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Light Blue Optics' Light Touch turns any surface into a color touchscreen display (video hands-on)
Ever heard of a small company called Light Blue Optics? Probably not. But it's companies like LBO that make events like CES truly worthwhile. Tucked away in a small suite overshadowed by the million dollar spreads owned by industry giants like Samsung and Sony is a tiny startup looking to attract the attention of OEMs with its full-color holographic laser projection technology. The Windows CE-powered Light Touch represents the company's very first effort to create an interactive projector that allows users to interact with the displayed image as they would a modern touchscreen display. Despite our skepticism, we came away suitably surprised -- impressed even. Granted, our hands-on was performed in a lowly-lit room on par with the lighting you might find in a fine restaurant. Still, the 15 lumens were effective at lighting videos and the touch sensitivity was far more accurate than we expected -- so good that we were quickly typing out phrases on the QWERTY with few mistakes (admittedly taking a reasonable amount of care to strike the right "key"). The projector only supports single-touch at the moment though multi-touch is just a software tweak away. See the video after the break and prepare to be suitably amazed at watching a laser projector create a touchscreen display.%Gallery-81902%
Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid hands-on and impressions
There's no hiding the fact that the first images of the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid amazed us, and now after seeing the device we can say the feeling was well-founded -- the detachable resistive multitouch display worked better than we ever expected for such an early preproduction unit. Check the mouthwatering gallery below and then head over the break for full impressions and a few videos showing off the U1's finer points. %Gallery-81541%
Video: LG Watch Phone hands-on
So we dropped by LG's booth here in the South Hall at CES and weren't really surprised to see a whole bunch of watch phones in a case that looked like it was just moved out of Jacob & Co. There was a surplus of models dolled up behind glass, but only two out on the floor. LG was being super secretive about the transitions between the various screens, but we did our best to sneak peeks through the fingers on our not-so-generous demonstrator's hand. What we did see looked pretty polished though (which you should know by now) and the transitions looked like browsing music on the iPhone. We were able to find out that the screen is not an OLED. LG went with a TFT with capacitive touch but we were told that it would work through a golf glove -- though we're not exactly sure about this. Be sure to check out the gallery for even more glamor shots and check after the break for video of the device (or the parts that LG would let us see) and prepare to be amazed. Ooh, shiny.%Gallery-41148%
Hands-on with Novatel's MiFi 3G hotspot
We've talked about the svelte silver -- and a black version is in the works -- MiFi card and of course CES gave us a chance to put one to work. And, well, what can we say, it works as advertised. While we've not had a chance to speedtest it, hide it in the darkest corners of the temporary Engadget Mansion or otherwise abuse it, we know we want. Launch is expected sometime midway through 2009 on some US CDMA carrier with two GSM / HSDPA variants coming shortly after. Short video of it doing its blinky thing after the break.
