The Unwired Medic

Teaching EMS providers & other public safety pros about using mobile tech to improve their practice, patient care, continuing education, scene safety, general entertainment, & productivity.

CES Day Two

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I’m afraid that fatigue got the better of me last night and I succumbed to the dreaded sleep disease.  So this post is an update to cover Day Two of Consumer Electronics Show (CES) findings.  Please keep watching for updates to see more details about what I summarize from CES 2012.

By far, the highlight of my trip to CES 2012 in Las Vegas was bestowed upon me by the Pelican Products crew.  Of course Pelican has been considered by many to be the gold standard in public safety cases for many years, entrusted to protect our gear and medications. Their staff gave me a tour of the newer products they have to offer this year.  Most impressive is their new laptop backpacks.  They have one for netbooks and another for full sized laptops.  The back is padded and vented, and with the clamshell casing positioned where it is in the pack, it supports the wearer’s back as well as a full-framed pack.  Additionally, it offers limiting straps so you don’t have to set the pack down to open it, and it won’t flip open so far that your laptop is at risk for being dropped out.  They also have some updates to their LED flashlights, including a tactical light that has 160 lumens.

At their booth this year, they were giving away the Pelican 1055 Hardback Case with a Kindle Fire every day.  Very few people actually showed up at the time of the drawings so they called several names until they found one attached to a person who was actually present.  Yours truly was the winner for Wednesday.  The CEO of Pelican Products was present for the drawing and handed the prize to me commenting on how heavy the case seemed to be, apparently unaware that his marketing staff had decided to give the Kindle Fire away.  He was quite jovial about it and said that he didn’t interfere with his marketing experts. Then gave me a 1910 LED flashlight.  Awesome!

I received a LED flashlight from Norlite to evaluate, Canon gave me another one for completing a task at their booth (I mean, can one really have too many flashlights?), and the people at Wicked Audio gave me a set of nice Jawbreaker earbuds.  I met the crew of gForm and have a tablet sleeve to demo, and I have to tell you, after their booth demo dropping a bowling ball from 3 feet onto a small bag of M&M’s and not even cracking a single one, I can’t wait to test it out.  Of course, these items are going to be given away on my blog and social media sites, so make sure you subscribe to them now!

I met the DFX team and they demo’ed some fitness equipment that I think would go perfectly on the ambulance.  I mean, why should the hose jocks (meant affectionately, of course) get all the love with access to the health and strengthening machinery inside the comforts of their own station and we in EMS get none?  Perhaps Fitmedics or Brian Fass would be willing to help me properly evaluate the gyro exercisers?  I have access to the DFX SportsPro now, but have assurances that more will be coming after the show is over.

Although that is all I walked out of Day Two with in my hands, that certainly isn’t everything I found and learned about that can be a benefit to us public servants.  The following is an intro to what I learned about that no demo products will be had for, or that will have demo products to come after things settle back down after CES…

For the public safety photographer, there is a device set to be released to public soon that allows you to mount your iPhone (and soon other non-iOS devices) right to the hot shoe on a DSLR camera.  That allows you to have instant access to built-in GPS features on the phone to geotag your images, turn on your camera flash as a flashlight to light up an area where it is dark and the camera cannot focus without a little helping lightsource, or to allow you to snap still photos with the DSLR while you roll video on the phone.  The device is called the Flash-Dock and I hope you will see the potential with it as I do.  The hot shoe doesn’t actually access the camera, nor does the DALR or videocam have control over the phone.  Again, this is coming soon.  The inventor also has an app called “Dimension” on the iTunes market that allows an iOS user to snap some pictures in a room and it will tell you what the volume is by returning L x W x H measurements.

Earloomz is a themematic Bluetooth headset maker, and has promised to send me a Bluetooth headset as a prize for a reader.

Ruggedized cases and mounts are big this year too, and I have (hopefully) Bodyguardz will be sending me a case, Bodydock states they will ship & provide an evaluation sample, and a fantastic little company called Lethal Protection, which has a VERY versatile mounting system that allows the user to mount their device in many different ways, including hanging it off the side of something have all promised demo units to be sent so I can evaluate them, then turn around and regift them.

Although there is a lot more to go on about, I apparently am feeling the Benadryl kick in (thanks to one of my many allergies I am cursed with and I have no idea what I was exposed to to set of my itching, rash, and airway discomfort) so I am going to sign off for tonight and try to fill in more tomorrow, the last day of CES. :-S

Cheers to you and thanks for reading!

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