of the cases would be fixed by my own theory of patents (if you don’t yourself manufacture the item or use the process protected by a patent, I think you shouldn’t be able to benefit from the patent by extorting money from companies that do go to the effort of actually making something).

That would get rid of the patent trolls who buy up IP and sneak it past the patent office. Take the owners of the ludicrous new smartphone patent, which seems to ignore more prior art than I could shake a phone battery at. Read through the patent and you’ll find it’s not Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, HTC, Palm, Apple, Symbian, Sony Ericsson, HP or Motorola claiming to have invented the smartphone; it’s one Ki Il Kim of Minerva Industries, Los Angeles.

(Read More)

On open phones and open networks:

We spotted a blog post the other day claiming that the iPhone set new standards as an open phone platform. Rubbish, I said; you can’t install your choice of applications without hacking the pone via an image bug in the browser - and if you do, then you can’t get the updates that come out because they fix the hole and lock the iPhone right up again. How can you call that open? Apple may have an SDK on the way, but the iPhone is as closed as one of LG’s shiny bling machines.

The examples in the article look odd to British eyes, as we’ve become used to ubiquitous high-speed data and unlocked smartphones. You can run Google Maps and get your location from the mobile phone masts? You can do that on Windows Mobile, and you can have Live Search and Yahoo! Go on there too, along with more apps than you can shake a stick at. And you can search your emails properly (once you upgrade to Windows Mobile 6; if your operator hasn’t made an upgrade available and neither has the manufacturer, check the enthusiast sites for ROM upgrades that won’t compromise security or stop you being able to get future updates).

(Read More)

On using a mobile phone as a data modem:

We’ve been on the road for the last few weeks, doing a round of Stateside conferences and company visits. That’s meant relying on the “free” wifi in motels and conference halls. Consumer hardware really doesn’t cut it when you’re using a couple of Linksys routers to cover a hundred plus rooms - especially when it’s the cheapest motel nearest the CES halls. Every room was probably full of journalists and analysts trying to get online, and the routers just waved their little rubber feet in the air and gave up.

Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have dug out a good book and gone cold turkey on my Internet addiction. After all, I didn’t need to read a dozen gadget blogs to tell me what I’d just seen that day. However I had the IT Pro editorial team back in the UK waiting for copy - and lack of connectivity wasn’t what I needed. I could have gone to a Starbucks for some of their wifi, but not many are still open at 1 am, even in Vegas. I could have used a 3G card, but this shiny new HP Compaq 2710P tablet is a Santa Rosa machine, so only has a ExpressCard slot - and my Vodafone 3G card is, yes, a PC Card.

(Read More)

On wandering around MacWorld SF:

The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight – and a true reflection of the Mac market in many ways.

Walking around the show floor at MacWorld shows the difference between the Mac and PC markets. There was the new Mac version of Office of course, Office 2008, which combines the logically arranged big icons of 2007 Office with the menus of every other version, adding the SmartArt and XML file formats without making a fuss about them. There was Bento, the build-your-own-catalogue tool for people who find FileMaker too complicated. There was Parallels, making an excellent business of putting Windows onto the Mac.

And then there were the colours. You can thank the Mac market for the different colour cases for iomega’s portable eGo hard drives, because Mac users are used to colours. We saw whale-print neoprene laptop sleeves, embroidered neoprene laptop sleeves, oversize purple leather handbags designed to take notebooks and more rubber, leather, plastic and metal iPod and iPhone cases than you could shake an unlocked iPhone at. Whatever your tastes in technology as personal jewellery, there’s a case to suit.

(Read More)

On Oracle buying BEA and Sun buying MySQL:

It’s a sunny day in Silicon Valley. It’s also been a busy few days in boardrooms in the towns around San Jose. While Apple has been burning the midnight oil at One Infinite Loop while plotting this year’s MacWorld strategy, the lawyers’ Lexus convertibles have been powering up and down 101 with the documents that detailed this morning’s announcements.

Oracle buying BEA wasn’t a surprise, the two companies have been engaged in a takeover struggle for some time, and BEA’s capitulation, if not quite a foregone conclusion, was certainly on the cards. Sun’s purchase of MySQL came out of the blue. It’s actually quite logical though, as Sun has been moving away from its proprietary roots since Jonathan Schwartz took control of the corporate rudder.

(Read More)

On the next generation of storage at CES:

Every now and then I want to throw my laptop out of the window in sheer frustration. I’ve certainly flung USB sticks across the room from time to time, by accident. I’ve also done a Bill Gates and left my travel mug on the car roof when we drove off (although unlike the spoof video in Gates’ CES keynote speech the mug wasn’t there when we arrived). Most flash drives can survive a certain amount of damage - or at least the flash memory can. A USB stick would probably survive the fall from a car roof but I have a rather fetching 1Gb earring made from a flash stick that was sticking out of Simon’s PC when he turned his chair a little too far and snapped off the USB connector.

If you expect to treat your data roughly, Corsair has the rugged, rubber-coated Voyager and the Survivor which screws into an aircraft-grade aluminium canister. The Survivor we saw looked a touch battered; Corsair had driven a tractor over it to test it out. Voyager drives were sitting in ice, water and sand but they still worked when we fished them out.

(Read More)

On "Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House" and other CES goodies:

Just because it’s the Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of products that matter for business here in Vegas.

Connecting to multiple monitors wirelessly is as useful at work as it is at home; manufacturers like IOGEAR and Samsung are doing that with DisplayLink’s chips and a future product will put the screen from your mobile phone onto a TV or monitor. A SlingCatcher lets you send video from one TV to another (so you don’t have to pay a second Sky subscription to watch the occasional show on a TV in the bedroom), but you can also use it to see photos, presentations, Web pages - and anything else that’s on your PC screen - on TV, which is handy for an informal meeting. Panasonic’s 150" screen is sized for a large meeting room rather than the average living room.

And then there’s Windows Home Server. It’s designed for the home - obviously. Microsoft has come up with an amusing ad campaign about Stay At Home Servers, complete with fake TV debates and a hugely funny children’s picture book entitled Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House?

(Read More)

Comments over there please!

Also, if you want to see these as they arrive, in full, there's a syndicated feed for the blog at itpro_sandm.

...it's a great tool, but it's about to wipe out a small niche of the software industry, without Google even noticing. So much for "Do no evil".

The result, a rant at our IT PRO blog:

Google's latest version of its Earth mapping tool adds a significant new feature; Sky. It's a great tool, you can scroll around the heavens, zooming in for detailed Hubble shots of the most beautiful astronomical objects, and all for free...

That's great for us, but a terrible thing for all the small software houses and software developers who've invested their lives in developing planetarium software. Astronomical applications have been a profitable niche for a large number of companies, and sophisticated sky explorers have been developed over a number of years. Now, overnight, that market has been blown away.

Read more here.

...like staying up far too late at night trying to get some code working in an unfamiliar development environment and in an unfamiliar language targeting an unfamiliar OS.

Still, we end up with something decent in the end. Here's some more words at The Register, looking at Trolltech's Greenphone:

Trolltech's Qtopia is a commonly used mobile Linux. It's used in a large number of different devices – from Sony's mylo communicator, to Motorola and Panasonic's Linux phones. While you might not have come across it in the Carphone Warehouse, it's a common platform in one of the biggest mobile markets going – China.

But how do you develop for a phone platform that's not widely available over here? And how do you develop applications that link deep into a phone's operating system – and even change the behaviour of that OS? You could work with a phone virtual machine (after all, Microsoft's phone simulators are actually custom versions of Virtual PC). Trolltech is offering another approach – the Greenphone, a phone designed for developers along with a development platform that makes it easy to work with all aspects of the hardware.

Read more here.

This time I ended up learning enough C++ and QT to actually get an application running on the Greenphone. It's a pity I'd never actually written a line of C++ before - let alone targeting Trolltech's Qtopia.

Now, can I get my hands on an OpenMoko device for a companion piece?