CES - Day 0 - Technology, Ain’t It Grand?
Yesterday, Tuesday, January 3rd was effectively Day 0 of the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. It’s the day before the conferences start, and two days before the exhibit floors officially open.
My first CES-related task of the day was an overview of the consumer electronics industry for 2006, presented by Sean Wargo, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The CEA runs the CES show. That was at 3pm, giving me ample time to go shopping for a number of items I needed as well as finalize my press registration.
My shopping task was to find a nice suit to replace my old tuxedo (losing 20% of your body weight as I have affects how old clothes fit, I’ve discovered) for formal functions. I wanted something with a “mandarin collar”. No luck finding that, but I did stumble across what I thought would be my dream mini-notebook (at least for now) - small, portable, and pretty powerful - with a great battery life.
I found this marvel at the Sony Style store at Caesar’s Forum Shops - it’s the TX series notebook. The model I wanted, the TX-690, which features 1.5GB of RAM and a cool blue metal finish, was not in stock (and had not been available on-line last week either, so I held off buying what they had in stock - the TX-670. While searching every store at the Forum Shops from Armani to Banana Republic for my suit, I get a call saying that a small shipments of the 690s arrived. I hightailed it back to the Sony store and bought it along with an extra battery and docking station.
To make a long story shorter, I’ve spent the last day trying to get the machine set up the way I want. Somewhere along the way, the 90 day trial version of Norton Internet Security choked, giving me a blue screen of death after I tried to uninstall it, so I had to waste hours of work doing a complete recovery. I figure I’m about 12 hours into getting the system set up properly now, and expect to spend at least another two putting my data from my other notebook on it. Sigh. Meanwhile, all the great blog entries and writing I had planned to have done by now have not materialized.
The battery life on the TX-690 is remarkable. I had it running pretty much non-stop from 9am until 3:30pm today on just the small battery. And now that it’s close to properly set-up I can say I am happy with my extravagant purchase.
More later. Off to the Sony press conference. And Panasonic apparently just announced that Comcast has selected them to provide next generation set-top boxes, much to the surprise of the person I just overheard hollering this into his cell phone here in the convention center.
