CES 2010: Picks and Pans

10.01.2010

Car Tech Gets an Upgrade: Ford's upcoming has proven one thing: The auto giant has realized that cars needn't lag woefully behind the rest of the technology world. MyFord, which will appear in the 2011 Ford Edge, can connect to the Internet with a USB modem, play gobs of media, and, in the future, let you operate mobile apps from the dashboard or by voice. It could be the greatest in-car innovation since the auxiliary port. --Jared Newman

The Need for Speed: For data speed demons, USB 3.0--announced by a slew of vendors--is shaping up as a promising connection interface. Our early tests of revealed a desktop hard drive with plenty of performance mojo. While WD's first USB 3.0 product is a desktop 3.5-inch drive, I'm personally looking forward to Seagate's Black Armor PS110, a portable 2.5-inch drive; over an actual USB 3.0 port, such as that announced on some HP models, this drive can run, unpowered, at faster speeds than its USB 2.0 cousins. --Melissa J. Perenson

Not Another Standards Battle, Please: Two competing high-bandwidth wireless technologies both picked up support at CES. Sibeam's WirelessHD, which promises up to 4GB of throughput in the 60GHz band, will power the wireless hookups between new Vizio sets and Blu-ray players. But LG, which last year introduced pricey WirelessHD sets, is switching to the Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI), which uses the 5GHz band and promises up to 3GB throughput. Just what we need: . --Yardena Arar

(For a slideshow summary of these Picks and Pans, see "" and ".")