Pepcom CES 2015 – Bluetooth and Wifi for all

January 2015 – Pepcom is a co-located event held at the kickoff to the 2015 CES in Las Vegas. This year the event, which was themed for the 1980’s, featured over 200 exhibitors with products ranging from accessories to hardware to software/apps for the Consumer Electronics space. The technology theme was – 2013 & 2014 CES products, give them a color refresh and add Bluetooth LE or WiFI. For already connected devices, the speed was kicked up on the transfers.

At Pepcom this year we had a chance to visit with EnGenius. Targeting the SMB space, they were showing high duty cycle, coverage area and capacity managed access points and routers under the 802.11ac protocol. These products had data rates in excess of 1750 Mbps and support multiple antenna MIMO configurations. Designed for office locations, the devices can be configured to multiple WiFI SSIDs, so guest access and temporary access can be supported without giving full access to the network on the main 2.4 and 5GHz connections.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2015 new keyboard

Lenovo was showing their new X1 Carbon laptop with the return to real keys for the function buttons a well as showing an expansion docking station for the X1. In the booth they also had the ne award winning Yuga line products and the true two piece convertible products. These devices were on display with their external drives, USB expansion products and display oriented peripherals.

LaCie 2TB Raid 1 drive with integrated Thunderbolt cable

Seagate had a display with the LaCie products. These are external storage solutions that are Mac targeted. The new device was a ruggedized drive that had dual 2TB 2.5” drives that sports a setup selection between being a 4TB Raid 0 configuration of a full 2TB Raid configuration without any software control needed just a switch. The device has a built in ~18in Thunderbolt connector, so it requires no additional support to be usable – just plug in and go. They were also showing their new mobile wireless hard drive. Available in different colors and varying capacities, the device has a USB 2.0 connection, a wireless host adapter so it can stream to up to 3 devices at once and a 6 hour battery life. The unit is a great companion to smart phones and pocket camera that want to offload their photos at high speed without a cable or without using cellular bandwidth.

KUBE Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker Cooler

Also at the event were newcomers KUBE who launched a Bluetooth connected Marine certified waterproof cooler with multiple speakers. The USB rechargeable cooler provides up to 20 hrs of music playback on the device. In this marketplace of long use lifestyle, Phaz introduced their new headphones to the market that have both a wireless play capability, but also the ability to charge back the phone with power from the headphones. This means, after longs periods of listening, you can still take a phone call as the headset will recharge the phone, and then you can return to listening.

Phaz Wireless headphones with Phone charging capability

In the headphones arena, a number of new wifi and Bluetooth connected products were launched by Plantronics, Logitech, Creative Labs, AudioFly and others. These were all bringing stereo to the wireless market to support the wireless convenience.

ecoATM was showing a kiosk, Nikon had their new V3 interchangeable Lens small format camera along with Western Digital with their NAS products and Broadcom with their connectivity solutions and their IoT development system.

Accessories supplier Zagg was also there showing their iFrogz line of portable power bricks, and new Bluetooth keyboards & speakers.