Kodak has announced a waterproof pocket video camera and a new touch screen camera with an unusual search feature in its raft of products for CES.

The Kodak Slice is a touch screen digital camera which stores up to 5000 photos on the internal memory. It shoots photos and videos in HD. The interesting feature is a search function which uses facial recognition and stored information about location and time of the shot to let you sort photos according to who's in them and when and where you took them. The Slice is wifi-ennabled meaning that you can share photos from your camera instantly with Facebook, Flickr or Youtube.

The Slice Touchscreen Camera will be available in black, nickel and radish for £299.99 beginning in April 2010

Kodak's Playsport Video Camera shoots in HD and works underwater - up to a depth of 10ft. Meant for rugged adventurous video shooting, the one-button to record make the device very simple to use. You can buy accessories which let you mount the camera on your helmet, handlebars or just hang it around your neck.

The PLAYSPORT Video Camera will be available in Abyss (black), Wave Crash (blue) and Adrenaline Rush (purple) for £129.99 beginning in April 2010.

See www.kodak.com for more information on both

All the big manufacturers at CES this year are knocking out rivals to Apple's forthcoming Tablet: call them tablets, slates, netbooks or what you will, this is the hot area in hardware.

Lenovo have brought in some heavy-hitting gadgets to this new niche. We already looked at the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid - half-laptop half-tablet, and another of their key products is the cute little Skylight.

It's a smartbook. If you can keep up with all the new names flying around, a smartbook is supposed to be a cross between a smartphone and a netbook. Lenovo say: "Skylight harnesses the best of smartphones and netbooks to create a new mobile consumer device." It's powered by a Snapdragon chipset, used in smartphones like Toshiba's TG01 and Google's new Nexus One, and designed to run rich functions on low power. That's ideal for mobile devices which need to economise on battery use and gives the Skylight a whopping 10 hours of battery life.

The Skylight is little, colourful and cute boasting all day battery life, robust wireless connectivity and a custom interface with live web gadgets (apps). Lenovo have already hooked up with network providers AT&T to link the Skylight up to their 3G mobile broadband network in the US.

Thinner than many smartphones, it has a high-definition 10 inch screen and comes in glossy lotus blue or earth red.

The Lenovo Skylight smartbook will be available starting in April in the U.S.It will be available in China and in Europe later this year. In the U.S., it will be sold through www.lenovo.com, www.att.com and AT&T retail stores. Pricing will start at $499 at full retail price.

See all stories from CES 2010 here

Half 'tablet' half laptop, Lenovo's new IdeaPad U1 Hybrid is a clamshell that you can take the screen off. Yes that's right, the screen is detachable and by itself it functions as a touch-screen tablet, giving the user two computers in one.

Each half has its own processor, operating system and battery that work together as a clamshell laptop or separately when the screen is functioning as a multitouch slate tablet.

Lenovo describe the technology as game-changing: "The IdeaPad U1 hybrid notebook is a game-changing technology in the PC industry that lets user switch their PC experience within a single device to match their dynamic lifestyle," said Liu Jun, senior vice president, Idea Product Group, Lenovo.

They claim it fuses the functionality of a notebook with the slate tablet's rich multitouch entertainment and mobile Internet experience.

The device has a 11.6 inch HD LED screen and runs Windows 7 off a powerful ARM processor chip. It's available in scarlet and weighs 1.8 pounds with the keyboard and 1.6 as a tablet.

The laptop base acts as a kind of dock for the tablet - which is meant for mobile use and has a 5hr battery life. Lenovo assures that the transition between the two is seamless.

Cool or what.

The Lenovo IdeaPad U1 hybrid notebook will be available in the US in summer 2010 with an estimated retail price of $999. The product will be available in the UK later in the year.

See all stories from CES 2010 here

CES has thrown up a few little surprises as well as the serious gadgets you'd expect. Take the augmented reality helicopter that you can control with you iPhone for example. Oh yes. The AR Drone Quadricopter (that's a four propeller helicopter) is a game accessory made by Parrot and looks like loads of fun.

Controlled by either an iPhone or an iPod touch, the AR Drone lifts up and flies. Raise the iPhone and the copter raises, tilt to the left and the device tilts to the left. The Drone boasts two cameras: one for controlling the device and another which streams images back to the iPhone/touch.

Just make sure you don't take a phone call while controlling it or someone's window is going to take a hit.

It's great fun as a standalone remote control toy. But where the AR Drone gets really fun is when the augmented reality kicks in and you can use the helicopter as part of a game. While flying the copter in the real world, you can compete against other copters in virtual airspace over the web using a specially created Parrot site.

Parrot is also issuing an SDK in the hope that developers will create even more fun uses for the device. There's no firm price yet but Techdigest suggest a figure of around $500.
AMAZING.

[via TechDigest]

See all stories from CES 2010 here

Is this the longest iPod speaker ever? Well it's certainly an unusual design. Audio equipment makers iLive have debuted a massive 33 iPod and iPhone-compatible audio products at CES this year and the iTDP610B bar speakers is one of the weirdest-looking. Available at either 32 inch or 37 inches this would sit along the back of your desk creating they claim, a top quality surround sound effect, without having to place 5 speakers around the room. It's also a DVD-player (plug into a screen to see the picture of course..) and has a motorised door which opens to reveal the iPhone dock and DVD slot. I'm a sucker for a motorised door.

Will be available for $199.99

[via Engadget]

See all stories from CES 2010 here

The CES offerings from camera-makers Canon include a duo of affordable and user-friendly digital cameras - the PowerShot A495 and the PowerShot A490, updates on the manufacturer's budget 'A' range.

Available in silver and red & blue (for the A495) these are cheap and cheerful cameras bringing some zingy features to the affordable price bracket.

The new cameras offer a 10.0 Megapixel sensor and genuine Canon 3.3x optical zoom lens, producing large, detailed images. Smart Auto mode takes care of picture settings automatically, and pictures are framed and displayed on a bright 6.2cm (2.5") LCD display.

Face detection and on screen red-eye correction allow for better portrait photographs and for intelligent self-timer shots - the A490 and A495 recognise when your face is in front of it.

And screen modes 'Poster Effect' - which reduces the number of colours for an older, poster-style look and 'Super Vivid' which adds a higher level of saturation to images to provide a dramatic, enriched effect, let you go a bit creative with the shots without the need for a computer.

The cameras come with Smart Automatic features such as the Scene Detection Technology, which automatically recognises shooting conditions and applies the optimum picture settings required to get the perfect shot: whether that's night-time, a close-up or a bright sunny day.

Both available from February in Argos. No prices yet.

See all stories on CES 2010

Stories from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas from Day One and before the show:

CES 2010: Kodak launches a waterproof video cam and a cool search function

CES 2010: Lenovo releases mobile smartbook the Skylight

CES 2010: Lenovo launch the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid, a notebook with a detachable screen

CES 2010 launch: AR Drone from Parrot is a helicopter you can control with your iPhone

CES 2010: 37" bar speakers from iLive - longest iPod speakers ever?

CES 2010 announcement: Skype moves on to the TV, and goes High Definition

CES 2010 launch: Lenovo releases new Thinkpad - the design-consicious Edge

CES 2010 launch: L5 app makes iPhone into universal remote, but do we want it?

CES 2010 announcement: Gaming Notebook Battalion Touch CZ-10 will be first to have multi-touch screen

CES 2010 launch: Canon launches zingy but affordable PowerShot A490 and A495 cameras

See all stories from CES 2010 here

The first gaming notebook to feature a multi-touch screen has just been released at CES. Made by game-ware manufacturers iBuyPower, the Battalion Touch CZ-10 takes advantage of the multitouch capacity on Windows 7 to let gamers use the whole screen as a control.

And when's that useful? well the touch screen is "perfect for Real-Time strategy gaming titles like the upcoming strategy title R.U.S.E from Ubisoft" say the manufacturers.

In case you didn't know it was a gaming computer the Battalion Touch CZ-10's got a flame-coloured leopard on the back. Not the most artistic of designs but it gets the point across.

The 15-inch multi-touch gaming notebook will be the first in a line of multi-touch gaming notebooks from iBuyPower.

No prices yet, but check the ibuypower website for more details

From February, iPhone users will be able to turn their handset into a universal remote for the electrical goods in their house.

Universal remotes such as Logitech's Harmony already exist, and L5 is taking it one step further by ditching the handset altogether, using the hardware on the iPhone and simply providing an accessory and app. This means your iPhone could control everything.

According to a report on the Apple Blog, L5 have made an accessory which clips into the iPhone's power socket and lets the phone beam commands to electrical devices up to 30ft away. The app provides the user interface, a screen of buttons that you can rearrange according to your taste. The app is free with the device which will cost approximately $45.

L5 describe the features:
- Powerful enough to replace a coffee table full of remotes.
- Drag and drop to design the remote you want.
- Keep the buttons you use. Delete the ones you don't.
- Quick and easy setup.
- Intuitive app for iPhone and iPod touch.
- No batteries, no WiFi, no wall plug needed.
- 100,000 button/1000 remote capacity.

But do we want it?
It would make the iPhone even more indispensable, but would you want one gadget to all that? Commenters on the AppleBlog post said no. Several pointed out that they wouldn't actually want a phone that doubled up as remote control - what if you receive a call and then want to pause or mute the TV?

Commenter Niraj says: "Yeah, or if you are in a call and want to change the channel. Or if you handed the phone to a friend or relative to talk to someone, and now you can't control your TV? A remote control seems like the kind of thing where you *do* want a dedicated device".

And Chese spells out a disaster scenario where multitasking your smartphone as your remote results in your other half leaving to watch TV in the bedroom and your iPhone getting soaked in beer.

We're just saying - it could get complicated...

More information from L5: http://l5technology.com/