A sampling of gadgets and technologies
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas doesn’t officially open to the public until today, but that didn’t stop companies Wednesday from pre-announcing a slew of new gadgets and technologies, all in the hopes of outgunning the competition.
Here is a sampling blogged by the Los Angeles Times technology staff.
Natal controller
Microsoft Corp. said it would start shipping its Natal gesture and voice controller for the Xbox 360 game console in time for the Christmas holiday shopping season.
Natal, named after a Brazilian city, lets players yell, jump, kick or wave their arms to control what happens in a video game, using a series of motion detectors, a camera and a microphone to capture what the players are doing.
The Redmond, Wash., technology giant demonstrated Natal last June in Los Angeles, but it did not say when it would start selling the add-on device.
Natal will work only with Xbox 360 consoles, not the original Xbox. Microsoft said it had sold more than 39 million Xbox 360s worldwide.
Its Xbox Live online service, which can be accessed from consoles connected to the Internet, has drawn more than 20 million players, half of whom have tried out non-gaming content offered on Xbox Live, including TV shows and movies, as well as Facebook and Twitter feeds.
-- Alex Pham Ditch the keyboard
Take your hands off that keyboard!
That, in short, was one of the points made by Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer in his keynote speech to kick off the show Wednesday night.
Ballmer showcased gadgets and devices that don’t require keyboards. Among them: the Slate tablet from Hewlett-Packard featuring a multi-touch screen from N-Trig, which also provided the touch technology for computers from Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba.
Altogether, the devices show Microsoft’s vision for the future of computing, one that increasingly will rely on a host of natural user interfaces to let people abandon the keyboard in order to speak, point, touch and, eventually, think their commands.
As more consumers turn to smart phones, TVs and even cars to hop on the Internet, the computer has become a less crucial component of how people browse the Web, check e-mail or view online videos.
As a result, Microsoft has been pursuing a “three screen” strategy to provide the operating system software for mobile devices and large-screen TVs, as well as PCs, where it dominates.
-- Alex Pham AT&T smart phones
AT&T Inc. said it planned to offer for the first time five new Android-based phones from Dell, HTC and Motorola.
The phones, using the operating system developed by Google Inc., is expected to be on the market in the first half of 2010. The carrier also hopes to offer all major app stores preloaded on the devices.
And in a big bearhug to application developers down the road from the Consumer Electronics Show at its developer summit, AT&T also described its deal with chipset maker Qualcomm to standardize app development for quick messaging devices, or QMDs, which have mostly been left out of the attractive app market. The deal would also make the process of developing apps for AT&T phones a bit more developer-friendly.
-- Michelle Maltais Netgear video
Netgear showed off a couple of technologies Wednesday that make online video streams look considerably better on a big TV screen.
The demos involved prototypes, and it’s not clear how close they are to release (“later this year,” Netgear says). But as demos go, they were fantastic.
And by moving online streams closer to broadcast-TV quality, they represent an important step in the process of making online channels competitive with those provided through cable and over the air.
-- Jon Healey Divx TV
DivX Inc., best known for its popular digital video file format, is making another attempt to extend its reach into video services.
The company unveiled DivX TV, a software platform for streaming video from the Internet to a user’s television.
Its first recruit is LG, which plans to add DivX TV to Blu-ray players, digital TVs and other devices equipped with its NetCast Entertainment Access software.
It’s a departure from the DivX Connected set-tops, the company’s last attempt to bring the Web to the TV screen.
Those single-purpose boxes relied on a PC to convert online video into a format a TV could handle; the new platform is embedded into multipurpose devices and grabs content straight from the Internet.
DivX TV puts the company into an increasingly crowded field of players jostling to supply the software that enables living-room TVs, set-top boxes and stereos to tune in to online music and video sites.
-- Jon Healey Sony Make.Believe
Sony Corp. unveiled a series of 11 online videos aimed at inspiring viewers to stop watching and start making their own movies.
The spots are part of its Make.Believe campaign and feature artists and independent filmmakers who used Sony cameras over the years for their projects.
One of them was a profile of Jessica Sanders, a director who made “After Innocence,” a documentary that won the Sundance Special Jury Prize in 2005 about prisoners who were exonerated by DNA tests. (Sanders also produced and edited the spot herself.)
Over the next few months, Sony plans to solicit people to submit their videos, a selection of which would be playable on Crackle, its online video channel; YouTube; PlayStation Home, the company’s online venue for its PlayStation 3 consoles; and elsewhere.
-- Alex Pham
