CES 2005 Day 1 - Walking The Show Floor

TheTechLounge writes "Our second day in Vegas for CES, and our first day on the actual show floor was pretty much what I expected: mountains of new gadgets, people in suits staring at your name tag and scantily clad models trying not to get angry as they are repeatedly photographed. We started our excursion on opening day in the upper levels of the South Hall. Big name companies like ATI, nVidia, AMD, Logitech, and HP were showcasing anything and everything they could fit into their floor space."

Comments

Nice screens matrix

[moz25]

The screens on the first page look nifty. It would be even cooler if they joined better (i.e. no thick dark bars).

Shuttle

[Nightreaver]

The new shuttles are what my eyes are out for. Their design has become top notch and you can now purchase systems with AMD64... I'm just waiting for the money.

Graphics cards?

[BabyJaysus]

Any word on motherboards for AMD Athlon 64 (esp. socket 939) with PCI-express, or even dual--PCI-express slots for SLI?

Re:Phantom

[FiReaNGeL]

Didn't see that! From the article you linked to :

According to Infinium Labs' pricing scheme, hardware will be given away free to any user who agrees to a two-year contract for their basic service at $29.95 per month or for $200 without a contract. Subscribers get a stock of basic games with the hardware, plus added games each month. But don't misunderstand me, you won't be getting UT2004 for free with this console; According to an Infinium rep you'll be paying full retail price for hot new games. [...] Games are stored on a local hard drive, and may be bumped off to make room in a TiVo-like fashion if you download lots of big games. We were assured though that you'd be able to re-download the games onto the Phantom at no extra cost as many times as you want. There is no way to trasfer the games to a PC for play. Conversely, there is no way to load your existing PC game library onto the Phantom.

According to the Infinium rep I spoke to, the Phantom runs Windows XP Embedded with an AMD processor and NVIDIA GPU. In other words, a pretty normal PC, so it seems odd that they would disallow playing current PC titles. I even asked if there was any modification made to the downloaded games to allow them to work on the console, and was told that no, the Phantom runs the exact same version of the game you'd go buy in a store. Weird.

It seems that the reviewer was... unimpressed at the least. After reading that, I can't figure why I would be paying 30$x24 (720$ for 2 years) for crappy games and soon-to-be-obsolete hardware. And these prices are from last year, and before the (costly and useless) lawsuit versus HardOCP. I'll buy myself a PC, thanks.

The Phantom

[retro128]

I was at CES all day on Saturday, and lo and behold, what was in the nVidia booth? Well apparently Infinium Labs had a rep showing off the Phantom console there. I thought that was very interesting considering the fact that it won this year's Wired Vaporware Award.

So needless to say, a friend of mine and I started grilling the poor guy. Naturally the first thing we wanted to know was how much the subcription fee was. His answer: "I am a hardware guy". Ok, fine, so now we wanted to know if the game content was exclusive or if it was just (under)glorified PC. He said that the Phantom would run anything a PC would and is directly loaded over the 'Net. So basically that left us with the impression that the Phantom was basically a PC in a fancy box pre-packaged with a Steam-like delivery system. I starting asking about the guts, and found out that they are farming out the board design to BIOStar, but I didn't get any word on what the BIOS would be like. That is, if it was encrypted Xbox style or pretty left alone. However, the indication I got was that it would be pretty well locked down. I also asked how the system would handle a hard disk crash, and he said the hard disk could be replaced and the content would automatically load itself back on the drive. I commented "so it takes you what, a day and half to get to your stuff loaded again", to which he replied, "Well, how often does your hard disk crash?", to which I shot back "Well, if it's a Maxtor, once every two weeks."

Then he wanted to know what kind of hard disk I would recommend to put into it. I said Seagate and he seemed to agree with me. So if Seagate ends up in the Phantom, it's because of me! :)

Re:Hmm.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Seriously, did they think they were hired for their hard work and moral values?

A friend of mine was a booth babe, once. She was fine with showing off her assets to sell products or posing for photos. However, she wasn't prepared for just how immature grown men can be at a technical conference. Most of them had the mental maturity of a 13 year old boy stuck in a 30-year old man's body.

Makes me embarrased for my gender...

Re:Hmm.

[Anubis350]

you might want to read this article on gc.com about boothbabe mentality (from E3 2004), quite an interesting (and in some cases humorous) read. Its a unique article that I remembered reading a whileback and looked it up because of your post. Of course you know a former boothbabe so the insight in the article is prolly not new to you,

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your tellin me, but add intelligence of a 13yr old to that also. I was at the convention Friday and one booth had a car inverter that was as big as the car battery it was plugged into. Sufficeing to say there was a "profesional" looking dipstick makeing small-talk with the "booth-babe" talkin bout anything but what was there. Heres the kicker. The dumbass had one hand on the Negative battery terminal and the other hand insainely close to the Positive one. I had to look twice...afterall...no one is that dumb rite?