Hands-on with Kodak's latest and greatest

We got a nice look at Kodak's newest gear from this morning, and while it's an uneven showing at best, there are certainly some gems. The real standout of the bunch is the Kodak Theatre HD Player, a teensy box with all the right ins and outs, a purtiful interface, and a glorious motion-sensing remote. We really haven't had this much fun with a peripheral since the Wiimote came along, and Kodak has somehow managed to best that in the role of couch-based cursor positioning. Kodak was a bit coy about what exactly goes on inside the thing, and we're even more curious as to whether somebody can produce a dongle to let it operate a PC, but it's a marvel all the same. Next up -- in importance, anyways -- is Kodak's new Zi6 HD pocket video camera, a transparent bid to cut in on those Pure Digital dollars. It's a bit of a bulky beast, and the image quality is hardly an improvement over the competition, but it certainly works as advertised: it really couldn't be simpler to turn it on, shoot a video, and upload that video to the internet. Perhaps our biggest gripe is that it looks like it was built by some second-tier consumer electronics company, and shares zero design language with Kodak's other products -- many of which have really matured in the looks department of late. The Z1015 IS we didn't spend as much time with, but it seemed nice, light but not too light, and has a gorgeous screen. Finally, the new W820 and W1020 wireless photo frames were on display, with some prototype software showing off some add-ridden FrameChannel content (seriously Kodak, what were you thinking?) but loved just about everything else on the frames.
%Gallery-27314%