Live From IFA (Almost)

I spent today at the Berlin Messe Convention centre for a set of press conference in the lead up to this year’s IFA event. IFA is a very large Consumer Electronics show similar in style to the CES event we cover in Las Vegas (although still smaller than CES) Unlike CES members of the public can visit IFA (for a fee) with the public days starting tomorrow.

Like CES the venue suffers from a lack of decent connectivity and despite my best efforts I found it impossible to  live blog as I had intended. So here is my somewhat later than live – live blog.

After an early start arrived just in time to get a glimpse at what Dell will be showing.

It twists it turns–a glimpse of Dell’s Win 8 future:

Dell also had a slightly more conventional touch screen all-in-one:

Toshiba in on the Windows 8 designs as well (the first image is the Toshiba U920t)

Samsung conference is over subscribed – I wonder why! Hopefully Andrew is in and will cover. I’ve headed next door to Philips which is pretty busy:

Jamie Oliver at Philips Press Conference demonstrating their new Home Cooker device. Steams, Boils, Fries and Stirs. Actually a quite impressive bit of kit basically a food processor with a cooker built in. Can stir at the same time as heating. What he is mixing up smells amazing.

Philips apparently sells more music docks than anyone else in europe. They seem very proud of their Fidelio products which apparently don’t get to market unless approved by a set of Golden Ears. I must admit to not realising that the wireless speakers supports Android as well as iPhone. The new Fidelio 5.1 Blu-Ray unit and speaker bar look good.

Quite like Philips InRange is a novel device that you put say in your wallet and it will alert you  on your phone if your wallet get more than a certain distance from your phone.

TP Vision now talking – Philips and TPV’s 5 Month old joint venture in TV. Good to see that the Philips name will remain on TVs.  If you didn’t know TPV are apparently the number 1 manufacturer of Monitors in the world.

Looking to reduce thickness of both screen and bezel. Predicting high growth in large screen with 46 inch becoming a main stream size.

The new 6900 series looks good in terms of its frameless design.

The top of range PFL9707 Smart TV has very  clever new remote with built in pointer(mouse) and Qwerty keyboard. The SmartTV interface looks very straightforward to use. Oh and the picture looks fabulous.

Very neat trick with Twitter on the Philips SmartTV – as you change channel the twitter feed changes to show tweets about the current show.

The Philips iPad app for their TV’s has really improved and now allows streaming of the content showing on the TV – driven from the TV itself. I guess this will need one of their newer models.

Now for  the mad rush to catch the plane back.

Oh and I can confirm Jamie Oliver’s Demo tastes as good as it looks.