After the general calm of the pre-9am hour, CES quickly picked up and has since built to a standing-room-only fight for space. Hungry? Good luck.
It's not unusual to be accosted by an eager pitch-man (or woman) for this product or that, or to blithely ignore such advances; less common is to be struck by a bizarre product and intrigued enough to stop and listen.
Such was the case with the GRID-IT!, a lifestyle product designed to help organize assorted hand-held devices and cables inside laptop and camera bags.
My first thought: Worthless. The concept is little more than a woven pad comprised of elastic bands which stretch to accommodate your digital life.
So, we challenged our man on the floor to fit as many objects as possible into a standard-sized GRID-IT. I had doubts about capacity. The final tally: Two iPhones, a pocket-sized bottle of Visine (he claimed to be recovering from a rough night), a packet of Tic-Tacs, a Flip camera, and another non-iPhone smartphone, all held snugly in place.
On a more practical level, the grid concept seems like it would be particularly handy for keeping cables neatly packed away inside a laptop case. Cocoon sells a variety of stylish laptop and camera bags which all come with a large GRID-IT! included.
Another common sight at CES: Scantily clad women dubiously talking about CE technology. Casio took this concept to an extreme by featuring a weapons and fighting presentation, held inside a make-shift arena surrounded by various Casio point-and-shoot cameras. Brilliant. By staggering the presentation, there's a constant crowd milling about the Casio booth, checking out their products.
As the ladies of Team Casio regaled the (mostly male) audience with whatever it was they were doing (karate or kung-fu of some sort), the cameras were available so that attendees could get some hands-on time and test features such as rapid-shot / burst mode and 10 or 20x optical zoom. Because, as we all know, you can't really predict when a group of incredibly attractive ninjas might show up and attempt to kill each other.
When it happens, apparently, you want a Casio.
