Say hello to the BytePac. It’s a hard disk caddy made entirely out of 100% recyclable material (yes, cardboard), but before you jump to any rash, mocking conclusions – as half the office did when it arrived – let me explain how it works.

Pull off the outer sleeve and open the box, and inside there’s room for a 3.5in hard disk (or 2.5in with the included card “adapter”) to sit snugly. At the connection end the box has a flap through which you plug the combined power-and-SATA connector, the other end of which goes to both the mains and to either an eSATA or USB port on your PC. That’s all you need to get the drive running, then simply fold back a ventilation flap on the rear of the box, which doubles up as a stand to prop the drive up off the desk.

This video shows it off neatly. For a cardboard box, it’s actually rather elegant.

The question you might be asking is: why? The BytePac is billed as an alternative to external hard disks, but it’s not as robust as proper external drives, nor is it particularly thin and light. Few people will buy a disk specifically to use in a BytePac when far sleeker solutions are so common.

However, it’s best viewed as an attractive and simple archiving system. Once you’ve bought your first kit with its power box and set of cables (three empty boxes, one cable set, £34), you can simply buy more empty boxes (around £4 each) as and when you need them. Put an old disk in each, sensibly label the side of the box and stack them on a shelf as you would a collection of books. When you need some old data, just pull out the relevant BytePac and plug the cable in – the disk itself need never see the light of day.

You may already have your own archiving setup, and you may be wary of entrusting your valuable data to a cardboard box. But the BytePac is a cheap way to archive a large number of disks, it’s environmentally friendly, and it won’t look like it’s worth nicking if the burglars come round.

I’ve got one here that I’ll be playing with this week, and several people in the office have already made their minds up one way or the other, but I’m interested to hear what you think. Is the BytePac a neat archiving innovation or a piece of cheap tat?

When Amazon launched the Kindle Fire last year, it made the rather irritating decision not to bring it to the UK at the same time. The rotters didn’t even let us have the Kindle Touch, leaving us with the (admittedly excellent) fourth generation Kindle. If the rumours are to be believed, however, changes are afoot, and with the UK braced to receive Amazon’s latest baby, we’ve managed to get our hands on an import to see what’s what.

Probably the most important thing about the Fire isn’t the hardware, the software or content offering, but the price. With no official confirmation of the launch, we can’t say for sure how much it will be, but in the US it’s $199, and given Amazon’s track record on its E Ink Kindles, we can’t see it costing much more than £200. In fact, it could be less. That’s significant. Where most other manufacturers are using the iPad as a yardstick when it comes to pricing, with 10in tablets costing around £350 to £400, and smaller tablets at around £300 to £350, Amazon is setting out all on its own, with a price more akin to no-brand Chinese knockoffs. The big question is, would you buy one?

The first thing to get straight is that this isn’t a tablet in the traditional sense. Yes, it runs Android (version 2.3), but the user interface is heavily customised. There are none of the ugly smartphone-esque graphics normally associated with cheap tablets – it actually looks attractive – and it works in an entirely different way.

Gone is the usual widget- and icon-littered Android desktop, to be replaced with a bookshelf-themed front-end. Along the top of the screen runs a bar with links to different content categories: Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps and Web. Below it is a horizontally scrolling carousel of recent items, and this covers not only books and other content, but also apps and web pages. At the very bottom on the screen – on the bottom shelves – is a list of customisable favourites, to which any number of items can be added.

It’s a design that makes sense, and the reason it works so well is that it’s driven by Amazon’s content offering. You’ll doubtless be familiar with the company’s ebook and periodical library, but the Fire also provides the opportunity to rent or buy movies and TV shows, and purchase music, with users also able to borrow books using the Kindle library lending service. And with the Fire, that content doesn’t even have to be downloaded and stored locally. As with books on the Kindle, Amazon keeps copies of all purchased content in the cloud, and files can be streamed or downloaded as needed. Files can even be removed and downloaded again later.

We weren’t able to test the whole process of downloading videos and music, unfortunately, as the service isn’t yet live in the UK, but we were able to stream track previews and movie trailers smoothly, and the Kindle eBooks service worked beautifully.

Performance

Clearly Amazon has put a lot of thought into the integration of content, but to hit such a low price it’s abundantly clear that cutbacks have been made. The first casualty is the design. The Fire is a real slab of a tablet, measuring 11.5mm thick and weighing 404g – that may seem fine, but this is a 7in tablet designed for reading books on, and held in one hand it feels unwieldy compared to the best small Android tablets.

There’s also very little in the way of design nicety. There isn’t much a manufacturer can do with the glass touchscreen of a tablet, admittedly, but the rear and edges give it a chance to shine. Amazon has turned down that opportunity. The rear of the Fire is plain black, slightly rubbery plastic, with the word “kindle” etched in counter-relief, while the edges are straight up and down – not a contour nor a chamfered edge in sight.

If the looks are disappointing, the specifications are doubly so. The dual-core Texas Instruments CPU looks fine on paper, but with only 512MB of RAM to back it up, the tablet frequently feels a little ragged and jittery. The user interface isn’t affected too badly, but scrolling up and down, zooming and panning around some web pages (the BBC or YouTube homepages, for instance) is hardly smooth. Here, Amazon’s lauded Silk browser, which loads some page elements server side and attempts to predict what you’ll click on next in a bid to speed up, cannot help. The slight performance lag also affects ebooks, pages of which seem to catch slightly as they’re swiped aside.

Other disappointments include a lack of Bluetooth, no front or rear camera, single-band wireless, no GPS, and limited storage space of 8GB, with no microSD for expansion. There’s no 3G version either, which seems odd, and the resolution of the screen – 1,024 x 600 – lends a slightly grainy look to affairs.

On the positive side, the benchmark figures indicate that the tablet should take most apps and games in its stride. It finished the SunSpider JavaScript test in a time of 2,567ms – not the quickest we’ve seen, but far from poor. It completed the PC Pro HTML render test in an average of 15.5 seconds, which again isn’t bad. Although we weren’t able to use the Amazon app store, we were able to side-load a couple of games and get them running using their APK install files, and both worked smoothly.

Other aspects of performance are more impressive. The screen is a bright IPS model – we measured it at a maximum 414cd/m2, with a contrast ratio of 796:1 – so movies do look punchy and colourful, notwithstanding the low resolution. With the brightness turned down, reading text is easy on the eye too, and with more options for tweaking text than the standard Kindle, the Fire makes a decent ebook reader.

Finally, in our looped video battery test we found the Fire lasted a total of 8hrs 43mins, which is pretty good compared to other Android touchscreen devices of a similar size and with similar specifications. It’s clearly nowhere near the E Ink-based Kindle that can last weeks on a single charge, though.

Prospects

That Kindle Fire, then, is tricky to assess in light of established genres. In the context of other Android-based tablets it looks light in several areas; things we’d normally come down heavily on a normal tablet for. Although the screen is bright, and battery life acceptable, other tablets offer far more power and features, better responsiveness and more attractive design. On the other hand, it won’t satisfy fans of the E Ink Kindles, with their huge battery life and paper-like displays.

Consider it on its own merits, however, and the Fire begins to make more sense. Its inextricable links with Amazon’s services, and its focus on content, in fact, make it more of an iPad-lite than a budget Android knockoff. The cloud-based approach is ingenious, too, and adds an extra dimension.

The key thing, as mentioned at the very beginning of this preview, is the price. If Amazon does bring this tablet to the UK, and it’s around the same cost as it is in the US, it will almost certainly have a winner on its hands. It’s clearly far from perfect, but the low price, coupled with the Kindle name and Amazon’s content services, should be enough to ensure it’s a force to be reckoned with in 2012.

The Lytro has been kicking around for a few months — we covered its launch in issue 207 of the magazine — and it picked up an award at CES last week, but the camera has yet to actually ship. However, the company had a few pre-production models to let us try out the intriguing new camera technology.

The Lytro is a light-field camera, also called a plenoptic camera, and the result of research from Stanford University — the company’s website even links to the CEO’s dissertation. The idea is that the Lytro’s special sensor captures everything in the “light field” — essentially all the data about light’s intensity, direction and colour, with nothing omitted.

Shots are focused after, rather than before, the photo is taken via software on a computer (or previewed on the camera itself). This not only offers the potential to re-imagine photos and create intriguing images utterly abusing depth of field, but also means they’re snapped almost instantly, without the photographer or the hardware having to ponder over where to focus. The sensor captures so much information, it can create 3D images and slightly shift the vantage point from which the picture was taken, although it seems to work better in some photographs than others, so there is a bit of learning curve.

A light 214g, it’s small enough to hold in one hand — and I have tiny, child-sized hands. There are only two buttons, the on switch on the bottom and shutter on the top. See a shot you want to snap? It powers on in a flash, and your picture will be snapped in what feels like an instant. It is ridiculously fast.

This makes the Lytro perfect for snapshots; it’s easy to imagine it being handy as a point-and-shoot, especially after a few weeks over the holidays spent chasing my sisters’ children around with a DSLR, trying to focus on quick-moving toddlers.

The Lytro features an f/2 aperture and 8x optical zoom, which is controlled via a touch-sensitive ridge on the top of the device. The screen is also touch-sensitive; tap on the screen to zoom in or focus on any spot of the image directly in the camera. We weren’t given the desktop software or copies of our photos to try focusing after the fact on a computer, but it was clear from tapping around the images on the camera that it was indeed  possible to pick out faces or objects to sharpen up and focus on after the fact.

The camera can take pictures from as little as four inches as way from the subject, with the ability to focus on anything in the image past that point. The cameras we were handed had an experimental creative mode — which may not make it into the first round of cameras — that boosted the Lytro’s macro abilities. Put the subject directly in-front of the lens and tap the touchscreen, and the Lytro can automatically focus on the up-close object.

The bright, colourful form-factor looks like a toy, and was certainly eye-catching; twice in the hour-long trial with the camera in the lobby of the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, I was stopped and asked what exactly was in my hands, and could they try it out. (The answer, according to watching PRs, was no.)

Half of it is made up of the camera lenses, with the sensor sitting around the the midpoint. The front is made from aluminium, while the back half is rubber.

One compelling aspect of the Lytro is that the firm is constantly working to update the camera’s firmware — and upgrades such as the creative mode will be offered free.  One feature in the works is the ability to hit a button in the desktop software to put everything in focus, rather than having to pick a single point.

There are of course downsides. The Lytro is limited in what it can do. There’s no flash or any way to adjust ISO or other settings, meaning you have to work with the light you’ve got. The resolution doesn’t appear to be particularly great, and the company tries to get around this by pitching it as a device for online sharing. The company says the photographs can be exported to a 1,080 x 1,080 pixel JPG, advising users they won’t be able to cleanly print larger sized versions of their images.

Another major downside is that the desktop software, necessary to edit the light-field photo files, only works on Macs. A Windows version is in the works, however.

All in, the Lytro is an intriguing little camera that’s surprisingly fun to use. It’s no replacement for a DSLR, but at first glance the ease and speed of shooting could make it a handy point-and-shoot, for those willing to do a wee bit of post-production on snapshots to pick a focal point and export their images to standard file types.

A 16GB version, which the company says will hold 750 pictures, costs $499, while an 8GB version costs $399. The Lytro is available for pre-order now and shipping next month, but sadly initially only in the US.

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is currently the pick of the bunch when it comes to Android tablets, but one of its few weaknesses was the lack of the latest version of the OS. Not any more. It’s received its update, so we thought we’d do an update of our own.

You can read about our first encounter with Android 4 – or Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) – in our Samsung Galaxy Nexus review. We were impressed with it, but had a couple of concerns, chiefly concerning the use of soft buttons and the potential waste of valuable screen real estate. That, fortunately, is a non-issue on tablets. We’re already used to it on Honeycomb tablets, and it takes up a negligible amount of room on a 10.1in tablet such as the Prime.

Initially things don’t look that different, but a few minutes of browsing around really brings home the main advantage of the new OS: the Prime was already pretty responsive, but Android 4 takes that to the next level. It feels even more immediate than before, sweeping from desktop to desktop with the sort of smoothness typically associated with Apple products. Launching and scrolling menus feels buttery smooth, and there’s barely a judder or hesitation to be found.

In more practical terms, this translates to faster and more predictable behaviour in complicated websites. During our day-long test working with tablets, we found sites such as WordPress were barely usable on a tablet, whether iOS- or Android-based. With this ICS update, in most cases there’s zero typing lag and no irritating keyboard buffer run-on. One exception to this rule we found was Zoho Writer, which still feels sluggish in use.

Results in various benchmarks back up this impression. In our own in-house HTML test, which times the loading of 28 web pages, the Prime took an impressive 8.9 seconds, only a little behind the iPad 2’s 7.7 seconds. By comparison, with Android 3.2 on board, the Prime took 17.6 seconds.

Moving on to SunSpider, and oddly the position is reversed. On Android 3.2, the Prime  scored a scorching 1,796ms; with Android 4 on board it slipped to 2,340ms. Just for the hell of it, we also headed of to the BrowserMark website to see how the Prime would fare: it scored 116,360. Alas, we didn’t get the opportunity to test in BrowserMark under Android 3.2, but the general consensus in other reviews is that it scores around 100,000. Another victory for Android 4.

We also retested battery life, but this is one area that appears to be unchanged. With our standard looping video test and the tablet in battery saver mode, the Prime lasted for 9hrs 49mins – that’s roughly the same as the 10hrs 8mins time we achieved under Android 3.2.

Screenshots

Android 4 doesn’t just boost performance. It also brings with it an overhauled user interface and a load of new settings and features. The lock screen has the new Android 4 font, but also a change in functionality: the lock icon can be dragged to the right to unlock the tablet, or to the left to unlock and launch the camera. Small beer, but every little helps.

Once you’re into the UI proper, more small changes become apparent. In the top-right corner, the + symbol has now disappeared. This used to launch the customisation screen – where shortcuts, apps, widgets and wallpapers could be dragged onto any of the five Honeycomb desktops. That screen has gone, with widgets moving to the app drawer (see below) and the wallpaper menu accessed via a long press on the desktop.

You may also have noticed a small black square filled with app icons in the bottom-right corner. That’s a folder. As with the phone version of Android 4, folders are created by dragging one app icon onto another on the desktop, then giving it a name.

Here’s the new app launcher screen, complete with widget preview. As with Honeycomb, you swipe left and right to navigate, and there’s a new fade-in animation: as the current page of apps exits stage  left, rather than scrolling in from the right the new page of apps fades in from behind. Frivolous, but neat.

Another small change is the ability to tidy up the recent apps list. Pop up the list in the normal manner and you’ll see that the individual thumbnails can be removed with a quick swipe of the finger.  Note, that  process also removes the app from Anroid’s cached processes list, effectively killing the app completely. You can see the effects by visiting the App section of the settings screen, where you can now switch between a view of running apps and cached processes.

Speaking of which, this is the new settings screen, which looks similar to Honeycomb’s but sees a reorganisation of sorts. The list to the left is now broken up into sub-headed sections: Wireless & networks, Device, Personal and System. It’s a little easier to find your way around as a result, although it took us a while to get used to it.

There is also a handful of new options and tools hidden away in the various settings screens. Above is the new data usage screen, which gives an overview of how much data you’re consuming overall, plus a breakdown of data usage on an app by app basis. There’s the option to encrypt your tablet – apps and all – to improve security, as well as the ability to remove the lock screen if you so wish.

In terms of the core apps there are more tweaks, but nothing hugely dramatic. The Gallery app now looks a little neater, with thumbnails tidily tesselated together instead of surrounded by acres of wasted black space.  A long press on any photo or album allows photos to be shared as before, but with slightly changed options – a one-click shortcut to the  last service used is handily displayed next to the sharing dropdown.

While we’re on the subject of photos, the camera app has seen a dramatic overhaul. Much more of the screen is now given over to the viewfinder; the shutter button is surrounded by a zoom control, and there’s an extra option in the bottom-right corner for shooting panoramic photos.

Elsewhere, the changes are a little more sedate. Aside from a slight redesign, the Gmail app looks largely the same as before, and the same holds true for the email app used for POP3, IMAP and Exchange accounts. There’s still no sign of search (sigh), although you can at least browse your Outlook folders.

The Calendar, meanwhile adds a new Agenda view, listing upcoming meetings in a vertically scrolling list to the left and details in a larger pane on the right.

As far as the browser is concerned, it’s more minor tweaks. As you can see from this screenshot, there’s a new section – Accessibility – in the settings menu, which allows you to fiddle with text scaling, the amount the page zooms when the screen is double-tapped, and the minimum font size. Elsewhere, there’s a new ‘Fast Scroller’ setting, which brings up a scroll bar when the edge of a page is tapped. In a bonus for 3G tablet owners, there’s the option to switch off Google’s search result preloading, potentially saving a bob or two on data.

Finally, the keyboard sees a slight usability improvement. The look is a little cleaner, fitting in with the whole Ice Cream Sandwich ethos, but more importantly, each key is now a few pixels taller, making it a touch easier to type onscreen. The new keyboard is on the left in the above screenshot; the old Honeycomb one is on the right.

Verdict

Overall, Ice Cream Sandwich is an excellent update that turns a great tablet into an even better one. I’m sure there are more new features to find, but hopefully this gives a flavour of what to expect when the OS update starts to roll in aboard shiny new quad-core tablets over the coming months.

Tablets have come in many shape and forms at this year’s CES, but there’s only one that’s made us go “wow”. And that tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7.

It is, quite simply, drop dead gorgeous. Of course we can reel off the specs – it’s 7.9mm thin and weighs 340g  – but that doesn’t do it justice. When you pick it up for the first time your arm jumps up too quickly; it expects to be lifting something heavier.

The Tab’s 7.9mm thickness is truly remarkable too. If anything, it looks even thinner in the flesh.

This might lead cynics to think the Tab 7.7 is too fragile, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. A firm backing gives it a solid feel, and that’s backed up by a high quality finish; every bit as good as the iPad.

That lightness also means you can hold it for long periods without your arms growing tired (one of the iPad’s few flaws), and that you can chuck it into a bag without worrying about the extra weight.

Battery life sounds respectable too: Samsung claims ten hours of continuous video playback. Obviously we’d like more, but compromises have to be made to keep the weight and size down.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7 also boasts a terrific screen. Sony may have fallen out of love with OLED technology, but Samsung’s AMOLED screens produce eye-popping colours compared to the LCDs most people will be used to.

Then there’s the resolution. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to see 1,280 x 800 pixels in a 7.7in screen when seemingly all the phones announced at CES boast “HD” displays, but it works beautifully at this size. That means the interface is crisp and detailed, and helps photos and videos look great.

Naturally it’s quick to respond to commands. There is, after all, a 1.4GHz dual-core processor inside, and 1GB of RAM helps keep the OS flying along.

But this is one of the disappointments: Android OS 3.2 powers the Tab, and while we can hope/expect an Android 4 update, bitter experience has taught us never to assume.

One of the reasons for using 3.2 is that Samsung has heavily customised the interface with its “TouchWiz” design (and yes, the person who came up with the name TouchWiz should indeed be shot).

The only aspect of it we prefer over vanilla Android 3.2 Honeycomb is the “Mini Apps” tray, which gives quick access to “background” apps such as the task manager, calendar and music player.

We also like Samsung Apps. This is a so-called recommendation engine that essentially filters apps suitable for Honeycomb. Admittedly this feels like a kludge – surely such filtering should be Google’s job – but it’s very useful until the Android Market becomes easier to browse for tablet users.

We don’t think many people will be dumping their cameras and camcorders for the Tab’s built-in 3-megapixel camera, but it’s there with an LED flash and does support 720p recording. A 2-megapixel camera on the front is present for video calls too.

On the subject of calls, this first version of the Tab is going to be released in tandem with Verizon Wireless in the US, and there’s a 4G chip inside. There are no details for a similar 3G partnership in the UK yet, but we’re pretty confident discussions will be taking place.

Nor do we know how much the Galaxy Tab 7.7 will cost, but it’s notable that this first release only includes 16GB of storage; no doubt this is to keep a lid on the price. You can add up to 32GB more via the microSD card slot.

The final neat feature we should mention is the infrared port. This turns the Tab into a universal remote control, which may sound frivolous but is exactly the sort of thing people will end up using every day.

With Samsung already releasing some nice extra accessories – a keyboard dock, multimedia dock, a USB adapter that allows you to connect printers/mice/keyboards, and an HDMI adapter – it should be obvious why we think the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is the pick of the CES tablets.

Let’s just hope it lives up to our expectations when we eventually get one to test for ourselves.

There’s a sense of 3D printing coming of age here at CES 2012. A section of the South Hall is devoted to 3D printing, and there are several working models on the show floor – all with a healthy, fascinated crowd gathered around them.

3D Systems Corporation is, for example, showing off its new Cube personal printer (shown in the video below). It’s mesmerising to watch as, layer by layer, a 3D object slowly emerges before your eyes: a chess piece, a bracelet or a plastic figurine. But for $1,299 (around £850), I’d want it to print something more useful than an over-sized Christmas Cracker toy.

3D Systems is working incredibly hard to spark innovation. It’s launching tablet apps that allow you to draw your own 3D models, and the option to create 3D models out of objects captured using the Kinect camera. It’s also launched the Cubify.com website to allow people to upload and share their 3D models, and a set of APIs to allow developers to create apps for its printers. The site was only launched last week, but so far I can’t see myself shelling out $15 to print a 5in model of a bull or $5 for a shirt button. The app store is currently bare.

One 3D printing service that’s already in Apple’s App Store is French firm Sculpteo. Its iPhone/iPad app allows you to create a selection of bizarre bespoke objects, which the company then prints out and despatches to your door.

You can, for example, take a photo of yourself or a friend on the iPhone’s camera and have their profile turned into a ceramic vase. (A copy of the new issue of PC Pro for the first person to identify the member of PC Pro staff whose profile is supposedly reflected in the vase below.)

You can also design your own cup, etch social networking data into the side of a mug or create a customised iPhone case. It’s all very clever, but little more than a novelty and frighteningly expensive – the vase costs in excess of £300, for example.

I’m intrigued by the possibilities of 3D printing – many of which were discussed in our recent feature – but right now it feels like this amazing technology desperately needs a killer app to help it take off.

The compact camera market is fascinating: on one side it’s being savagely attacked by smartphones and their ever-improving cameras, and on the other by affordable DSLRs and hybrids.

But there’s still a place for compacts – taking snaps indoors in low light being one obvious example – and companies such as Samsung continue to deliver fresh ideas.

For example, there’s Mobile Link: a way to wirelessly transmit photos from your camera to any Wi-Fi equipped phone, tablet or computer.

Admittedly, wireless in itself isn’t new. We saw this in the SH100, which I blogged about from last year’s CES. However, Samsung says that it’s “doubling down” on wireless, and there are now five wireless-enabled cameras and camcorders in its line-up.

What else can you do with them? Here’s a video from a Samsung spokesperson who I spoke to at CES:

So, you don’t need to upload photos to your PC and then to Facebook (and other social-networking sites); you do it straight from the camera. That’s convenient if you’re at home, but even better if you’re abroad and at a wireless hotspot.

There’s also a nice little feature where you can use your Android smartphone or tablet as a viewfinder for the camera; with a remote control shutter, that could be a real boon.

Then there’s the capability of backing up to SkyDrive; with 25GB of free storage, it’s a potentially brilliant feature.

I’m less convinced by the ability to wirelessly back up photos to your PC – it’s simpler to remove the card and place it in your computer’s media slot, surely – and the idea of emailing photos to friends directly from a phone seems an unnecessary hassle.

But that’s just me. I’m curious what other people think. Will your next camera be wireless, or will you simply cut out the middle man – and accept some loss of quality – and use your smartphone’s camera instead?

A couple of days ago, I teased you with Sharp’s announcement of the world’s first 8K video screen. Today, I got the chance to see it with my own eyes on Sharp’s 85in (7ft!) LCD screen. I can summarise the following blog post in one word: wow.

A little recap: 8K video means 33 million pixels of high definition loveliness. They’re going to need to invent a new definition superlative, because high, super-high or ultra-high won’t do it justice. The screen has a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 – 16 times as many pixels as a Full HD screen.

The picture quality is gobsmacking. There’s no point in me even trying to take photos of the screen because my DSLR sensor hasn’t got the resolution to do it justice. You’ll have to take my word for it.

The demo video shows a close up of a man’s face that delivers the kind of detail a dermatologist would kill his mother for

The demo video shows a close up of a man’s face that delivers the kind of detail a dermatologist would kill his mother for. Every pore, every bristle in the man’s beard, every eyelash is captured. I stood staring at the man’s face for so long it was getting a little homoerotic…

Another of the demo clips shows a frankly insane Japanese game, where hundreds of men chase a tree trunk down a ludicrously steep hill. As the tree trunk gathers speed, it starts sending dust billowing into the air, and it feels like you can see every last lunatic-choking particle when the camera zooms in.

I could have sat watching all day, but Sharp has a couple of employees on hand to keep the crowd moving and mop up the saliva. If this is what the future of television looks like, I may never leave the house again.

I played the piano, lost a strange game involving multiplying insects (don’t ask) and then showed my considerable skill at losing by being heavily defeated at an excellent multiplayer game in the mould of Guitar Hero. Who needs dancing girls, cocktails or casinos?

The reason is a piece of innovation that’s bound to be copied quicker than the speed of my colleagues’ ears pricking up at the sound of dancing girls: a folding arm.

In this instance, a video is worth at least a thousand words:

The rest of the spec is almost irrelevant. Yes, it’s got a 27in display, an Intel Core processor, Nvidia GeForce graphics and up to 1TB of storage – but what matters is that arm!

Perhaps that simplifies it a little bit. Another key technical inclusion is support for ten-point multitouch. That means you can play sophisticated games with multiple players, plus any number of other applications: photo and video editing, maps, music creation to name but a few.

And it isn’t just for home use: the A720 would be absolutely perfect as a “front of office” PC for a trendy company. The A720 will be released with Windows 7, but the version I played with was running Windows 8 Developer, and it’s undoubtedly the best showpiece yet for Microsoft’s forthcoming OS.

Then we come to the Android TV

Now this one is a little more of a concept piece; it’s a 55in TV that will be released in China this year, along with a 42in version, and it looks terrific.

Its headline feature is that it runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and Lenovo has done some clever interface work – as seen by the photo.

Nor is it just a pretty face, with some equally clever work going into the remote. Want to perform a search? Then speak into it. Want to swipe left or right? Then sweep away with your finger using the remote’s built-in touch-sensitive area.

There’s also a 5-megapixel camera to bring in some interaction, and the inevitable tickbox of 3D.

Unfortunately the Lenovo rep was guarding the remote quite closely, so I couldn’t actually play with this one. But if and when this machine arrives in the PC Pro Labs, I’ll be asking for first dibs.

With Ultrabooks making laptops more slender than ever, it feels somewhat counterproductive to continue lugging a full-sized mouse around if you can’t get on with the touchpad. Logitech claims to have the answer with the incongruously named Cube.

As you’ll see from the photo, it’s not a cube – in fact, when I first saw it on the table at the CES Showstoppers event last night, I thought it was a discarded box of matches.

However, this diminutive little device is a portable mouse cum presentation clicker. The entire upper surface of the device is touch surface. You tap the top of the Cube for a left-click, near the middle for a right-click, and run your finger along the surface to scroll. To move the cursor, you drag the little box of tricks around like a mouse.

It’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker

I’ll stress that I only had chance to spend a couple of minutes with the Cube at the Logitech stand, and this should by no means be considered a definitive judgement, but… I really don’t like it.

The Cube is obviously very light, and that makes it hard to move the cursor with any precision. I’m not the biggest fan of trackpads, mainly due to their lack of accuracy, but I can’t see the Cube being any better in that regard. Having to retrain your muscle memory for left- and right-click could also prove an obstacle. And it’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker.

I do like the way that the Cube becomes a presentation clicker when you pick it up: you “click” the Cube to advance to the next slide, and flip it over and click the other side if you want to go back. It’s also unobtrusive: a little USB receiver sits almost flush in one of the laptop’s ports and the battery is rechargable via USB.

Whether that’s enough to justify the $70 (around £45) price tag is, at this stage, highly questionable. But I’ll reserve full judgement until we can literally get our hands on one in the PC Pro Labs.