The CES has opened their doors in las Vegas some days ago and interesting
items have already been shown. So has Victorinox, manufacturer of the
legendary swiss army knife, shown a prototype of a 1TB-USB-Knife.
HP shows it’s Envy 14, a 14-inch-size Ultrabook, Huawei a 6.2mm thin phone.

The Victorinox Knife shall be rather seen as promotional item as USB sticks with more than 256GB are rarely seen and also expensive. But hey, for the upper 10’000 of us, such a estimated 2k expensive gadget is already paid for from the money of the coin holder. A small LC-Display shall inform the user about the remaining capacity. But with 1TB, is it to worry about? The Interface is supposed to spek USB2.0, USB3.0 and eSATA… so fast filling of the tiny tool should be almost no problem…

A prototype of the 1TB USB-Knife

Speaking of high capacity, Lexar has announced the world’s first 256GB CF-Card that should provide you with constant 60MB/s Read and Write speeds.
Although cards with such capacity are also very expensive, there are some photographers who could need such cards for their convenience.

And if there are modern video cameras providing 1920x1080p at 60Hz, the capacity of this card may give much time to do some recording.

Looks big and can hold lots of data – Lexar’s 256GB CF-Card

Okay, now let’s head over to the smartphone section. While the iPhone 4S still lacks support of LTE, Nokia and Microsoft have presented their new Lumia 900 which should fill this gap. Identically in design to the already released Lumia 800, the only new thing is the LTE support that shall allow Download speed of up to 100Mbit/s – Of course this value is theoretical and probably only reached in test environments or cells of the LTE network where you do not have to share your bandwith with someone else.

Speaking of smartphones, the new shooting star of the thinnest smartphones appears to be Huawei with it’s new Ascent S phone. Only 6.2mm thick, it is thinner than the motorola RAZR but yet comes with decent and strong hardware. A 1.5GHZ dualcore ARM, paired with Android 4.0, a 960×540 4,3″ display and an 8 MP camera with an additional 1.3MP front camera sound very good so far. The Ascent is a bit ticker, 7.2mm in detail and comes with a weaker battery. The other details aren’t known yet but I think they don’t differ too much from the S variant.

The Huawei Ascent S and Ascent – tribute to Samsung galaxy S?

So… the ultrabook section also has anoter contributor. While Asus, Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo and Intel have already presented their Ultrabooks and already are selling them, HP is presenting a new ENVY 14 ultrabook at the CES. The ultrabook seems fine worked out if you look at the surface. The display, lid and handrest are all covered with Gorilla glass. Any similarities to Apple? Probably. The Look similar to Apple’s macBook Air – probably. But what you can see from here, it looks decent but yet very luxury. And so is the price of an estimated 1400 US$, with a 128GB SSD, an i5 2637 cpu with the integrated Intel HD3000 graphics. The ultrabook has a full-size GBit-Ethernet connector and also speaks USB3.0. Furthermore it comes with the standard connectors and the battery is about to hold up for about 8 hours of continuous work. 4GB RAM should be enough for an ultrabook by now. An 128GB SSD holds your files. Not too much but bot too shabby either! A novum is the sound system which is equipped with the beats sound enhancer which is said to be too bass-loaded anyways. To define this as a new “standard” seems a bit too far for me as it is only a simple sound enhancer… nothing more! Even the headphones aren’t THAT good. Compare a Beyerdynamic DT990 with the Beats headphones and you’ll set aside the Beats for sure. Of course the DT990 doesn’t look that hip. It’s the same with the iPhone. Defined as the quasi standard for smartphones it can’t anything better than, say, a Samsung Galaxy S. However the sound shall be okay.

HP’s ENVY 14 – sleek design if you ask me.
But very similar to Apple’s Macbook Air!

Oh and finally: Full 60Hz 4k (3840×2160 or 4096×1920) standard is supported by HDMI now. Yet the new standard has no name yet. HDMI 1.4b maybe? Or 1.5? Who knows…