TECH SPECIAL..Techilicious CES 2012

The Beautiful And The Magnificent Waterproof cellphones, Android apps on Windows 8 and a phone with massive battery life: here's the best of the best YES, I know. This was supposed to be all about the best and the worst of the Consumer Electronics Show this year. It's not! One, there were very few clunkers this year and two, all I've got is two measly pages to bring you the biggest consumer electronics show in the world. Forget all the bad stuff, forget the worst ­ it's time to roll out the beautiful, the magnificent and the awesome: the best of CES 2012. SAMSUNG ULTRABOOK 9 Talk about building a stunning product and also stunningly confusing people. This is the 9 series Ultrabook from Samsung, which is what it was called last year too. Why pour in state-of-the-art changes and upgrade something so significantly and still call it the same? This year's model is thinner, lighter and more powerful. If an Ultrabook could be called an anorexic demigod, then this is it. BELKIN STREAMCAST The dream gadget is finally a reality and the tangled cable nightmare is finally over. No more cables, dust-gathering wires and HDMI to connect all your peripherals to your TV. A gaming console, a 3D BluRay player, your HD DTH player... just connect them to the StreamCast and even if it's 100 feet away, it will transmit it all to your TV with zero loss of quality. Even 5.1 surround sound, thus, can be used for a full audiophile setup with no source wires. Perfection. LG 55 OLED TV OLED is our future. Low power, high-contrast, razor-thin, stunning images ­ and now it's got a model number and a release date ­ just not a price point yet. LG's 3D 55-inch OLED TV, out in September, will stun your eyes (and your bank balance). SAMSUNG 55 OLED TV And right next to the LG and looking as stunning was the Samsung OLED. It's pure love and lust and absolute wizardry for the eyes. The only question is, who will be the first to take these stunners out for us to buy? MOTOROLA RAZR MAXX If you're the chatty type, then this could well be the only gadget you need to read about on these pages. This is the Razr that has some serious battery power ­ 3300 mAh of it. It can give you 21 hours of talktime ­ that's straight talktime, not standby. It's still Razrthin and it's still super good-looking. This is talking your brains out to the Maxx. MOTOACTV Strap it on and it gives you multiple gadgets in one. It can talk to your phone, show your messages, give you notifications and tell you the time too ­ but it's the fitness part that is really stunning. It tracks your life and movement down to the point where it'll literally tell you to move that fat a*s off the chair and onto the running track. Powerful uploads to a dedicated website to seal the deal. LENOVO S2 TAB At one time this company was only know for making serious, fairly drab looking laptops. Today, it seems to be churning out the most exciting looking and high performing devices one after the other. The Lenovo IdeaPad S2 is a 10.1-inch tablet with a 1280×800 IPS screen display and a snap-out laptop-to-Tablet latch system plus about 22 hours of battery life. It weighs just 580 gm. Yes, Lenovo is really doing some good things in their labs. SAMSUNG TUBE AMP DOCKS Talk about a great idea. Build some of the best looking docks and add one feature to them that makes them stand out from the rest. Samsung just did just that. They built tube amps into a whole line up of docks. Tube Amps, which existed only in the field of pure audiophile equipment, can now be giving off a warm and fulfilling sound from your Galaxy S2 phone. SENNHEISER RS 220 The number of people waiting in line to try this one at CES was almost ridiculous. This is where wired headphones are made to look very bad. With digital inputs, a bass that thumps right deep into your spine and clarity that blows anything with a cable out of the water ­ the wait for the RS 220 is over. This is pure audiophile wireless nirvana wrapped around your ears. HUAWEI ASCEND P1 S Here's a company on fire that is churning out one world-beater after another. The Ascend P1 S is the world's thinnest smartphone and it looks it. It's 6.68 mm thick and beats the Moto Razr by a fair bit as that one is 7.1 mm. A 4.3-inch AMOLED screen, dual-core 1.5 GHz CPU, SGX 540 GPU, 8-megapixel camera and 1 GB of RAM. Now tell me you're not salivating.

(RAJIV MAKHNI HTBR 5FEB12)