Did you know you can send text messages with your face when you’re in a call on the iPhone? That’s quite a feature. Apparently the proximity sensor in my phone isn’t working so hot these days…

Thanks to my pal Nick for pointing out my potentially offensive messages

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Don’t have time to watch over an hour of Steve waxing poetic about his new toys? Let Mahalo Daily help.
MD038 - The Steve Jobs 90 Minute Keynote (in 60 Seconds)

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“There’s something in the air” for this year’s Macworld (and yes, it’s probably in some part eau de fanboi), and people are starting to speculate on what His Mighty Steveness will announce. Will it be a sub-notebook? (I hope so) Perhaps a higher-capacity, Widgets-compatible iPhone, along with the SDK? Maybe even a 3G version? Sure, that seems possible. WiMax-enabled laptops? Highly doubtful.
What do you think is coming? Any surprises you think they’ll throw in this year? Rumors you want to smash? And how annoying is it that Macworld and CES are overlapping once again in 2009 (curse you!!!)?

I’ll be there tomorrow on the show floor, checking out all the fun new toys. See you then!

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What’s happened to conferences in 2007? During the past week, I think we’ve all been waiting for some truly amazing news to come out of CES, and it never came. So what’s the deal? Is there just too much industry pressure for these annual events for the companies to live up to? New rule for CES: If you don’t have anything good to show me that’s going to come out in the current calendar year, then you have no business having a booth on the show floor. We cover it because it’s there and because people find it interesting, but how frustrating is it that, for example, the hot new product you just saw won’t be out until 2010? Enough with the prototype and “concept designs.”

This whole scenario reminded me a lot of E3, and how drastically different it was from past years. Yes, the lack of excess was refreshing for people, but there were no amazing announcements to give it some balance. I don’t know, maybe if they had some dancing bears or something it would have taken the edge off of hearing about delayed titles and lackluster console sales.

There are exceptions, of course. Macworld is an obvious example of a show that keeps it’s intensity, but it’s also not as broad in scope as E3 or CES. And smaller conferences are also garnering a lot of attention, but that has a lot to do with their niche focus (such as startups at TechCrunch40 or LeWeb).

I don’t know, maybe it’s unrealistic to expect to be wow’d at every conference like this. And I certainly don’t think that companies like Sony or Samsung should sit on new stuff all year to save it for a big unveiling at CES, either. But with the rate that technology is progressing, I’m just a little surprised with the lack of new things to see here at the show floor. I guess there’s always next year.

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