CES Hodgepodge & a Money Bumbling Inventor

First of all, I had to go check out the Motorola Xoom to see what all the hype was about.

I kept getting asked if I had seen the Motorola Xoom (the new competitor to the iPad that won Best of Show) but since I missed it, I went back to CES just to check it out.

This is actually the Motorola booth. The Microsoft sign is for the booth behind it.  All the guys there were checking out Motorola’s latest devices. The booth was dark, lit with LED’s, very edgy and cool.

This is a Motorola dude explaining the Xoom to someone who mattered, which was obviously not me.

After seeing bazillions of tablets, and then the Xoom, I didn’t grasp why all the buzz was about the Xoom.

To me, it seemed like an iPad with a camera, and a few more things. Why Best of Show?

The Entourage Edge, however, knocked my socks off. I even dragged 4 other people over there to see it.

The photo links to their site. If you buy one, tell them Technorazzi sent you.

(Not that they know me, let alone commission me. I just promote what I like.)

I don’t mean to diss Motorola, I have a cornucopia of Motorola items I love.

Now I even have this photo of world-famous hacker Kevin Mitnick posing in front of the Motorola logo. (If you remember, Mitnick hacked into Motorola once upon a time, so I thought this was priceless.)

Life. (Logo) Powered.  That’s a killer slogan. Kudos to the advertising firm.

Here’s Mitnick in front of another one of his past hacking conquests.

Makerbot was making waves. Thing-O-Matic? Hehehe. Love their brains!

I also had to take a photo of the Qt booth for Tolga. He worships Qt. Seriously, if there were posters of anything Qt, he’d plaster his walls with them instead of Nicole Kidman posters. It’s right up there with Mountain Dew.

Not sure what these guys were, but Asian people kept posing for photos with these birds, I thought I should take a pic too, for no good reason. Peer pressure I guess.

This was crazy cool too. A woman walks into a booth at a clothing boutique, gets scanned and 3Dified, and when she comes out, her body is made into a 3D avatar which she can then use to “try on” clothes without having to go through all the effort!

Then in the press room, I met an eccentric genius named Ken Lager who had a parrot that was, um, being a pain in the neck.

Actually, the bird was a brilliant marketing move because it made me interested in this guy. His suitcase, which he had on the counter in the press room, reminded me of the trunk of John Draper’s car, not to mention my own closet, so I instantly liked him.  Besides, who else would do this at a tech show?

I didn’t even have to ask him to “Show Me the Money!” Here just did it spontaneously.

Then, of course, he dropped the money. I started laughing, couldn’t help it. (See that pink gingham fabric bag in the bottom left?  That’s my Betsey Johnson purse. Sadly, none of his life savings made it in there.)

Ken Lager’s clumsiness was so fun to participate in, I was LOL-ing loudly. So loud, in fact, that it resulted in scowls and fowl looks from the real writers on deadline for serious publications. I was hoping the bird would fly over them and drop a surprise, but no such luck.

Oh well. It made me more amused by the bumbling ways of this random geek I met at CES, so I interviewed him using Voicepods, a new software Tolga made me last week for my iPad. I’ll write about Ken soon. (By the way, remember to hit the orange button on the top right to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don’t miss any of our nonsense.)

Anyway, that was my last day at CES. Sad it’s over.