Getting Plugged In

By Wilson Rothman

If you didn't get your fill of gadgets and gizmos over the holidays, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held last week in Las Vegas, was the place to be. There's always a contest over who has the largest plasma TV. This time around, Samsung has a 102-in. set but no plans to sell it in the U.S.; LG will sell its 71-incher for $75,000. There are also always plenty of exciting trends. Here are four of the most intriguing:

IT'S NOT TV, IT'S SED

New TV technologies usually receive the CES crowd's most opinionated harrumphs, and this year the SED flat-panel technology developed by Toshiba and Canon was at the center of scrutiny. Billed as the technology that could bring down plasma, SED takes the idea of conventional cathode-ray-tube televisions and miniaturizes it: instead of one big electron gun exciting all the phosphors on a screen in sequence, millions of little electrical nodes do the same thing simultaneously. The result is picture contrast and response time that outstrip plasma and LCD with a much lower power drain. Toshiba says that production costs over time could make SED TVs relatively affordable, but the first, a big-screen set scheduled for launch this year, will cost a wheelbarrow of cash filled to an as-yet-undisclosed height.

LISTENING TO MUSIC (AND MORE) THE WIRELESS WAY

Going wireless is a constant theme in electronics today, but one cord that is still hanging around is the one that tethers stereo headphones to portable music players. This year everyone seems to be jumping for the chance to cut it. Creative Labs is introducing wireless headphones and an adapter for its Zen Micro that uses a technology called magnetic induction for a clean signal and long battery life. The kit will be available this spring for $150, possibly along with a universal wireless kit for other MP3 players. Motorola and Toshiba are both launching wireless wraparound headphones that use Bluetooth wireless networking to connect to laptops and cell phones, and HP recently introduced a similar pair, primarily for use with its iPaq PDAs. When MP3 players eventually add Bluetooth connectivity to their features, partnering them with one of these headsets will be easy. In the meantime, Belkin will offer TuneStage, a Bluetooth adapter for late-model iPods, which runs on the iPod's battery power.

Perhaps the coolest wireless device, however, is a snowboarding jacket from Burton, which teamed up with Motorola for the design. Like a previous BURTON JACKET, it connects to an iPod to jam music on the slopes. But this beauty can also route phone calls to the headphones hidden in the hood.

EXTREME CAMCORDING

No longer just a sidearm for doting daddies, camcorders are branching out. SAMSUNG'S SC-X105L (available in March for $600) has a separate wide-angle lens that you can attach, by way of headband or armband, to your extremities. The camcorder itself stays safely tucked inside your jacket or carrying case while the remote lens captures all your adrenalized action. Another innovation: Sony's DCR-DVD403 DVD Handycam (out this spring for $1,000) brings richness to a home-video soundtrack by recording audio from five directions and encoding it automatically onto a DVD in genuine Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.

BROADBAND GOES CELLULAR

On Feb. 1 Verizon Wireless fires up its new wireless broadband service in 32 cities, delivering DSL-like download speeds of 300 to 500 kbps and often higher. The new VCAST service makes Verizon the first U.S. carrier to push 15-frames-per-sec. video and high- quality stereo music to the cell phone. LG'S VX8000 will support VCAST at launch, and three more phones, from Samsung, UTStarcom and Motorola, are expected. For $15 a month on top of a standard calling plan, customers can download an unlimited stream of files to the phones or pay extra for premium content. Highlights will include music videos, Doppler weather radar, 3-D games and video clips as much as five minutes or longer, among them "webisodes" from 20th Century Fox based on the show 24.