大象传媒

Big boys

• Darren Waters
• 8 Jan 07, 09:39 PM

I've spent the morning with the big boys at CES - Microsoft and Yahoo.

Microsoft is giving more details on its internet TV plans, especially the ability to get TV over the net to your Xbox 360 games console.

I'll be writing more about that in a feature on the digital home for later in the week.

Yahoo was showing off a new service for mobile phones called Yahoo Go.

They want to improve the experience of using the internet on a mobile phone - which is generally a poor way to access information.

"Everyone knows that mobile internet sucks," Steve Boom, senior vice president for broadband and mobile at Yahoo, told me.

Yahoo Go is an application you can download to your phone - more than 400 phones will be able to run the software by the end of the year - and it acts as a gateway to the internet.

The idea is based around the widget approach - the little utilities that run on PCs or Macs in the background.

The interface is easy to navigate and you can choose the widgets you want to use - from news to sport, weather, maps, local information etc.

Yahoo is stressing that it's an open approach - anyone can build widgets for Yahoo Go and people can personalise their experience.

"This is about bringing the open internet to the mobile phone," Mr Boom said.

He also stressed that mobile operators needed to bring down the walled garden approach and let people surf freely on phones, if the mobile web was going to take off.

On a different note: I know I'm focusing on the bigger players so far at CES but it is only half way through day one officially. I hope to get a sense of what the smaller players, especially some British firms, are up to later in the week.

If there is anything in particular you want me to look at, please let me know.

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How high is high def?

• Darren Waters
• 8 Jan 07, 09:22 PM

How many of you bought a high definition television set this year? Did you make sure you bought one with the HD Ready logo just to be sure you were buying a set that "future proofs" you against further change?

Well I have a bit of bad news for you. Every television manufacturer here at CES is now trumpeting something they are calling "Full HD".

I bought a high definition TV this year and I was confident that my TV was capable of displaying full HD, at least no-one told me it was "less than full HD".

So what is "full HD"?

Basically it's a TV capable of displaying a resolution of 1080p - 1920 脳 1080 or about two million pixels.

Many televisions in the last year had a top resolution of 1080i - a slightly less high quality resolution where the lines in the image are shown sequentially instead of all at once in the case of 1080p.

So does it mean your TV is defunct if it can't display 1080p? Absolutely not.

You would only spot the difference between 1080p and 1080i if you were viewing content in that format on a TV over 40 inches in size - and even then it's subjective to some.

But the TV makers have got a new feature to sell and of course they want to charge a premium for it.

So if you haven't got 1080p, don't lose any sleep over it.

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CES daily video blog

• Darren Waters
• 8 Jan 07, 07:45 PM

The technology journalists at 大象传媒 Click are filming a daily video blog from CES - giving you a sense of the atmosphere and colour as well as the latest news from the technology show.

The blog will run from Monday to Thursday this week and most days will be found first on the page.

Click here to watch.

UPDATE, Tue 11:00: Click here for the latest episode.

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Crushed at the Gates

• Darren Waters
• 8 Jan 07, 05:19 AM

Bill Gates was the hottest ticket in town tonight - so hot that in order to see him you had to queue not once, not twice, but three times.

I say queue when in fact I mean loiter because the organisers at CES didn't want people to queue.

They told me that after I had loitered for a while to pick up my voucher for the keynote speech; a voucher which then entitled me to preferential waiting to get into the lobby where I was to wait for access to the hall to see Mr Gates.

But before I could get to the stage I had to wait at the foot of some escalators for an hour before anyone was allowed up.

I was joined by about 300 other people who had also engaged in a bout of formless waiting.

"Shouldn't there be a queue," I asked one of the kindly CES organisers. "No, we don't want people to have to wait in line. Everybody will be allowed up at 5," she explained.

And so chaos ensued. People just formed an impromptu mob at the foot of the escalators, despite the protests of security staff at the Venetian hotel, who belatedly tried to get everyone to form an orderly queue.

And once we were allowed upstairs we then had to wait for a third time outside the doors of the ballroom where the event was being held.

As one journalist commented, parodying a much-seen advert for Microsoft's new Vista operating system: "The ow starts now!".

So was the three hour wait to see the world's richest man and genuine visionary worth it?

Not really. It was all very interesting as Mr Gates spelled out his vision of connected experiences.

But it lacked a bit of zing, if I'm honest.

The keynote also featured a video of lots of smiling people - looking suspiciously like models - engaged in the jolly japes of using connected technologies.

It should have been cool. It should have been aspirational.

But it actually made the technology look a little dull and clunky.

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