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CES 2012 - Newer Technology, part of the MAC Sales clan which includes OWC SSDs displayed a product I'm sure everyone reading this can appreciates. USB ports built into power sockets aren't anything new but all of them we've seen continually power the USB ports. This is a big waste of power since you don't have devices connected all of the time to the USB ports.

Phantom power draw is a big issue when you are paying the electric bill but Newer Technology has come up with a simple solution to turn the ports off when not in use. The USB ports provide up to 2 amps of power when the USB door opens. A micro switch gets activated and your iPad, iPod, cell phone or other device gets the juice.

The Newer Technology Power2U is currently available at MACSALES.com for less than 30 Dollars.

Last month we visited the Thermaltake HQ in Taipei where we stumbled upon a few products where we got the chance to film them on video in this pre-CES 2012 preview of a couple new cases from the Taiwanese company.

CES 2012 - First up we have the Level 10 GTS which is a new case coming onto the market by the end of Q1 2012 and should end up retailing for around $100 USD. It gets its design from its bigger full tower brother, the original Level 10 GT. Of course the GTS is much cheaper and has a similar feel as the GT and the same extended case width which users like. It will also get bundled with a quick access drive bay that allows you to move around hard drives from one Level 10 GT/GTS to another Level 10 GT/GTS or other computers thanks to the addition of the SATA (data and power) to USB 3.0 adapter that comes included.

Next up we have the Armor Revo which takes some of the design theory from previous Thermaltake Armor series cases but at the same time mixes it up quite a bit. The front is rather busy with a rather unique, funky and stylish design with a mesh flow down the center of the case. You can always rely on Thermaltake to come out with something that stands out from the crowd. This is definitely the sort of case that you are either going to love right away or turn your nose up to. On the top front of the case you have your standard audio ports, eSATA, two USB 3.0 and USB 2.0. There are also high and low fan speed adjustments and LED on and off buttons as well as a docking area for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch hard drives and on the right side is the power and reset buttons along with the power status LED.

In today's world of high-speed data transfers, cameras and their memory cards have been relatively left behind. But, Sony have stopped that with the Sony XQD memory card, based on the PCI-Express specification, the XQD format is aimed at improving digital image capture speed and performance.

It is capable of capturing up to 100 frames in RAW format in continuous shooting mode. Sporting write speeds of 125MB/sec, and theoretical maximum write speeds of 5Gb/s, or roughly 600MB/sec. You can see how this is exciting for photographers. Director of consumer media for Sony Electronics, Viviano Cantu, says:

The Consumer Electronics Show starts up this week and right out of the gate in relation to consumer electronics is a report from the NPD Group: Consumer electronic sales during the 2011 holiday period dropped 6-percent when compared to 2010.

But, it doesn't look like it'll get any better. The NPD Weekly Tracking Service notes that the decline comes off of another decline from the year before. 2011's drop was not as bad as 2010's bad, but it shows the direction the market is headed. NPD says:

This is something new for me, I've never heard of it before and wow does it sound interesting. Tobii, have introduced eye-tracking technology called "Gaze", where you can control Windows 8 with your... eyes. Yes, the eyes you're reading this text with, can control the next-generation OS from Microsoft. The project is a result of research conducted in 2001 at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology.

Gizmodo tried it out and they seem to have nothing but great words to say about it, and it makes me just as excited to read about it and imagine the possibilities. Gaze's eye control device, which is said to look like a "horizontal rectangle glass obelisk attached to the hinge of a laptop", is incredibly accurate.

Just like smartphones, Gaze requires some personal calibration before you can use it and some unique finger movements. Gaze is said to be very accurate, never missing the target by more than a "few pixels". On top of the eye tracking, swipe gestures are also available through Windows 8 and Gaze. Included at the demo was an Asteroids-like game with Tobii's Gaze and everything that was impressive about Tobii before, was just as impressive in Asteroids, according to Gizmodo.

Team VSB, a bunch of peeps who have built a feature-length Space Quest game called "Vohaul Strikes Back" is now available, and best of all: for free. Vohaul Strikes Back is a labor of love, with nearly 10 years of work going into the game.

It's also the first original Space Quest game of this scale since the official Space Quest 6 which was released all the way back in 1995. Vohaul Strikes Back doesn't include a voice pack, but Team VSB are working on one. If you'd like to help the team out with the voice pack, you can reach them through their forums.

You can check out their website here, and download the game (again, for free!) from here. I'm quite enjoying the amount of love these old-school adventure games are getting, now if we can just get updated Full HD versions of my favorite FMV games such as Night Trap, Under a Killing Moon and others, I'd be in nostalgic heaven.

So as Cameron and Chris talk me into running through CES Unveiled, I found myself packed in a room with hundreds of people, just after what should have been the biggest tip off of the night. As we passed through the doors, there was a lady handing out iPhone cases to everyone who wanted one. Once we passed through the doors you see food, a bar at each end of the hall, and what seemed to be an iHall.

With select few displays showing convection cook tops, some radar detectors, and the most impressive of the whole room was the ice block that chilled the Vodka for the Martini's that were given away to keep us in the room longer. I realize it was an open bar, and that is all fine and great for us who were in the room, but poor Cameron had to drink his Jack and Cokes with Coke Zero of all things, as regular Coke was something the bartender seemed to have no concept of!

After fighting your way through tons of people and getting slammed by bags from every angle as you try to squirm your way through the masses, I for one was left underwhelmed at what was actually being displayed to kick off the event. Most of my time speaking with others was spent looking at the nuances of the new convection cook tops, as it was seriously the biggest draw to me personally in the room, as I don't own any Apple products. For those that do, there were a couple of cool devices to mix with your iPhone and iPads, but again, enough is enough with the iGadgets.

Valve just released their 2011 growth data for Steam, and during 2011 the platform grew to offer over 1,800 games to more than 40 million accounts. Year-over-year unit sales increased by more than 100-percent for the seventh straight year, and during the 2011 Holiday Sale, Steam's simultaneous user numbers ballooned to over 5 million players at once.

If you're a storage fan, get this: Steam doubled the amount of content delivered from 2010, to serve over 780 Petabytes (with a P!) of data to gamers around the world. To sustain this demand for bandwidth, the Steam infrastructure more than doubled its service capacity and a new content delivery architecture was deployed to improve user download rates.

Steamworks-powered games hit 14.5 million copies registered in 2011, a 67-percent increase over 2010. Included Steamworks titles were huge sellers like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and more. Since Steamworks started over three years ago, it has shipped in over 400 games. Gabe Newell, co-founder, president of Valve and my personal super hero, says:

CES 2012: Acer started their CES unveiling with quite the bang, showing off its second ultrabook, the Acer Aspire S5. The Aspire S5 is due for a Q2 arrival, is just 15mm thick and weighs under 1.35kg.

It sports an Onyx Black magnesium-aluminum alloy cover, a 13.3-inch LCD screen, chiclet keyboard, an Intel Core processor, a solid state drive, and a MagicFlip I/O port panel, which includes HDMI, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connectors. Thunderbolt, on an ultrabook? Very good news for 2012 products.

Acer also include their Green Instant On technology which provides super fast booting and resume, and the Always Connect solution which enables users to 'manage their multimedia and data on all their devices at anytime, anywhere'. At the moment, there's no details on Aspire S5's pricing.

CES 2012 - Long before SandForce, Marvell or even Intel were churning out SSD controllers MemoRight was breaking new ground on the SSD frontier.

We've been reviewing their products for several years now and always found MemoRight SSDs to be of the highest quality no matter what controller was used.

A big reason for the high quality coming from MemoRight is their military division, products designed for use in aircraft, marine and in infantry platforms. Here we see a military class SSD with several surface mount capacitors. MemoRight explains this as like having a UPS built into each drive.

Alright, so our first video from Las Vegas this year at CES is from Storage Visions 2012 where we ran into Rob from Micron. He was a little reluctant at first, but we managed to get him on video to give us a little hands-on and some details about their newest product called the Crucial Adrenaline.

This is an SSD drive that will be coming out sometime soon (we are guessing late January to early February timeframe) and it will come with a capacity of 50GB. Why only 50GB? You shouldn't really think of this drive as a traditional SSD, it's a caching drive. It is designed to complement your existing system and introduce some of the performance benefits you can see from flash based storage.

It works in tandem with your current HDD setup and the Adrenaline caches the most common files that you use to provide an easy to install and afford boost to system performance. We've already been told we can expect a review sample in the next two weeks and you can probably expect to see it go on sale just a little after that based on previous products we have got in from Crucial to review.

Samsung in the last few days have launched a new smartphone, touted as an "affordable" handset, the Galaxy M Style. The Samsung Galaxy M Style is a mid-range smartphone featuring a 4-inch Super AMOLED display and a slim form factor of just 9.9mm.

The Galaxy M Style sports Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a 1GHz single-core processor, 4GB of internal memory and a microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB) and sports dual cameras, with a VGA front-facing camera and a rear-facing 3-megapixel camera. It also supports HD (720p) video recording.

The Galaxy M Style is only going to splash onto South Korean shores and will launch in three colors: Platinum Silver, Blue Black, and Lavender Pink. Samsung haven't confirmed whether Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) will come to the handset. Galaxy M Style is priced at just $500, which is significantly less than their flagship ICS-powered Galaxy Nexus handset.

CES 2012: One of the first things to report about CES, is one of the most important: Jersey Shore star, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi will be attending. Not only that, but the hair-do boy himself, Justin Bieber will also be in attendance. Back in 2010, Lady Gaga herself made an appearance at CES, taking the role of creative director at Polaroid.

Bieber will appear at a booth for TOSY, a Vietnamese robotics company. Bieber won't be doing interviews, so Cam will be mad about that! (ha!) Now onto Snooki, she'll be there to build hype for iHip, a maker of audio accessories. She'll also be hosting a fist-pumping VIP party at the Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino during the week, and will also be making appearances on the floor of the Last Vegas Convention Center.

There are a bunch of other celebs attending, with one of them my favorite from Buffy: Eliza Dushku. She played Faith on Buffy, and has been in various shows and movies since, and will be at CES as an ambassador for the Entertainment Matters program which is sponsored by Variety magazine and Ericsson, 50 Cent will announce new audio products through his company, SMS Audio.

Samsung have an exciting screen to show off at CES next week, where they'll unveil for the first time its new Series 9 premium monitor. It's a new slim widescreen called S27A970, which is a 27-inch PLS (Plane Line Switching) panel capable of a resolution of 2560x1440.

The Samsung S27A970 also sports an anti-glare edge-to-edge glass display, an aluminum stand and base, a response time of 5ms, 178/178-degree viewing angles, a static contrast ratio of 1,000:1, a maximum brightness of 300 cd/m2, two 7W built-in speakers, a 2-port USB 2.0 hub, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort inputs, as well as a Mobile High Definition Link (MHL) enabling connectivity with MHL-supporting smartphones and tablets.

The Samsung S27A970 is expected to launch in March priced at $1,200. Now all we need is Samsung to release this identical screen at 120Hz, and I'll buy three of them, tomorrow.

Let's keep going with some display news, shall we. The industry, customers and everyone in between have been excited for the next-generation OLED display technology for not only consumer TVs, but computer monitors and should roll out this year.

LG are set to show off some OLED TVs at CES over the next few days, and Sony were also due to intro some OLED TVs to consumers. But, Sony kept their face mangled and the wind changed, so now they have to live with the following consequences: their OLED plans have been shelved, according to The Daily Yomiuri. Sony will only continue to sell the technology to corporate customers like broadcasting companies, as well as associated research and development into better displays.

The reason for dropping the consumer market is said to be due to poor business performance in this area, with Sony cutting back on capital investment, which in turn reduced its price competitiveness with its Korean-based rivals such as LG and Samsung. It's a strange move indeed, but maybe Sony see the market not being strong in 2012. There's sure to be a number of investment, banking and debt problems throughout this year and the last thing people are going to spend their money on is some next-gen OLED displays.

Just when I'm looking to upgrade my TV, LG have announced a new TV. LG have of late been pushing their 3DTVs as Cinema 3D, but now they're introduced some new 3DTVs that include a 1mm thin LCD bezel called "Cinema Screen".

LG claim that this brings the experience closer to the theater, but that's not the only cool feature this new range sports. LG have also announced it will throw in Dual Play, which uses polarized glasses to allow two different players only view their perspective on the full screen at once in games that support it.

President and CEO of LG Home Entertainment Company, Havis Kwon, chimes in with:

CES is upon us, and whilst our boss Cameron is over there, one problem: he forgot my ticket. It must've been lost in the mail, and I'll forgive him... this time. Ha. Onto the exciting ASUS News. ASUS were barely able to contain their CES excitement, and at a press event in Taipei, Vice President and General Manager of the Eee Systems Business Unit, Samson Hu, let loose the ASUS tablet road map.

ASUS confirmed they will be launching an ARM-powered, Windows 8-based tablet that will hit at the end of this year, there is a 3G version of the Transformer Prime confirmed for a March release and also includes a more powerful GPS module. Netbook News are expecting ASUS to unveil a 7-inch tablet, which should be the ASUS Memo as well as a high-resolution 10-inch tablet. The excitement doesn't stop there though, two new 10-inch tablets were announced for 2H 2012, but no additional details were provided.

ASUS also gave some projections for 2012, with sales expected to reach the 6 million mark. ASUS are also expanding their Android Tablet division from 300 to 400 employees. Right now, ASUS have 150 developers and engineers working on the new Windows 8 tablets. As you can see from the increase in employees, ASUS are really pumping some energy into the tablet market, which in my opinion, is a very smart move indeed.

This is something truly amazing, Xian Min Zhang sent in a video to Gizmodo of his company's latest project, a 30-story tall, 183,000-square-foot hotel built in just 360 hours. 360 hours is just an amazing 15 days. What is more impressive is that it's not just a simple hotel built, there are some great features built-in.

The hotel was built near the Dongting lake, in the Hunan Province, China, by Broad Group, a Chinese construction company who specializes in sustainable architecture. The building uses prefabricated modules (with a +/- 0.2mm precision in the fabrication process) mounted on a steel structure, with diagonal steel bracing.

What impressed me the most, are the following features of the building: it can resist a 9-magnitude earthquake (and was tested by the China Academy of Building Research), which is claimed to be five times more earthquake-resistant than conventional buildings. It is also five times more more energy efficient, with 6-inch thick glass curtain wall insulation and four-paned windows with built-in shades, a heat recovery system and 3-stage filtration air conditioning process that actually purifies indoor air to be 20 times (!) purer than the air outside.

AMD may have had a successful Radeon HD 7000-series launch, but 2012 is not starting off well for their laptop division. Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese company that manufactures laptops for companies such as HP, Dell, Acer, and others, is suing AMD for an alleged breach of contract.

Quanta Computer are claiming that AMD chips used in laptops made for NEC were defective. No specific models have been mentioned, but both AMD and ATI are mentioned in the report, meaning that the complaints could cover GPUs, CPUs or, both. The problem that Quanta have with the chips is heat tolerance issues in a particular laptop line, but again, no models are mentioned.

Quanta claims that it "has suffered significant injury to prospective revenue and profits" and they are suing for breach of warranty, negligent misrepresentation, civil fraud, and interference with a contract.

MSI have officially released their flagship motherboard based on the X79 Express chipset, taking the LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E CPUs. MSI have dubbed the board Big Bang-XPower II and boy does it have some great features.

The board sports support for PCI-Express 3.0, 4-way NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire technologies, 8 DIMM slots that can handle an insane 128GB of RAM, 22-phase PWM design with Hybrid Digital Power, dual 8-pin CPU and single 6-pin VGA power connectors to reach Xtreme Power Design as well as the introduction of MIL-STD-810G certified Military Class III components.

This board is aimed squarely at overclockers, super high-end gamers and those who simply want the best in motherboards. The color scheme of the board looks slick too, as well as the magazine-looking heatsink that just looks amazing. Because the Big Bang-XPower II has a 22-phase PWM design with Hybrid Digital Power, it can deliver up to 770W output, 2.4 times the reference 9-phase design.