This year the Lunch at Piero’s press event during CES 2011 will be full of exciting products and technologies. Here’s proof that innovation is alive and well. Yes, our event is fiercely independent, intriguing, and anything but run-of-the-mill and we are honored to be the place where the following brand new products and devices will be presented by our great group of sponsors for Lunch at Piero’s 2011:
Cloud-based tools for creating and sharing ePublications
Dazzling photo-realistic 3D maps for geo-location apps
A smartphone app to track your valuables
Cool devices that will make your home the hottest spot
World’s thinnest LED monitor display
The hottest new mobile productivity apps
Android tablet devices that expand existing markets
The Number One mobile wallet
A tablet that proves size really does matter
Reliable wireless 1080p HDMI connectivity
Faster, more mobile data with USB 3.0 technologies
Multi-platform on-demand mobile TV subscription service
New longest-range cordless radar detector
Breakthrough multi-dimensional color video technology
Software to protect your devices and save your sanity
LCD TVs with personality and style from every angle
USB speakers with a small footprint and big sound
Industry-leading gaming platforms for tomorrow’s PCs
Voice-activated technology that enhances how people interact with their devices.
The Alex eReader, which made its world debut at Lunch at Piero’s during CES 2010, is closer to entering the market. Spring Design has opened the web shop for pre-orders of the Alex, priced at $399. The Alex is Android-based and runs a number of Android apps right out of the box. You can annotate, highlight, even make voice notes to augment what you are reading. You can browse, enjoy multimedia, use Gmail on the LCD screen. Two surprisingly loud speakers deliver great sound or you can listen on the headset provided with the Alex.
EPD and LCD screens can work together through the Duet Navigator extending the LCD display up into the larger EPD screen that lets you read anything, even in bright sunlight. The handy LCD screen also lets you look up things easily as you read a book on the EPD screen. But here’s the real magic: Imagine if books came with built-in hyperlinks? Spring Design suggests that publishing is going through a major change and has designed LinkNotes into the Alex that lets users or publishers embed links into text. Textbooks will never be the same again, nor as bulky. The Alex is 4.7 x 8.9″ weighs only 11 ounces and is less than a half inch thick. And imagine if you could not only read about that chemistry experiment but actually watch it on the LCD screen either playing off the Web or stored on the microSD card for up to 32GB of extra storage.
A slight delay in opening its store was attributed to web site glitches, but now everything appears to be running fine. By the time the Alex ships in mid April, there will be resellers and partners around the world. Spring Design has already developed the Alex in several foreign languages.
Spring Design plans to expand its developer community and provide plenty of content to read from various partners that will be announced later.
You’re hiking on a remote trail, touring pyramids in Egypt, you’re at a baseball game, or on the train on your daily commute. Wherever you are, whenever the craving for information hits you, just whip out the WikiReader, a small handheld device that holds 3.1 million Wikipedia articles complete with hyperlinks. Because it works offline and has been tweaked to perfection, this handheld encyclopedia is much faster than a browser-based search. And for those times that you want to settle a bar bet, be a genius for your kids, or delve in to the history of the pyramids without lugging heavy travel guides, the WikiReader is perfect. Watch this demo at Lunch at Piero’s, the innovator and media event during CES 2010 where Openmoko announced a Spanish language version of the WikiReader coming for download at http://thewikireader.com in February 2010.
