CES 2010 – Day 2

More cool stuff!

Gear
Lenovo U1 (Engadget)
DLNA Server UI VIew (Engadget)
Ceton 4-tuner Cable Card (We Got Served)

Thoughts

The Lenovo U1 is an incredible product. Its a “regular” 11″ laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo chip. But you can detach the display and its got a Snapdragon chip inside and it will transfer over the web browser (from Windows 7 to their Linux distro) and back when you undock and then redock the display slate. I’m interested to see how well the transition works in person.

I’m not quite sure where Engadget got its info on the DLNA specs, but if the cable companies are actually enthusiastic about it, it could stand to substantially remake the home entertainment experience with cable. The idea is very similar to the suggestion TiVo made in a FCC comment a few weeks ago. The basic premise is that your ethernet or wifi-connected would use DLNA to connect to the one cable box/omnibox in the house, and then view and even interact with the UI and get the video steaming the data back to the TV.

The Ceton cable card four tuner device is really awesome, but its very expensive – $399. The key to making this device worth while would be to turn the box into a in-house head-end where you can watch a bunch of channels live, or pull stuff up that was recorded, all from a cheap set top box (e.g. not a $200 Xbox, something closer to $129 or less). If Microsoft can pull it off it would be the light fantastic, sadly, I just don’t have a lot of confidence that they can do it. It just doesn’t seem to be in the cards lately for them.

Possibly Related Posts:

• TiVo Premiere (Series4) announced – good but not great
• How to down-convert a high definition movie to your iPad/iPod/iPhone and PS3
• CES 2010 – Day 1 Round-up
• CES 2010 – Day 0 Round-up
• Cell Phones and TiVo – More Closely Related Than You Think!
• Apple Getting Interest in Video Subscription Services
• Why a la carte Cable/Satellite TV is a Pipe Dream
• Have they finally woken up?