I dropped by the SandDisk booth to talk about the implications of 2 TB cards being on the SD Association’s roadmap with their new XS designation, but they were pretty tight-lipped about it. We talked broadly about how well SlotMusic was doing (not bad apparently) and their new 16 GB card. I actually used a complimentary one to record the interview on my BlackBerry, partly out of novelty, partly because I couldn’t find my usual dang recorder. Frankly, I have no clue what I do with 2 terabytes. That kind of memory capacity, though still a ways off, opens up all kinds of new application possibilities. I mean, you can only cram so much music and pictures onto these things. Sandisk talked a bit about how storing mobile maps is becoming more popular, which was a very new possibility. HD video is also just around the corner with microSD XS, but it will take awhile before manufacturers catch on. I have a feeling Palm knew about it, and actually held back on including a microSD slot on the Pre because they would be supporting a standard that was on the tail end of its life cycle – it would be best to hold out for their second WebOS-based handset to include microSD XS compatibility.
After that, I tried hitting up the exception Palm Pre lounge again to post for a bit, but my laptop totally crashed and burned, hence my meager posting for the tail end of the show. After some fruitless percussive maintenance, I went out to see the Sony Ericsson booth. It took quite a bit to tear me away from Killzone 2, but eventually I got in front of their announcements for the show: the the C510 (Kate) and the W508 (somehow missed the W715). They had a lot of cool twists to old functions, like Smile Shutter, which only takes a picture after it detects that the target is grinning, and gesture-based music control, but the hardware never really tweaked my fancy much. They also had some excessively slim stereo Bluetooth earbuds that were just great-looking.
And that’s it! The biggest mobile news of CES?
We’ve got lots of interviews ready for this week’s episode of The Signal, so stick around.
Picture gallery on the last page!