Make your own custom fit earphones.

Each year, for the past 10, I brace myself for The Last Gadget Standing, an event at  International CES that admires the spirit of creativity and the fact that CES attendees not only appreciate cool technology, but that they can pick the winners from the losers.

As the competition starts to heat up I’ll point to a few my favs and favs yet to come.

AutoBot from Mavizon Technologies:  Ten years ago  GM Onstar won the Last Gadget competition.  A few years later CarMD tapped into the car’s diagnostic port and let you diagnose potential car trouble. This year Mavizon is “Onstar for those on a budget”.  For under $300 (price is still being determined) you get a small box that plugs into the car and reports back to your mobile phone. Not only will it check the car’s vital signs like the need for an oil change, but it can send an emergency call if your air bag is deployed, remind you where you’ve partked, act like a GPS. It even has a Groupon like coupon feature to get you the best deals on everything from new tires to a lube job.  You get a coupon or two but there’s no monthy service charge for using Mavizon.

Sonomax Soundcage is a kit that lets you make your own custom fit earphones. You buy the Sonomax earphones encased in a plastic headpiece. Place the plugs in your ears and a tube of inflatable silicon shapes the plug to match your ear. Once you’ve shaped your plugs (four minutes later) you toss away the headpiece.

Lapiac entered a bracelet locator that helps you keep tabs on everyone from an outdoor adventurer to an aging parent to a prison parolee. It relies on Assisted GPS technology for indoor and outdoor coverage, logs movement and can be used to set up geofences.

For those who think even a mobile phone is too big to tuck in a pocket or purse, Sony Ericcson just introduced LiveView microdisplay, a tiny square screen that notifies you about incoming calls and social media feeds.  Designed to work with the company’s Xperia phones.

IdealLife, a line of products that let’s caretakers monitor patients is built around a single bluetooth hub that can talk to everything from pulse meters, to blood pressure cuffs, to scales, pedometers and more. A line of expandable high tech products for home health represents a first.

Seen a great gadget lately. Come on over and tell us about them. Or re-live the past by watching last year’s Last Gadget video

Color display, Barnes and Noble partner and a great price

Pandigital, a company best known for creating wireless digital photo frames, took a novel step forward with the introduction of a $200 full-color e-book reader with multimedia capabilities and a Barnes & Noble affiliation. In addition to the unit’s e-reader functionality, you can store photos, music, and movies, and use the device as a photo frame when you’re not reading.

The Down Low

The first version of the Pandigital Novel is a 7-inch eReader with an integrated and very fulfilling Barnes & Noble eBook Store experience. The comparatively large screen is a full-color LCD touch-screen display. It has Wi-Fi connectivity and a full set of reading enhancements, like a dictionary and notetakers. You can run a browser or play music while you read, since it’s multitasking capable, but the Internet search is not integrated into the book experience itself.

One of the cooler things on my list is a night reading mode where the text inverts from black-on-white to white-on-black. (If your spouse complains about your nocturnal reading habits this is a great answer.) It’ll also take advantage of the cutting edge Barnes & Noble LendMe technology, making it one of the first e-readers to work like a 14-day lending library.

I called Ross Rubin, an NPD analyst who monitors e-books, for his opinion. He believes that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have an advantage (presumably over iTunes), since both have vast databases of avid readers. “Barnes & Noble is reaching out to be the default bookstore on such devices as this one, the Plastic Logic device, and the forthcoming RCA e-reader from Audiovox,” says Rubin.

One of the tradeoffs of using an LCD screen is a shorter battery life, significantly shorter than the Kindle’s e-paper screen. One of the other tradeoffs is using Wi-Fi (home and hotspots) versus the Kindle’s data connection that works anywhere.

On the plus side—let’s face it—the iPad, a device with many similar features, costs $500. The Pandigital Novel is $200. The new Pandigital Novel eReader is an Android-based system, though it does not yet support downloadable apps.

The end result? Affordable, handsome, and a welcome contender to the e-reader plus world. It’s on my list as the closest thing to an iPad at one-third the price. And I’m betting that future versions will take more advantage of the Android operating system.

Forget apps. Start the move with your existing contacts and phone numbers.  You did buy your phone to make a call, right?  Step one is to import your contact list from wherever it lives now.  If it’s large, it may be a good time to weed  – getting rid of those contacts  where you haven’t had any contact in a decade.  Immediately learn how your phone “finds a contact” and “places the call”.

Practice your touch. The single biggest complaint most new users have is getting used to a touch screen. They can be both overly sensitive and insensitive, very dependent on your perfect touch. Like my bowling, my touch finger has a hook.  I’m always one to the left of the key I really want to press. My solution was to get an Android with a keyboard; others learn to watch the autocomplete feature which finishes your word for you as you touch.

Take your old GPS with you on the maiden voyage.  Before you grab your phone and head off with its navigation app you should take a maiden voyage with your dedicated GPS as a backup. Nothing like rushing into the car to find out that you can’t read your GPS screen and can’t seem to make it talk. Plus, the routes suggested by a Garmin and an Android are strikingly different.

Make the fonts bigger.  Mobile phones are going to be the worst villains in the history of eye strain. Head to your settings and configurations and choose a font size that you can actually read.  Just getting the gist of an important email is not  enough.  Hats off to iPhone for the pinch and pull, by far the easiest way to enlarge. The rest of you?  Head over to your Settings.

 
Learn how to shut down/silence ringer.  Don’t even think about taking your phone into a public place until you can shut it off properly.  Can’t be fumbling for the first time in a darkened theatre.
Make it Secure  Studies show that mobile phones are the highest security  threat in the workplace. .  Most service providers have decent “backend” protection against hackers and malware but there are few things you should do:
A: don’t keep your Bluetooth or WiFi turned on when you’re not using it; it gives other devices a chance to hack into your system
B: Keep the number of apps that use location based notification to a minimum. Broadcasting your coordinates to your friends doesn’t insure that it stays amongst your friends.

Save Battery Power  A dead phone isn’t much good and smart phones are hungry phones.  Leaving your GPS on; forgetting to end a call, or leaving your phone connected to Wifi even when you’re out and about are perfect battery drainers.  I download an app called Advanced Task Killer – it’s like the RAID of mobile phones. It knock anything that’s running dead.
Now, we’re ready for some App device.

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Back to the Genius Bar. I made my maiden voyage with some trepidation, after upgrading my iPod Touch to Version 3.0 and encountering troubles. I brought my shhh…HP Pavilion along to show that I buy my music, most often from iTunes, and that while my podcasts, movies, and photos all made the upgrade, my music was still stuck in my PC’s library.

Quick Observations On the Bar

If I were a single woman looking to meet really smart, gangly, slightly geeky men, I would keep trouncing my Macs and heading back to the store. My visit gave Apple lust a new meaning.

Second, I felt as if I’d walked into some Lake Wobegone where all the shoppers were above average. The crowd was the same crowd that I see at NPR fundraisers and indie movies (with a strong pinch of foreign visitors tossed in for good measure). These were happy people and really smart looking–two things usually in short supply in any store in NYC.

Third, I had no idea you had to BOOK an appointment with a Genius. I thought it was spontaneous sort of thing, like the deli counter where you take a ticket number. So, I watched the LCD display behind the Bar for a few moments. It showed people’s rank on the waiting list, interspersed with did-ya-knows for Genius-wannabes. Finally, a competent young woman spotted me to ask if I needed anything.

“Help,” I said meekly.

“Did you make your appointment online,” she asked.

“Sorry,” I said, “I thought they ran it like a bar, not a doctor’s office.”

Sizing me up as a virgin, she somehow worked some magic and got me in as the last appointment of the Genius Bar’s day.

I stood, waited, and watched. (Stood because the two small benches in the Bar area barely held five size 6 bodies apiece.) I pulled out a hard copy of my New Yorker to read (definitely the only piece of hard copy in the store).

One guy was turned away from help because he’d bought his phone from an ASAP (Apple Authorized Service Provider), hence that needed to be his first stop. I’d be pissed. He was Hakuna matata.

Another guy did get a little testy when he explained he drove in from Brooklyn, paid for parking, and had to get his girlfriend’s Mac fixed. They gave him a place without an appointment, too.

Despite the fact that the woman estimated a 15-minute wait for my turn and I waited something more like 45 minutes, I, too, was happy (well, I would have been happier with a Starbuck’s franchise in the store).

Then came my turn. Displaying my Touch was no problem; maybe it was my paranoia, but I saw a bunch of raised eyeballs when I pulled out my HP Pavilion to show the synch stats. My Genius was clearly uncomfortable and uninterested. (Not helped by the fact that my battery was nearly dead, I had a few dozen Windows open as the machine awoke, and Vista was even slower than usual.) I was living confirmation of everything wrong with PCs even though it was my Touch that was not working.

First, he turned the cover of my HP notebook so that it faced the back of the Bar. Then he told me I should drive the PC. (Not my job, man.) The old Mars/Venus thing reared its ugly head and I know he was thinking that if I’d had a Mac I wouldn’t need a genius. And that I’d never be a genius because I didn’t have the sense to buy a Mac.

Ultimately, he did not fix the problem, but gave me enough information so that I could do a tedious restore and then manual synch myself.

I sent out a quick Facebook note asking others to share their Genius Bar war stories with me. I know a lot of people who like to complain. But all of them reported visiting the Genius Bar was more like visiting the spa than the dentist and were thankful for the help they received. As one friend so aptly nailed it, “I wonder what the lines would be like if the PC mfrs offered a Genius Bar for Windows products?”

My bets on some of the hottest trends at the show:

eBook Wars: You’ll have seen most of them before the opening day of CES, but you’re going to begin to see a features war over book readers. Color readers, readers with two screens, readers with backlit screens, pocket readers, multimedia readers, and so on. The good news? All this talk about reading may resuscitate the printed word. If you’re at CES, visit the eReader exhibit on the CES floor and the HigherEd Tech Summit.* Both will be discussing how ebooks will replace those high-priced printed versions.

3D: James Cameron may be getting all the 3D glory on the big screen this season, but there are plenty of folks at CES leaving their 3D mark. Look for notebooks and netbooks from the likes of Acer (3D glasses required). SONY, Mitsubishi, and Panasonic will be showing the next variant of 3D TV (glasses required on most, not all). Even the gamemakers (keep an eye on PlayStation) will be supporting 3D output. ASUS has just announced a 3D gaming notebook, the G51 J 3D. My favorite? Fujifilm has a new camera that shoots photos and videos in 3D and requires no glasses. The trick? Two sensors built into the camera.

Mobile Phones and Their Apps: There are now over 100,000 iPhone apps; that’s a pretty big business. But the iPhone is being challenged by Android, RIM Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm, and Nokia’s Symbian environments. As consumers, we want to know what apps are worth paying for; as a developer, you’ll want to know what apps to create for. These topics will be visited in multiple places on the show floor, but the Mobile Apps Showdown should be a nice culmination of an app-ified world.

Mind and Body: Take a motion sensor, add some software and a cloud computing app, and you’ve got the recipe for a healthier body. Look for everything from digital pedometers with online recordkeeping to elaborate systems that measure your energy output and give you enough readout to put the Challenger’s dashboard to shame. Watch for biofeedback, relaxation, remote medical data collection, and more.

Telepresence: Yes, it’s a Trekian buzzword, but get used to it. Simply (probably too simply) put, telepresence creates the illusion that something is near you, even though it is not. Video conferencing, distance learning, remote medical diagnoses–all of these rely on telepresence. Look for Cisco to take the lead, but IBM, Microsoft, and others will express their violent interest in this topic.

Augmented Reality: A close cousin of telepresence, augmented reality was beginning to seep into our collective consciousness at the last CES. It’s back, and in general it describes a technology that adds a level of information on top of your physical reality. Point your phone at a person and it might automatically recognize them and offer the person’s vital stats for you. Point a digital camera at an object (say, a museum) and have entries about that object appear on your screen. Making augmented reality more real are manufacturers like NVIDIA. Its new Tegra chip packs the power of a PC onto a single, small chip.

* Disclosure: My company, Living in Digital Times, produces the Mobile Apps Showdown and the HigherEd Tech Summit at CES.

HP's Mini-clutch was designed by fashion celeb, Vivienne Tam.

At Microsoft's Open House in NYC, a tweetie bird answered tweets from her perch below a treehouse.

Now that all PCs cost about the same and run about the same at any given price point, they’ve become commodities. All except the Mac, that is. The Mac is like the mythical siren, designed to lure us with gorgeous work from bevel to the box, and expecting a premium to be paid for its good looks. PC vendors now are trying (almost too hard) to compete on design and that hip elegance that’s never quite been the PC’s style.

To anchor the new fashion parade, there’s Windows 7, noticeably more attractive and thankfully speedier. If you’re interested in the main new features of Win 7, read this introduction by Ars Technica.

Commensurate with the launch of Win 7 come a bevy of beautiful machines with all sorts of radical designs. First to show off this fall was the HP Vivienne Tam clutch bag PC  (pictured above).  There is no Mac equivalent and women drool when they see it. The guts of this clutch bag sized PC are similar to HP Mini-Notes, the company’s netbook offering. Not much detail yet, but just having HP play a big part in Fashion Week was a novelty.

There was an audible gulp when Dell unveiled its Adamo XPS, an ultra-thin notebook computer that’s under a centimeter in width. That’s a pencil near the photo to give you some idea about how thin is thin.

It’s lovely to look at; more so if you’re a fan of modern minimalist anodized aluminum (it’s available, appropriately, in onyx (black) or pearl (white)). The glass screen (13.5 inches) has no framing. Edge-to-edge, it’s glass, creating a beauty of its own. After the blush was off the rose, the tech folks weighed in, pointing out that the PC felt heavier than it looked, was expensive ($1,499), and lacked an SD slot. I guess being thin has its price…both on the pocketbook and perf

ormance. For a fun read see, the Dell Adamo/MacBook Air deathmatch in PC World.

Of course, Dell had to have an “It” machine worthy of the new Adamo name. That would be the Dell Domo 13, a special collector’s version decorated with Swarovski crystals that form an intricate bejeweled snake on the laptop cover. (Word to the wise: Do not try to put this Dell in your laptop bag.) Available at Bergdorf Goodman only, my guess is that Dell contracted this one long before the recession took hold.

Dell joins OPI brand nail polish to come up with the finishes for Dell PCs available from Dell's Design Studio. No chipping, I hope.

Much more on price point, but equally decadent, is a partnership Dell announced with OPI (a nail polish brand used in most garden variety salons, whose colors I love but whose ability to stay on my hands for more than a day without chipping is lacking). Guys feeling left out? The MLB (Major League Baseball Association) announced a number of favorite team covers. (I’d think twice if I were a NY salesman going to see that client in Boston with my Yankee studded laptop.) The cases are available for Mini, Inspiron, and Studio laptops and will cost somewhere between $65 and $85 extra.

More like a netbook, but with SONY's incredible lightness of being and gorgeous styling.

Sony has built a brand on its elegant design. This year, at a crowded NYC party amidst the work of Thomas Pendelton, tattoo artists, and Cirque Berzerk (an LA based, cabaret style Cirque du Soleil), Sony announced three new VAIOs running Windows 7. Actress Mischa Barton showed up to herald three new VAIOs running Windows 7. One of the systems, the new Sony VAIO X, nudged out the Dell by a little more than an ounce to claim the title of lightest PC, but it has a 2” smaller screen so they’re not really comparable. The Sony has integrated Verizon wireless and a much heftier price tag; many observed that it’s more like a netbook than a notebook ($1,200).

Not to be outdone on color palette, Sony CW series notebooks can be outfitted with some lovely two-tone colors, and these 14-inch screen laptops start as low as $800. For more, see PC World reviews.

A pocket video recorder is the 21^st century version of pen and paper. You can whip it out, document, and then share the moments of your day. The top contenders in the pocket video space are the Flip camera and the Kodak Xi8. Flip’s got the catchier name and it captured high definition video first. But the new Kodak Xi8 has some impressive technology that gives pocket video cams a hefty sized infusion of respect and gives Kodak the momentary lead in this two-horse race. The camera will be available in September and will retail for $179, which is about $50 less expensive than the Flip Mino HD.

Kodak’s video is now full HD, which is great for playing your family movies back on high definition TV sets. But one of the features I like best is the ability to switch quickly (before you even hit record) between HD and lower resolutions like 720p or even XVGA so you can take pictures that are more appropriately sized for web or email viewing.

Other giant leaps forward include blur reduction and a special internal sensor that compensates for a shaky hand by stabilizing the image. I tested the camera in low light and the image was still sharp. The built-in microphone is improved but you can also add an external stereo microphone through the USB. Once you’ve captured the shots, a flexible USB arm pops out of the camera to transfer your video to the computer. And the camera can upload directly to YouTube, Facebook and, of course, Kodak Gallery.

A bit clunkier than the demure Flip camera, the Kodak has a larger 2.5-inch color LCD with a healthy antireflective coating so that shooting in daylight is pretty reasonable. It’s not quite as simple to use, nor as ergonomically elegant as the Flip’s, but you can watch my Carnegie Deli Pickle Eating contest (taken on the streets of NYC live) and judge for yourself.

Finds your best waking moment.

I have become my Grandmother. She was the one that spent  a bulk of each day pleasantly sleeping in front of the television. The instant she’d wake she’d fret about the fact  that she never slept.  As we age sleep problems do increase, but so does fretting about them. While I’m not my Grandma yet,  I’m now a card carrying member of the generation who can’t sleep at night. Just one more thing that technology proposes to remedy for me.

My first foray into managing sleeplessness was the SleepTracker,  a plastic, oversized, digital stopwatch type device that sells for around $170. The watch tracks your sleep patterns and serves as your alarm clock (both vibration and ringing), but with a high tech twist.

The watch can track small body movements and determine whether you are in REM sleep (the deepeet of the sleep cycles) or a lighter sleep. Because REM sleep is the deepest, most restful sleep, you’ll feel better if you’re awakened during the lighter part of your sleep cycle. When you set the SleepTracker alarm you set it for a window of wake-up opportunity. The alarm will wake you at a time during that window when you are in a lighter sleep. Theoretically you’ll wake more refreshed. 
After trying it for a week I learned that wearing a big plastic watch on my wrist at bedtime drove me nuts. I also found that monitoring obscure terms and obscure push buttons for Data 1 and Data 2 was too much to think about. Finally my sleep patterns were irregular, too irregular to provide much of a baseline. Ultimately I found myself worrying  about the  gadget enough to be losing sleep over it. 

Next up is Pzizz, a software for power napping (or getting a restful night’s sleep). According to its creators, Pzizz combines Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), music, sound effects and a binaural beat that puts you into a relaxed state of mind. Very new-agey. I really did feel more awake and energized after listening to a pzizz session, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t have felt  equally as rested if I’d just allowed myself a quick catnap minus the pzzizz and I’m to my mind computers and resting are a bit of an oxymoronic mix. The good thing about pzizz is that it gently wakes you after a specified nap time. Try the free download of pzizz soundtracks at http://pzizz.com 

The emWave Personal Stress Reliever  from HeartMath can help you sleep more restfully or do just about anything else that calls for lowering stress levels. Based on biofeedback principles that monitor your pulse, breath rate and other autonomic body indicators, , the unit sense your stress level and then you concentrate on lowering it.  It costs $199.

Light has also been known to play a big part in sleep. Back in the pre-electricity days, people went to sleep when it got dark and woke up when it wasn’t. These circadian rhythms create a natural pattern for sleeping and waking.  Most lightning solutions try to mimic circadian rhythms. There are many lighting devices designed to gently wake you by simulating daylight, but the Lamborghini of sleep devices is The Starry Night Bed  http://www.starrynightbed.com/ . This bed would feel right at home in the honeymoon suite at a hotel. It adjusts lighting and positioning depending on whether you want to read, romance or just get some shut-eye. You can program the bed’s temperature, monitor your sleeping and breathing patterns, or just entertain yourself with the bed’s  built-in  iPod docking station and Microsoft Media Center.  The bed sells for upwards of $20k; the price of a  good night’s sleep?  Priceless.

Late Breaking Update:  Here I am playing around with stopwatches while David Pogue played with his Zeo Alarm Clock as reviewed in the New York Times. His clock sits on his nightable (not his wrist) and the monitor gets stuck to his head where it measures brainwaves as he sleeps.  $400 — and lots of data to analyze if you’re really sleep obsessed.

Held in NYC this week, CEALineShows/Digital Downtown a June preview event focused on innovation and a sneak peak at the holiday season drew its share of news. Here’s what some attendees had to say.

The Geek in Chief Addresses the Crowd

Does it take to long to renew your driver’s liscense?  Is high speed bandwidth a problem in your neighborhood? Do you want to feel more secure about your privacy?  You’ve got a friend in The Whitehouse in  Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra.  He addressed the gadget-loving crowd at CEALineshows by stressing that “digitalness” of the Obama admininistration and his focus on innovation and efficiency in government.

Chopra drew accolodades from the crowd as he described technology as pivotal to much of our policy and job creation in the coming years. He covered the success of the DTV transition, the need for public/private partnerships and the proliferation of applications for a mobile world.

The nation’s first Chief Technology Officer, the audiencec reaction was something approaching the geek equivalent of American Idol.

To find out more about Mr. Chopra.

To lend your voice to the discussion of why America is falling behind in the technology infrastructure race.

Amazon announced two major partnerships: one for students and one for newspaper readers. In a partnership with three of the top five textbook publishers, trials are being held at five well-known college campuses including Princeton, Case-Western, Reed College, University of Virginia, and Arizona State. Expensive textbooks—obsolete almost before the ink dries—will be available for the Kindle. Even the most heavily formatted calculus and anatomy books look quite lovely on the Kindle display. Students will have lighter loads and clearly save money over the course of four years at over $1,000 a year in textbooks.

Not a moment too soon, three ailing newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe—will be offering their readers special discounts on a Kindle DX when they sign up for newspaper delivery. While details haven’t been announced, it’s clear we’re talking about saving trees as well as money.

The new Kindle DX is also a more open system. It’ll read PDF files, play music, and even convert the written word into speech. It’s got enough storage to house 3,500 books and uses the same 3G wireless network to download a book in less than 60 seconds with no subscription fees or service charges.

In terms of new technology, the Kindle is only a modest upgrade—a jumbo-sized version of its former self. In terms of creating a new e-book market that serves students and newspaper readers, Amazon strikes gold. When you can purchase content and have the Kindle discounted we all win.

For more:
A website for all things Kindle: http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/06/kindle-dx-review/

For history buffs, Stephen Levy saw it all coming in this 2007 Newsweek article http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983

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