by Stephanie McLoughlin

Test Center Tracker: Dispatches from CES

analysis
Jan 11, 20072 mins

Gadgets and gizmos galore: Oliver Rist is braving the Vegas crowds at CES to bring you a taste of the portable future. Check out the fancy Flybook tablet, Packet8's VoIP deal (with nifty video phone), and Buffalo Technology's small-but-powerful TeraStation Pro II. Looks like there are plenty of new toys to drool over at this year's show, although today's Enterprise Windows column takes Microsoft to task for a fe

Gadgets and gizmos galore: Oliver Rist is braving the Vegas crowds at CES to bring you a taste of the portable future. Check out the fancy Flybook tablet, Packet8’s VoIP deal (with nifty video phone), and Buffalo Technology’s small-but-powerful TeraStation Pro II. Looks like there are plenty of new toys to drool over at this year’s show, although today’s Enterprise Windows column takes Microsoft to task for a few shortcomings in its Home Server.

The other side of CES: On the other hand, Brian Chee is at CES too, and he’s discovering a dark side: there are still many, many Bluetooth devices roaming the world without security protection. Brian did a straightforward experiment: “some simple scanning with my old iPaq H3900 with the older v1.0 Blue Tooth radio. (limited distance) With at least 2 dozen devices in range, 80% of these were willing to talk to me, 80% of those were willing to accept business cards and 10% were willing to accept a file.” Yikes. Time to re-examine your wireless security.

Speed racer: InfoWorld storage maven Mario Apicella’s looking for faster storage before diving into Vista. Turns out there are a couple of technologies making waves in the performance fishbowl: the SanDisk SSD UATA 5000, hybrid drives, and Intel’s Robson cache. Check out today’s Storage Insider column and find out if any of these are ready for prime time booting.