A photo essay of the 2006 DigitalLife Show in New York City on October 12, 2006.
David Carnoy
Executive Editor David Carnoy has been a leading member of CNET's Reviews team since 2000. He covers the gamut of gadgets and is a notable reviewer of mobile accessories and portable audio products, including headphones and speakers. He's also an e-reader and e-publishing expert as well as the author of the novels Knife Music, The Big Exit and Lucidity. All the titles are available as Kindle, iBooks, Kobo e-books and audiobooks.
In only its third year, DigitalLife has gradually been growing, but it's still relatively small trade show. You could make the rounds of the show floor at New York's Javits Center in a few hours--or less, if you're a hot-shot tech journalist who's seen most of this stuff already.
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The general public lines up to get into the show after the press had the show floor to themselves for two hours.
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Mio Technology was showing off its its slick little Digi Walker, which is a GPS/portable entertainment device, all rolled into one. However, given its name, we were a little disappointed there was no built-in pedometer.
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This is the company's not-yet-officially-announced Pocket PC with built-in GPS.
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At Sega's booth, you could play both the PS3 and the XBox 360 versions of the upcoming Sonic title. For those keeping score, the XBox 360 version was 10 percent further along in its development than was the PS3 version.
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Shortly after we snapped this shot, this good-looking cake was snarfed down by throngs of geeks, hungry to celebrate Sonic's 15th birthday.
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Microsoft had a couple of gaming-oriented booths. This one allowed you to play just about every title available in its XBox Live Arcade service for the 360.
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In the back of the hall, there were lots of little booths hawking accessories, most of them for the iPod. This double-layer case from Vermont-based Mophie adds dual headphone jacks to your Nano.
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OK, maybe it was actually more of a presentation, but you could learn everything you possibly need to know about HD-DVD from this expert.
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PS3 has Blu-ray, but the XBox 360 will shortly have an external HD-DVD drive. Forget HD-DVD, the drive's almost worth getting just for those two extra USB ports on the back.
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Microsoft's Flight Simulator 10 in action.
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Neuros makes digital VCRs that record video in formats that are friendly to portable devices such as the iPod, the PSP, and smart phones. The company's latest product, the OSD, was just released, but it still has some kinks to work out with its firmware. Neuros is relying on its tech-savvy early adopters to help with upgrades. I have a feeling that the OS in OSD stands for open source.
