So immediately after the keynote finished, fellow Engadgeteer Lenn Pryor and I decided we had to have iPod Shuffles RIGHT NOW! It just made sense for the kind of iPod users we are to snap them up. I have too much music on my iPod (25 Gigs, actually) to pick what I want to play, but with so much music on there, shuffle never comes out quite right. Plus the iPod is too big, and too susceptible to crashing from being shook up for my active lifestyle, and so I mainly only use it only trips these days. I figured the Shuffle was the answer to all my prayers — and if it wasn't the 99 bucks wouldn't kill me.

There is a serious dearth of coverage about the new W22SA in English, however we've been able to catch the basic details. It has all the same features of the W21SA, including OCR translatation software that lets you take a picture of text in English and display the Japanese word. The 22 forgoes the 21's twist and flip screen in favor of a more traditional flip but it's still packed full of gadgety goodness. It has stereo speakers (for extra trick ringtones) and this crazy navigation pad that lets you control certain phone features with the lid closed. (those five little dots below Snow White). By using newer chips and giving up on the twist and flip design, the 22 is significantly lighter and smaller than the 21 without sacrificing any features. Just look at how Ryan has to cup the phone gently in his hand (after the break), it's so light and small you just have to cradle it.

It's just not fair. We've been in lust with the W21SA ever since KDDI unveiled it way last summer, and though they've come out with a few slimmer 3G phones since then, we still love the Spacephone's smooth white (iPod/iBook/iWhatever) lines and all its incredible features. When we picked it up, it was hard to keep the drool off the phone; every line, every button is so smooth and well placed, and the looks like a big white piece of chocolate with a luscious high tech LCD display. Oh, beloved ice cream bar…

More luscious white 3G goodness after the break.

The Infobar was one of the most heralded phones in Japan and helped convince a lot of subscribers to switch to KDDI. The follow up, the Talby, is the Infobar re-imagined by designer Mark Newson. Not only is it beautiful but it's powerful too; designed for KDDI's 1x RTT network, the phone has the Opera web browser with a Flash Lite player, a 240 x 320 (QVGA) LCD, and a 1.3 MP camera with macro mode for snapping barcodes.

Although we didn't get to play with it that much since the interface is only in Japanese, we can tell you after holding this phone, all you can say to yourself is "Why? Why can't any American phones look and feel half this good?" Once you pick it up, you don't want to put it down—EVAR.

Click on for more pictures—and believe us, no matter how many we took we still wanted to keep snapping this thing.

We hit the show floor with Cat Schwartz as she immerses herself in the Spherex RX2, ohhs and ahhhs over these Sumiko turntables, and hooks you up with a reprise of the Motorola Burton Bluetooth Jacket just so she can ask if you took it off any sweet jumps, dude.

Watch the Video (.wmv)

Yesterday we thought the Moto Bluetooth stereo headset was interesting but we hadn't seen it and couldn't quite explain it. Today we have all the answers. (Ok, maybe not all the answers.) Here's how it really works. The HT820 supports both headset and hands-free to connect to a phone via Bluetooth. It also supports two new Bluetooth profiles for audio, one for receiving stereo broadcast and the other for controlling audio devices. If you have an audio device that supports the profiles, or you have an adapter—either one of Motorola's that we mentioned or even the naviPlay—the headset will be able to pause your music when you take an incoming call, and you can even skip tracks using buttons right on the headset. If, however you don't have a Bluetooth audio device or adapter, you can plug a player into the 'phones using a cable, in which case, the HT820 will mute the audio when you get a phone call, but won't be able to pause it. There's a few more pix below.

At Macworld Griffin will introduce a new wireless remote control with transmitter units for both the iPod and the Mac itself. The AirClick iPod will come in 4G and mini flavors, and will let you play, pause, and navigate through tracks as well as control the volume using a remote and a receiver that talk to each other over RF from up to 60 feet away. So you don't need line of sight to your iPod, hell you don't even need to be in the same room. You can also use the remote to click through slide shows if you have an iPod photo. (Take that, pt!) You can add an AirClick USB dongle to your Mac and use the remote to control iTunes, Keynote, DVD Player, VLC and other applications too. Since we live in a tiny apartment, we'll stick with our trusty Sony Ericsson phone and the Bluetooth remote profiles for now, but if we move someplace bigger, or someplace with more than one room, the extended reach of the AirClick could come in handy.

There's not even 50 people on our Skype buddy list, but in addition to clear voice chats, Skype is adding enough interesting features that we might have to start convincing our IM buddies to switch. Skype has launched an incremental upgrade to its Windows client that lets up to 50 people enter an IM chat room, in addition to its already secure IM chats and file transfers. They've also improved the interface with a better buddy list, avatars, and system tray notifications. Maybe they'll launch a Mac update soon.

Dolby built a special theater in the middle of the CES floor to showcase Dolby Digital Plus, the next generation of Dolby home theatre protocols that starts at 7.1 and currently goes as high as 13.1 channels. Of course, they use all 13.1 channels in their booth. Not only does this one go to 13, but the audio is sampled at a much higher bit rate, for truer sound. Dolby bumped the sampling rate from 640 kbps to 6 Mbps. HD-DVD has already selected Dolby Digital Plus as its audio codec of choice. Of course that means that once you get an HD-DVD player and the accompanying receiver, you'll need enough cable to wrap around the earth's circumference just to wire a single room. Buy stock in Monster Cable.

Sony unveiled the latest in its P series of Cybershot cameras, but we're wondering why they bothered. Not that there was anything wrong with its predecessor, the P150, but Sony literally didn't change a thing except for smoothing out the case a bit. It has the same Super HAD 7.2 Megapixel CCD, the same Real Image processor, the same lens and all the same functions. The P150 was pretty well received at its launch for being a powerful, solid, small camera, so it's not like the P200 stinks, or even lags behind the competitors for pocket-sized models. But please, Sony, was it really worth making a fuss and adding 50 to model number just to mellow the harsh lines of the P150?

What's wrong with this picture? Doesn't the top half of the flip look a little bit funny? Maybe because there's no speaker there. Maybe because this phone is so trick that it doesn't even need a speaker, the whole LCD display is a speaker. Seriously, the entire display vibrates so that when you put your ear up against it, it works just like a speaker. The technology comes from a UK company called New Transducers Limited. Other than that, it's just a regular old 2G i-mode phone from NEC, except that it has video out to display photos or video from the phone on TV.

Verizon wireless has launched EV-DO in 11 new metro areas today. Subscribers in Chicago, Houston, Boston, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Columbus, Orlando, Jacksonville, Providence, Hartford and New Haven (shwew!) will all have access to Verizon's 3G network, as long as they have a PC Card or the VX6600 Pocket PC phone. Verizon continues to ignore the entire northwest quadrant of the country, because, you know, no one in say Seattle is on the leading edge of technology. However on February 1, everyone in a city with EV-DO will be able to get high speed access on 3 new clamshell handsets, which we've already told you about, the LG VX8000, Motorola Samsung A890, and the UT Starcom (nee Audiovox) 8940. The phones aren't the exciting part, the VCAST content is.

The service will cost $15 per month for unlimited access to basic video clips and WAP content. Premium content like music downloads, 3D games, NBA, NASCAR and probably some exclusive video content will cost extra. All of the video content is produced specifically for the small screen, so it's not shmooshed TV clips but actual phone-centric video, and it looks sharp. Verizon won't just get exclusively formatted content, they'll also get exclusively produced content. Fox will create 3 new series specifically for the V CAST service, Love and Hate, 24 Conspiracy and Sunset Hotel. MTV and other broadcasters will also provide programs.

We got a chance to play with the service today, and we can tell you it lives up to Verizon's "Broadband Access" brand name. Video clips buffer in about 10 seconds and playback at TV-quality framerates. Downloading a 3D game (Kingdom Hearts bay-bee) only took about four seconds — for the whole damn game. When these phones launch, you won't regret  being the first in line for one at your local Verizon store.

Taking a page from the Nokia 7200 playbook, X2 has created a small, light laptop aimed at women that will come with a matching laptop case designed to look like a "sheik" (we think they mean "chic") handbag. The laptops feature a 12.1 inch widescreen LCD, 802.11 b/g, and full size keyboard but still weighs under 4 pounds. It looks similar to an iBook (why, we've never…), but in easter egg pastels. Each laptop comes with its own special bag that will match or color coordinate in materials like suede and fake croc skin. Neither the laptops nor the bags are all that bad, but we suspect most fashionistas would rather buy her bag from Kate Spade or whoever and then get her laptop painted to match. It's already a booming business in Japan, so maybe someone will open up a shop to do it stateside?

Making a more serious effort to compete in the now blooming multi-format flash recorder world, Samsung has reduced the size of its dual lens/dual CCD Duocam by a whopping 40%, meaning it's finally almost pocketable. The video side of the SC-D6550 captures full motion movies with 10x zoom lens, image stabilization and an assist lamp. The still picture side now has a 5 MP sensor. Both sides can write to a multi format card slot that accepts memory stick, SD and MMC cards. Past models have looked a little too chunky and steampunk for our tastes, but we'll grab a picture as soon as one's up (or CES opens) to see whether a 40% reduction in size also yields a 40% increase in sleekness.

Panasonic announced four more rather diminutive audio players and two equally tiny flash based video recorder/still combo units. Though they're all new, the audio players are starting to get old. One of the new ones, the SV-SD100V (catchy name, yah?) even pays homage to Panasonic's first line of e-wear audio players with its square shape and monchrome OLED display embedded below the surface of the glass front. It has 256 MB, but the other models each feature 512 MB memory built in, and two also have FM Radios. Panasonic continues to differentiate its players with incredibly boring or incredibly wacky shapes, not with incredible technology. They apparently aren't that concerned either, as they've now admitted they won't even introduce hard drive based players until 2006. Ouch.

Panasonic is finally getting some serious competition in the Flash based multimedia recorder field from the likes of JVC and Samsung (sorry we can't really call the Sanyo any competition). However unlike the audio players, Panasonic is actually making an effort to improve the shape and technology of the new flash recorders. Sadly the improvements don't really make them any better at recording (or playing back media) but they have made the new SV-AV25 and SV-AV50 more pocketable and more environmentally friendly. At least that's something.

Motorola is hitting both music and Bluetooth hard at CES in addition to jackets and hats with Bluetooth stereo speakers, they're also talking up the HT820, a stereo Bluetooth headset. Since there are no pictures yet (and the CES show floor is closed for the night) we aren't quite sure exactly how it works, but Motorola claims it can connect to a music player and a phone separately and automatically pause the music when a phone call is answered on the headset. We would suspect they mean mute, not pause the music, however the headset has controls for play and pause as well as call controls according to Moto. Maybe those controls only work with Bluetooth enabled music players. For the wired players, there is a headset jack built into the HT820 or Motorola will also offer the DC800, which takes audio out and streams it over Bluetooth.

[via Geekzone]

If palmOne won't step up to the plate and add WiFi to its handhelds, it's only natural that someone else would do it, right? Someone already hacked the drivers for palmOne's SD WiFi card so it'd work with the Treo 650, but we pretty much figured that the Treo 600 was a goner. Not so. It's not quite as svelte as getting down with a WiFi card, but Enfora is introducing a WiFi sled for adding 802.11b to the Treo 600. They'd already done one of these for the Tungsten E, and this one looks like it's along the same lines.

We know she's slumming it by kicking it with us, but somehow we managed to convince the lovely and extremely talented Cat Schwartz, official Tech Chick and former host of TechTV's Call For Help, to host Engadget's video coverage of this week's Consumer Electronics Show.

In this first installment Cat checks out Toshiba's new DVD recorder which lets you burn images onto the the top of the disc, BenQ's new wireless mouse, Panasonic's Toughbook Tablet PC, Motorola & Burton's new Bluetooth snowboarding jacket, and HP's EP9010 Instant Cinema Digital Projector.

Watch the video here.

TEN Technology had previously announced the naviPlay, a Bluetooth adapter for the iPod. Today they announced that when the unit finally ships, it'll be bundled with Bluetooth headphones from HP (which look exactly like the Toshiba ones we showed you earlier). The naviPlay itself still has all the same features as when we first reported on it. It will transmit audio from any iPod with a dock connector to Bluetooth audio devices as well as to a remote that can be used to control the iPod wirelessly as well as serve as a wired headphone jack. Unlike when we first reported on it, there's finally a picture.

You no longer need to have a boomin' car system just to play your iPod through it. Audiovox is launching an iPod Mobile Interface Kit that should let you directly hook your iPod into a car stereo through its CD changer port (if it has one, which most current models do). Once the iPod is plugged in you can you your stereo's track selection and play/pause controls to control the iPod — even the ones integrated into the steering wheel.  It will be available this month through dealers for installation or directly from Audiovox if you're willing to attempt installing it yourself for $200.

[via iPod Lounge]