The Cell Phone Junkie

The Consumer Electronics Show for 2012 is now officially over, but the impact of the conference will stretch for the next 12 months.  Whether it’s new technologies  just getting off the ground, or new partnerships just announced, we now have our baseline for the rest of the year.  Over the past week, we’ve spent time running around the trade show floor, meeting with vendors, attending press events and watching numerous press conferences.  Here are some highlights of things we saw, along with the other 153,000 of our closest friends.

Devices

One of the bigger device draws of the show as far as coverage and interest was the Samsung Galaxy Note.  We saw this used for a variety of things, from a caricature drawing of Joey to standard tablet functionality.  Either way, this device looks to be huge (both literally and figuratively) going into the next year.

And of course, check out the video of Joey’s caricature in the making.

Note not your style? How about A Samsung Galaxy S II in white?  This was our first chance to see the device in white, and it sure looks good!

Of course, one of the biggest devices of the show, the Nokia Lumia 900.  While we only had a few minutes to play around with the hardware, it’s clear that Nokia has hit a home run, and this will be the benchmark for Windows Phone hardware for the foreseeable future.

Huawei unveiled the world’s thinnest smartphone, the Ascend P1 S.  The device is 6.68 mm thick, and features a 4.3″ Super AMOLED qHD 960 by 540 display, dual-core TI IMAP 4460 Cortex-AP chipset running at 1.5 GHz and will run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Samsung showed off the Galaxy Tab 7.7 with a 7.7 inch Super AMOLED Plus display, Android 3.2 and a 1.4GHz dual-core processor.

Then, there was the Intel Atom Z2460 “Medfield” reference phone.  The Z2460 platform represents a unique shift in instruction-set architecture to Intel’s platform versus the common, power efficient ARM based mobile handsets and tablets. The device shown is not a unit that will be sold to the public, but it does represent what manufactures can do with the Atom processor based chipset. Intel is facing serious competition because manufacturers like Qualcomm have fully integrated wireless and processor chipsets, Intel is still going to have to use external wireless chipsets.

Verizon Monday announced the Motorola DROID 4, the latest qwerty-based device in the Droid lineup from Verizon.

As we mentioned last week, the LG Spectrum was announced Monday by Verizon, launching January 19th.

Sprint showed us the Galaxy Nexus, and although we couldn’t hold it, it is the same Nexus we’ve seen from Verizon.

Sprint announced the LG Viper, an Android 2.3 powered device with 4G LTE.

Motorola and Verizon Monday announced the Droid RAZR MAXX, featuring a 3300 mAh battery for up to 21 hours of talk time.

And of course mobile hotspots: we saw a few of them from Verizon, including the Novatel Jetpack MiFi and the ZTE Jetpack and a Sierra Wireless model as well from Sprint.