TechBite: CES Finds, a Personal Radar Gun, Epson’s All-in-One, and a Better Download Manager

CES: Winners and Losers

I spent three days at the not-as-big-as-before Consumer Electronics Show. I ignored the behemoth booths — Microsoft, Panasonic, Casio — and focused on the smaller, more interesting companies along the edge of the exhibit floor. I spotted some innovative products:

• A smartphone app that turns off e-mail and texting features if the speed of your vehicle exceeds five miles per hour.
• Lexmark’s multifunction printer that has something very appealing: Lexmark ink cartridges for under $5.
• Fashionable 3D eyeglasses for when you can afford a 3D plasma screen.
• Something to bring your electronic gadget back to life if you drop it in water.
• A video camera the size of a flash drive with two hours of recording time.

I have lots more, including a report on Terk’s Hi-Def internal and external antennas and a new-style rechargeable battery. Below is my first blurb about a portable radar device; more next week.
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Wii Gets Netflix. What’s Next?

My heartfelt congratulations to those who have a Wii in their living room, and nothing else that connects to the Internet. With nary an Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Roku box, connected HDTV or Blu-ray player, these poor souls will finally be able to watch Netflix’s streaming movie catalog from the television, starting this spring. Sure, it’s hobbled by the Wii’s 480p playback, and makes you insert a disc beforehand akin to the Playstation 3, but it’s better than nothing.

Drawbacks aside, I refuse to believe that this is it for the Wii. There must be more in store on the multimedia front, because a selection of old and B movies isn’t going to cut it. Netflix streaming is incomplete when it’s not supported by on-demand video or some other kind of catalog.

That’s why Roku is no longer just a Netflix player, and why Nintendo’s console competitors offer so much more as well. You can buy and rent movies and TV shows through Xbox Live and the Playstation Network. Xbox Live Gold subscribers can listen to endless music playlists with Last.fm. And of course, the Xbox 360 and PS3 play DVDs and Blu-ray discs, respectively.

The Wii’s addition of Netflix makes the console seem lopsided. It’s no longer strictly a gaming device, but a box of entertainment (I know, the Wii has news and weather channels, but that’s just information). And that entertainment section has to grow.

My prediction? The Wii’s video channel, which debuted in Japan last year, is not too far off. It has Hollywood movies. It has pay-per-view content from Warner and Disney, among others. It should be ready to roll by now. Dream scenario: Those Netflix discs will arrive along with a console update bearing a video store and some more Web channels, but maybe those poor Wii owners will pick up a more capable set-top box by then.

GoToMyPC…or Mac

Back when I had a “work PC” and a “home PC,” I swore by Citrix Online’s GoToMyPC remote-control service. I used it frequently to run business-related apps I didn’t have at home, and sometimes to snag files I’d forgotten to bring home. It certainly wasn’t my only remote-control option, nor the cheapest, but it scored extremely high for simplicity and rock-solid reliability.

When I started using Macs as well as Windows boxes, however, I used GoToMyPC less frequently. It had a Java client that let me control a PC from a Mac, but it was nowhere near as good as the native Windows app, and there wasn’t any way to control a Mac at all.

Citrix is remedying the situation today with the first version of GoToMyPC with full Mac support. It’s not a separate OS X version–which is why it’s not called GoToMyMac–but an upgrade to the standard one that works with Macs as well as Windows. For the first time, you can control a Mac from another Mac, a Windows PC from a Mac, or a Mac from a Windows PC. Or, as before, a PC from a PC.

Mac remote control is far from a breakthrough: GoToMyPC archrival LogMeIn already has it in its free and for-pay versions, and OS X even has a version built in, in the form of its Screen Sharing feature. And Citrix hasn’t yet implemented all the features available for Windows-to-Windows usage. But it’s still a welcome addition to a service that’s worth the bucks if you’ve got serious, ongoing need for remote access. GoToMyPC pricing remains the same: It’s $19.95 a month to control one computer, or $29.95 to control two. There are discounts for annual subscriptions, and a 30-day free trial offer.

More on Google and China

The day’s big tech news continues to be Google’s statement about its discovery of cyberattacks on its systems targeting Chinese human rights workers, and its decision to terminate the censored version of Google in China as a response. Secretary of State Clinton says she looks to the Chinese government for an explanation, and will have more to say on the matter. And James Fallows, who knows more about China than most of us ever will, has some smart–but gloomy–things to say about the matter.

Webcast Reminder

Quick reminder: I’m guest-tweeting a Webcast interview with James Surowiecki, author of the excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds, today at 1pm ET…

Exactly Right, Google. Exactly Right

For as long as western companies have been doing business in China–under Chinese laws–there’s been a fundamental question that’s been a subject of immense controversy: Are they helping to make China more free, or are they helping the Chinese government prevent more freedom?

Until now, Google has been one of a number of U.S. Web companies that has willingly provided a censored version of its services in China as a prerequisite of doing business there. It’s maintained that providing the Chinese people with access to some information is better than denying them access to Google entirely, and its Chinese search engine has carried a disclaimer that some links are suppressed.

But now that’s changing. In a fascinating blog post, Google has disclosed that it discovered a sophisticated hacker attack on its systems in mid-December. Its investigation revealed that the target was the accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and that the attack encompassed other large companies. It further found that the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists had been breached through such means as malware installed on their computers.

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NBA Jam, Then and Now

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, but EA Sports has announced that it will revive NBA Jam, the classic two-on-two basketball game from the mid-1990s, as a Wii exclusive. Very little is known about the game, but as I pondered the possibilities, it struck me how the hallmarks of NBA Jam are no longer anything special. They’re either taken for granted or relics of a bygone gaming era. Is it really possible to re-capture the magic of NBA Jam when so much has changed? You be the judge:

Voice Acting: Part of NBA Jam’s novelty was its color commentary. Voices in video games were still rare in the mid-1990s, especially on home consoles, and part of NBA Jam’s charm was just how lo-fi everything sounded. It’s hard to envision “boomshakalaka!” in crystal clear audio.

Cheat Codes and Easter Eggs: Back in the day, cheat codes had a mythical status — the 30 lives code in Contra, the blood code in Mortal Kombat for Sega Genesis — and NBA Jam was chock full of them. My favorites? Big Head Mode and the unlockable character of George Clinton, a.k.a. P-Funk. Nowadays, cheats are earned and unlocked through in-game accomplishments, if they’re in the game at all.

Saved Games: The ability to record your stats on a game cartridge came into fashion during the 16-bit era, but plenty of cartridges still lacked this feature. Nonetheless, I won’t lament the ubiquity of saved games now.

Licensing: According to this fascinating ESPN interview with NBA Jam creator Mark Turmell, Midway had to plead with the NBA to license actual basketball players, teams and logos because the league was wary about associating with arcades. Back then, it was rare to see a game with both players and teams, but a sports game wouldn’t be caught dead without both now.

Sports Fantasy: The genius of NBA Jam is the way it stripped down and pumped up basketball’s bare essentials, but I think it also came along at the right time, when a realistic depiction of sports wasn’t entirely possible yet. Can NBA Jam still capture the hearts of people who’ve become spoiled by NBA Live and NBA 2K?

Realtor.com Comes to the iPhone

A year and a half ago, I bought a house. Doing the deal was the culmination of a year of shopping–during which I did almost all my research at home spending nearly every weekend tooling round the San Francisco area with a stack of open-house listings I’d printed out. I took notes on my Windows Mobile phone, and I think I occasionally pulled up listings on its marginal Web browser, but it wasn’t much help. (I can’t remember how many times I’d stumble across an open house, go in, and only then discover that the property exceeded my budget by 200% or thereabouts.)

That all happened in the pre-iPhone apps era, which now seems like it was a very long time ago. Today, there are scads of real-estate applications for the iPhone, including one that was released today by Realtor.com, the site run by the National Association of Realtors. Realtor.com is really late to the game–apps from rivals such as Trulia and Zillow began to pop up almost as soon as Apple permitted third-party apps in mid-2008. But its program is nicely done, with the ability to browse detailed listings for homes and open houses, do searches based on criteria such as price and number of bedrooms, view photos, use GPS to find nearby listings, rate houses and take notes about them, and share information with an agent. And Realtor.com says it has more listings than anyone else–four million of ‘em–which makes sense given who’s behind the site.

The Realtor.com app is, of course, free. Playing around it with it almost leaves me wishing that I was in the market for a house again.

After the jump, a few screenshots.

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Is Windows Mobile 7 Delayed Again or Not?

Microsoft has truly been blindsided by the success of the iPhone and now the Android platform. This could not be more evident by the repeated delays in bringing the OS to market, and now some reports are indicating we may be waiting even longer. According to a report on tech news site Bright Side of News, any release could be pushed back to 2011. If true, it would mean a two-year delay from Microsoft’s initially announced release date.

The delay has a lot to do with the success of Android. Manufacturers and developers are still falling head over heels for the OS, leaving little room for Microsoft to maneuver. Devices that originally were pegged to run WM7 will now be Android based. Manufacturers were apparently telling BSN at CES that the delay was real, and the strategy was to employ Google’s mobile OS to remain competitive in the market.

If true, it certainly spells nothing but trouble for Microsoft. Already failing in the digital music category with the Zune, it now stands to lose the smartphone segment as well to a surging Google and already dominant Apple. A delay just cannot happen.

It seems as if there may be disagreement in the Microsoft press ranks, however. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley — who definitely has more credibility in predicting Microsoft’s moves I’d think — seemed to suggest in a January 7 post that it was all systems go to see WM7 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. Microsoft would talk about the platform as well as My Phone — it’s upcoming answer to MobileMe — there, with development details at MIX10 in Las Vegas the following month.

She pointed to comments by Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division President Robbie Bach at CES last week which did say Microsoft would be discussing WM7 in Barcelona.

So who do we believe? It’s hard to be sure. Microsoft must get this release right to stay competitive in the mobile space. But at the same time, I’d find it hard to believe they would risk failure by leaving the ship date for WM7 to slip once again.

What’s Your Favorite Tech Product of All Time?

Over on Twitter (where I’m @harrymccracken), I asked my pals to tell me what their favorite tech product they’d ever owned was. I got scads of responses–and while this wasn’t a contest, the iPhone/iPod Touch got more mentions than any other item. Take a look at the Tweets after the jump, then chime in by leaving a comment about your most-loved gizmo, gadget, PC, software, or service…

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Warner Music Signs Deal with eMusic

One of my biggest beefs with eMusic is its music selection. While it does have some tracks from popular artists, most of the tracks on the service are poorly done remakes. I could add to it that they way they label these tracks make you think it’s the real thing but I do digress…

Anyway, eMusic took a step forward Tuesday by striking a deal with Warner Music Group to bring 10,000 catalog albums to the service. Unfortunately, it does not include newer tracks, but it should come as welcome news to eMusic’s 400,000-plus subscribers.

In addition, the deal will allow eMusic to stream Warner’s music on the service, something the company has set as a goal for 2010. Sony Music is the only other major label on the service although CEO Danny Stein told Reuters that it is still working to strike deals with EMI and Universal.

No word was given on the progress of those talks.

5Words: Watch Out For Rising Prices!

PCs to get more expensive?

When’s Windows 7 coming out?

Free e-mail service on airlines.

Lots and lots of e-readers.

LiquaVista’s e-reader screens do color.

Nexus One early termination: pricey?

Would you rent Windows, Office?

MagicJack’s new product is controversial.

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A Little Closer to Gdrive: Google Docs Stores Files of All Sorts

People have been talking about Gdrive–a theoretical online storage service from Google–for eons. It still isn’t here, but Google keeps tippy-toeing towards offering the functionality we all assumed it would have. Back in November, the company started offering additional storage for Gmail and Picasa at dirt-cheap prices. And now it’s announcing that it’s letting users of its Google Docs online productivity suite store any sort of file in their Google Docs Web-based repository, not just ones that work with the service’s applications. That makes Google Docs into a virtual hard drive/backup solution of sorts, for the first time ever. The new feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

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Join Me for a Webcast on Wednesday

Once again, I’ve been asked to be a guest Tweeter at a Webcast. This one’s an interview with James Surowiecki–author of the excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds–and the subject is “Powering Crowdsourcing: Technology’s Role in the New Way of Working.” It’s been held this Wednesday at 1pm ET. You can get more information, watch the Webcast (either live or in playback form), and Tweet it yourself here.

Hope to see some of you there! Here, incidentally, are the first three Webcasts from the series, all of which I watched and provided color commentary for:

Chris Anderson, editor, Wired
George Halvorson, CEO, Kaiser Permanente
Richard Florida, author, Rise of the Creative Class

The (Not So Many) Games of CES

The Consumer Electronics Show is not a prime venue for video games, although it used to be, back before gaming had its own trade show, E3. But while some of my game journalism friends flew in and immediately started grumbling about how little there was to do, I enjoyed the scraps of stick time snuck in between checking out all the new tech toys. And unlike E3′s usual far-off fare, most of the games I played at CES are coming out in the next month or two. Here are the higlights of what I saw:

Heavy Rain: I played one scene of this PS3-exclusive adventure game at a party for bloggers, and despite the festive atmosphere, my heart was racing and palms were sweating as I tried to subdue an armed convenience store robber using smart dialog choices. No shooting galleries here, just pure dramatic tension. I can’t wait for February 23.

Splinter Cell: Conviction: I miss the game’s pure stealth roots, and being able to rely so easily on gunplay instead felt cheap, but if you do perform stealth kills, you earn the ability to execute, well, even easier silent kills. It’s out February 23 for PC and Xbox 360.

Lego Universe: It’s a third-person beat-em-up, due sometime this year, in the style of previous Lego Batman, Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, plus the ability to cooperate with people online. That’s worth a yawn, but I’m excited for the inclusion of Lego’s existing Digital Designer software. I’m told that you can build things in Digital Designer and put them in your home space within the game. Wait, a Lego game that actually encourages creativity? Cool.

Super Stardust HD in 3D: Sony’s 3D gaming kiosks didn’t make me want to buy a capable television right now, but I did enjoy seeing this pop out of the screen. The game’s out now in two dimensions.

Capcom Goes Retro: At an off-site suite, Capcom had a few old-school offerings on display. Final Fight Double Impact, due for Xbox 360 and PS3 in April, is the same beat-em-up as ever, plus achievements, a virtual bezel that looks just like the old arcade machine and a lesser-known 1990s arcade title, Magic Sword, packed in. But the real attraction was Mega Man 10, out in March. Yeah, it’s the same jump-and-gun platformer I’ve been playing since childhood, but I always come crawling back.

PrimeSense: Remote Control Without the Remote Control

Was it really only three years ago that Nintendo’s Wii controller seemed mindbendingly innovative? Before long, the fact that the Wii involves a controller at all may feel a tad retro.

One of my favorite CES demos this year was in a little private room on the periphery of the show floor. PrimeSense is an Israeli chip designer that’s building a processor to enable consumer-electronics devices of all sorts to accept gestures as input. It uses a cameras/infrared sensor to spot people and figure out their movements–even subtle ones like a wave of the fingertips. And then it can use those movements to control consumer-electronics devices, games, and maybe even eventually cars.

Here’s a video the company prepared showing the basic idea:

The video doesn’t show the use of the technology that really knocked my socks off when the company showed it to me: a TV-based photo viewer that’s reminiscent of the one offered by Microsoft’s Surface tabletop computer. Except PrimeSense’s version doesn’t make you touch anything–you just move your hands around in middair to move, rotate, and resize pictures on the TV. It’s multi-touch without the touch.

It’s also the closest thing to real-world Minority Report I’ve witnessed so far:

PrimeSense isn’t new (it also previewed what it was up to at CES 2008) and doesn’t lack for competitors trying to do vaguely similar things (such as Canesta). And the example of controller-less control that’s grabbed the most attention so far is Microsoft’s Project Natal for the Xbox 360, which is supposed to show up by the 2010 holiday season. But PrimeSense is finally talking about its technology showing up in commercial projects–the first of which is a new version of CyberLink’s PowerCinema movie player for Windows which will let you use gestures to control playback.

One way or another, I look forward to the day when the only universal remotes we’ll need are our own ten fingers…