Slow morning at the CES

January 9, 2009 | By glarr00 In Misc. Gadgets |

Slow morning at the CES
Today is officially the start of the CES proper and in true journalistic fashion Kevin and I have split up and are at the two different venues. Kevin is in the main Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) and I am ensconced in the Sands Expo Center. We will be meeting up at an off-site event […]

Today is officially the start of the CES proper and in true journalistic fashion Kevin and I have split up and are at the two different venues. Kevin is in the main Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) and I am ensconced in the Sands Expo Center. We will be meeting up at an off-site event later today.

In years past opening day of the CES has been a bit frienzied at both of the venues. Crowds of people everywhere you go and long lines to enter just about anthing. This year the show is very different and I think it’s a sign of the times.

The crowd at the Sands venue is nothing like in years past. There are folks already walking around the show floor but no big crush of people anywhere. What is most striking about this is how quiet the show floor is compared to years past. Usually it’s a strain to hear anything but it’s a bit quiet this morning. Maybe everyone is at the LVCC, we’ll get Kevin to chime in since he’s there.

I spent the morning wandering through the exhibition in the Sands. I have covered over half the show floor in a record amount of time because nothing caught my eye. Nothing. I have been deluged with booths showing USB flash drives, robotic animals dancing in time to the music, and displays full of laptop bags. That’s pretty much it and why I have no photos of cool gear to share. I haven’t seen any. You know it’s a slow opening day when the most interesting thing I’ve seen is a urinal.

Concentric Hosted IT Solutions and Web Hosting
Click here to save cost on your IT demands

Source: feedproxy.google.com

ThinkFree Office Suite on Qualcomm Snapdragon Netbook
This morning I met with Edward Coloma from ThinkFree, developers of the ThinkFree Office suite. Back in October, the company introduced a demo of the productivity suite specifically for netbooks and today the company showed me the software running on Qualcomm-based hardware. They’re looking to have their product available for Android during the first half […]

ThinkFree Office on Qualcomm Netbook

This morning I met with Edward Coloma from ThinkFree, developers of the ThinkFree Office suite. Back in October, the company introduced a demo of the productivity suite specifically for netbooks and today the company showed me the software running on Qualcomm-based hardware. They’re looking to have their product available for Android during the first half of 2009, but of course it all depends on hardware vendors since there aren’t any Android netbooks on the market… yet.

The test hardware I saw ThinkFree software running on was the same Qualcomm concept notebook we saw last month. The specs were meager by today’s netbook standards: the CPU was clocked under 600 MHz and had limited memory: 256MB. Yet the productivity demonstration ran reasonably well and is already optimized for touch controls. The concept hardware had a touchscreen and it was easy to tap and navigate through the simple menus. Overall, the software was pretty impressive considering it was ported over to support an ARM environment; it surely doesn’t hurt that it’s heavily based in Java.

ThinkFree is working with various OEMs to get the suite bundled on netbooks, but is considering a netbook version for sale. Too early for pricing, but their full version or Windows, Mac or Linux notebooks runs around $50 right now. My gut says the right price point for a netbook optimized version is around $30 to $35. The key selling point is the software’s ability to work both on- and off-line. We simply don’t have connectivity available all the time on our netbooks. Why sacrifice productivity when disconnected if you don’t have to?

I’ll be looking deeper at ThinkFree’s solution as they provided me with an Asus Eee PC 1000H review unit for 30 days, complete with their netbook software. Meanwhile, check out the gallery.