Retail: Features

The International Consumer Electronics Show is a veritable electronics smorgasbord, full-to-brimming with televisions, tablets, telephones, and cameras. The iOS accessories market is no different, getting its very own dedicated pavilion at CES. Here are some of the standout products we’ve seen in both the iLounge Pavilion and the rest of the show floor throughout our CES travels.

'Tis the season to begin ramping up online shopping activity, and for retailers that means doing all they can to ensure their websites are up, highly available and able to handle peak capacity. Looming in many IT managers' minds is the cautionary tale of Target, whose website crashed twice after it was inundated by an unprecedented number of online shoppers when the retailer began selling clothing and accessories from high-end Italian fashion company Missoni.

The question about ebooks is not if they will pass print, but when.

When the Kinect for Xbox 360 was released in late 2010, it created a buzz in the video gaming industry that had not been seen in many years. A webcam-style add-on peripheral for Microsoft’s video game console, the Kinect eliminated the need for a traditional control pad and instead allows the user to interact with video games through body gestures and voice commands. While Kinect was a success, selling an excess of 10 million units as of March, it was still just a video game accessory that was locked to the Xbox 360 platform and its implementation did not go further than video games.

We haven't seen HP hype a tablet since last year's flirtation with Windows 7, but that could change after February 9, when the company has all but confirmed that it will introduce its first WebOS tablet.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the recent Wikileaks scandal has shaken the Internet to its core. Regardless of where you stand on the debate, various services have simply refused to handle Wikileaks' business -- everything from domain-name providers to payment services -- and this has led to many questioning how robust the Internet actually is.

Rather than bore you with an opening line about how Android phones outsold the iPhone last quarter, I'm going to begin with an anecdote:

Nintendo's newly announced 3DS handheld promises 3D imagery without the need for goggles. How is this possible? If it does indeed use Sharp's "parallax barrier" technology, this is how it works.

Taiwanese e-reader makers jockeyed to show off new technologies at the Taipei International Book Exhibition over the weekend and said the emerging model for the devices is to sell them as part of a content bundle.

Now that Apple has revealed all of the iPad, we can finally discard all the wishful rumors that surrounded the tablet's launch. It's time to hold the tech press -- ourselves included, of course -- accountable for all sorts of iPad hopes, dreams and miscalculations. Not that Apple shouldn't have included some of the things we heard about.

Now that the mania of Apple's iPad (such a bad name) announcement has begun to calm and people are checking bank accounts instead of RSS feeds for more information, big-name critics are pulling out their swords and taking swings at Apple's latest creation. The overall reaction has been, in a word, underwhelming. What was hotly anticipated has mostly turned into cold soup. So what happened and what is being said?

Like it or not, 3D HDTV is here, and could make a huge splash in the consumer electronics market over the coming years. It seems like only yesterday when 1080p and 120Hz were the top of the line specs for which our eyes lusted and our wallets despised. Well, that's old-hat now, and it's time you got yourself educated on the 3D technology that will define HDTVs in 2010 and beyond.

The NAMM show, put on by the International Music Products Association, is one of the largest music product trade shows in the world. The 2010 NAMM Show took place this weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA, and companies from all over the music industry were busy unveiling a wide variety of new products all across the board. The following is a quick list of some of the things that particularly caught my eye.

Microsoft Windows 8 may be coming as early as 2012, based on a recent rash of comments and hints dropped by Microsoft personnel in official capacity and informal context.

These Christmas gift ideas may surprise even the most hardened geeks in your life

For once, Intel knows how it feels to be the underdog.

A day after a leading industry analyst reported that Dell cancelled its smartphone due to lack of interest from cellular carriers, a new report says the PC maker's handset may be very much alive.

The 5730 XpressMusic

Ah, the Apple App Store. Since July 2008, the month when Apple opened its wildly popular library of applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the world has been treated to more than 20,000 apps, with some 500 million downloaded as of February 2009.

Apple's iPod has been outrageously successful and slyly prolific. In the seven-plus years since Apple introduced the iPod, the company has created 17 versions.