CES bound

This week is the biggest consumer electronics conference in the US – CES.  Many of the companies have already started their PR wars with the news release and leaks of their new products.  While I’m sure there will be some surprise products in the mix, that will be introduced in the next few days, there are 3 particular products that have caught my interest and I’ll be spending some time investigating.

Marvell’s Plug Computer

While not mobile technology in the normal sense of the word, this is an interesting device since you basically attach it right to a plug in your home / office and you now have a network capable device.  Obviously you need to connect to it in some fashion or another since it’s really a “headless” computer (e.g. no monitor or keyboard), but for those users who spend a large portion of time on the road and use a laptop as their main computer, this could be invaluable as a mini-home server providing access to content at home rather than having a larger standard PC for this activity.

Lenovo’s Skylight One Pager

This is a Snapdragon based Smartbook.  It’s superlight, thin and supposedly has an all day battery.  I’ve had some thought in a previous posts about Smartbooks, but what is different about this one is the widget interface and that there is supposedly built-in content stores for movies and media.  If the execution on this is as good as it looks initially, this could be a surprise winner once the initial pricing goes down.

Freescale Tablets

This is really a Smartbook with or without the keyboard, but here Freescale is promising significantly lower costs for the devices.  However Freescale doesn’t seem to be providing any content integration stories, so I will be looking for those ODMs/OEMs who are looking to take these to market.  I’m positive there will be quite a few at CES, the question is whether any make the leap to provide real value-add to the device.

I’ll be at the show Friday – Sunday, so if you have something you think I should see or want to chat, feel free to send me an email evan (at) efeldman (dot) com.