Introduction

Hardware and Vegas

Ah, November! There's a brisk chill in the air, turkeys everywhere are cowering in fear, and Comdex season is upon us once again. As always, FiringSquad is here again in Las Vegas to join in on the hardware industry's yearly self-love session.

Las Vegas is a wondrous place. There are slot machines in the airports, buffets on every corner, and cabbies that insist on taking you to a strip club instead of your hotel when you really have to get back to your room to write an article about the day's events.

Brandon, Michael, and I made the trek to Comdex this year. Sarju's holding down the fort back in the home office. Hopefully, he'll be able to fend off those sketchy Gamers.com guys from across the room until Brandon and I get back to HQ (I think they know that we have the Pentium 4).

Day One

For those of you who haven't read our previous Comdex reports, let's go over a quick explanation on how we put together our Comdex coverage articles. We generally have meetings with several different hardware vendors on each day, and each night we write about the interesting information that comes out of those meetings. We also tend to include mentions of any interesting new products that we may have encountered on the exhibition floor (if we actually had enough time to check out the floor that day).

Since we all flew in on Monday morning, we only had a half-day for the show. Fortunately, we had scheduled a couple important meetings for the first day. We had the opportunity to meet with Turtle Beach, Intel, and NVIDIA.

All the meetings were fairly interesting. The guys at Turtle Beach showed us their new Sonic Link, FM transmitter, and a compelling Audiotron MP3 player. At Intel, we talked about Pentium 4 and DDR SDRAM. NVIDIA gave us a demonstration of its new GeForce2 Go mobile solution along with a little X-Box loving. With all these meetings, we weren't able to hit the show floor on Monday. Perhaps we'll have more free time tomorrow.