Bang & Olufsen have been around for a long time and it makes some very high-end home theater and audio gear. B&O has been offering some expensive HDTVs for years now and the one thing that it really doesn't have is a connected TV. Connected TVs are the big thing from TV makers right now even if many consumers aren't ready to bite.

Bang & Olufsen have announced that it has teamed up with Intel to get the latest Intel tech to roll into a new product. The new product will be a connected TV it seems with B&O CEO Kalle Hvidt Nielsen talking about the convergence of the PC, TV and audio solutions into one.

I would bet that we would see some interesting audio tech rolled into other solutions since B&O are famous for high-end audio. "During this convergence of PC, TV and audio technologies, this strategic cooperation with Intel is hugely important to Bang & Olufsen. We looking forward to working with Intel on creating unique product solutions for the future," says Kalle Hvidt Nielsen, Bang & Olufsen President & CEO.

Steve Ballmer, current CEO of Microsoft has promised that Kinect will have PC support sometime in the future. Right now, Kinect is Xbox 360 territory, but eventually Microsoft have plans to move this across to the PC.

Even though the system has been hacked, prodded, thrashed and slashed on virtually all platforms, official support is always going to win. The BBC asked Ballmer "Will you plug-in the Kinect to the PC, will you go for that in the near future?", Ballmer replied with "We'll support that in a formal way in the right time and when we've got an announcement to make we'll make it."

He also said "We're trying to move beyond gaming to include the world of socialization, movies, TV, music, and we're trying to make the whole experience accessible to everybody in the family not just the traditional gamer."

Intel has been quite busy this month with the launch of the LGA1155 socket - but this has not slowed down news floating around the web of the LGA1366-successor, LGA2011.

Zol.com.cn has been a source of some blurred out MSI motherboard shots, of which they claim the new chipset to be called X68 (although there are rumors of an X78 chipset too).

From the pics below, it seems the CPU is so large that Intel has been forced to use two levers that has to be opened and closed in a specific way. This is of course fine for 90% of users, but for the overclockers and testers, this would be a PITA.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - Intel shows off a new generation of Core CPUs. In the Las Vegas Convention Center Intel showed off their 2nd Generation Core CPUs along with a host of mobile systems that, according to Intel, will be faster, cooler, and more energy efficient than anything they have every offered before. Although these CPUs (Sandy Bridge) have technically been launched and the web has been full of reviews, Intel was still showing some demos that were very impressive.

One of the most impressive (to me) was the demonstration of full motion gaming. This was a demo of a special level of the upcoming game Portal 2 using a Razer full motion controller. This controller looked a lot like a Wii controller but it was built for the PC. We watched the Intel Rep as he used the controller to interact with the environment; he was able to stretch cubes, extend things out in front of him and more. I can see this type of tech bringing back some punch to PC gaming. The demo was run on a Core i5 using "out of the box" resolution.

This was not the only cool thing showed off though. We saw a large number of smaller mobile products including a wide array of Slate PCs that were using Atom CPUs. Interestingly the Asus Slate was not in the group. We found out that it was being shown off by Microsoft, and had to go over there to tinker with it.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - January 6 2011, TRENDNet shows off new high speed networking products to us in the lobby of the Mirage Casino and Hotel. We met up with Zak Wood and was able to take a look at a few of the new networking products we will get to show you later this year.

The first item we looked at was a new Green wireless router. This device will be a fairly standard n spec wireless device but it will have some extra green features to help with product life and also to reduce the power usage. It was a nice looking little product with curved lines and a clean look.

Next up was a 450Mbps wireless adapter that connects via USB to your system. This product when combined with the right router can truly kick up the speed of your wireless network

CES 2011, Las Vegas January 7, 2011. GIGABYTE today showed use a trio of mobile computing systems that will be the first GIGABYTE mobile products to be sold in the US. We had the chance to head by the GIGABYTE suite and see these new products.

When we first saw these we thought they were going to be the usual "Asia/Europe Only" devices. We were soon smiling very widely as we found out they would be available for sale in the US beginning in February.

The first device was a small tablet like laptop with a docking station that puts it in portrait mode instead of the traditional landscape. We were intrigued and asked more about this one. The new Laptop will have a capacitive multi-touch screen and either a Core i5 or a Core i3 CPU. The dock also has space for an external DVD-ROM. This can be carried around with you or left in dock for use.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - January 7, 2011 Asus shows off their commitment to all levels of the computer market. In a room at the Venetian Hotel and Casino I had the chance to talk with JJ Guerrero about some of Asus' new products and in particular where they are going with their new Sandy Bridge boards (the H67 and P67).

The first thing we were told was that Asus is moving to maintain a scalable feature set. They want to make sure that consumers know what they have to offer and can find the same "feel" in every product from the top to the bottom. The features will scale as the boards move from entry level to the very top end ROG products. The components on the board have also been designed with this concept in mind. Both DIGI+ VRM and Intel Lan will now be available on Asus' mid-range boards and not just their ROG line. This brings a more rounded feature set and also builds consumer confidence and allows for potential upgrading. Other items that will be seen across the board will be items like Bluetooth 2.1, USB 3.0 and a set layout.

JJ also let us know that Asus is not going to drop their commitment to performance. He told me that the new P67 boards are being designed with performance and, of course, overclocking in mind. To do this they have worked on the power planes to gain an extra boost to do this they have tested and discovered the power and thermal demands for a Sandy Bridge CPU with an applied 50x multiplier. This should help give even a lower end CPU enough juice to gain a good overclock.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - It's funny the things you find when taking a minute out of your busy CES schedule to admire some of the fantastic views that Las Vegas has to offer.

During our visit to the MSI suite at the lovely Aria hotel today, we spotted an upcoming MSI motherboard called the Big Bang Conqueror just sitting around which we believe is based around the AMD 990FX chipset. This chipset will support future AM3+ processors from AMD and it will be AMD's top dog for overclockers and gamers.

While we didn't get too many details on the chipset itself, from looking at the board itself we could make quite a few assumptions. The first and third blue PCI-E graphics slots will operate at 16 lanes for full speed AMD Crossfire support and the memory setup uses a standard dual-channel DDR3 configuration. As far as the MSI specific details go, we see the addition of the new Military Class II, OC Genie, SATA 6G, USB 3.0 and more.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - January 6, 2011 MSI held their Master Overclocking Arena event for the 2011 year. Held at the Pole Position raceway the event was military themed to match MSI's "Military Grade" component that they put on their motherboards. The competition was setup for teams to compete instead of the more traditional single last-man-standing style event that others use. MSI also live streamed the event.

There was plenty of MSI gear to be seen and along with full access to the raceway. Both the press and overclockers were allowed to run the small electric go-karts around the track to see who could get the best time. When they weren't out on the race track the usual battery of tests were run with the typical favorites like SuperPi (32M) FutureMark's 3DMark 11, and others.

The event was run over most of the day and had highlights like a loss of power to multiple tables and even breaking the world record for 3DMark 11. It was a well put together event if it did make for a very long day. We were not able to stay until the end to find out the winner but have since heard that OC Alliance (Splave and Romdominance) took the crown.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - Home Automation is really cool and one day I will automate my entire home. I have looked into it before and the thing that kept me away was having to put another computer in my home to run the software and the fact that most of the gateways at the time were almost $1000. A company called HomeSeer has unveiled a new and very small home automation gateway called the HomeTroller-Mini at CES. The device is a tiny gateway that allows people to control their home automation gear using the iPhone or iPad.

The HomeSeer device itself has a 1GHz processor on board and runs a version of Linux. It will work with most home automation brands on the market and supports formats like Z-Wave and a lot more. It can send you reminders about things via text, email, or voice messages. The device will also work to monitor home energy usage as well.

The HomeSeer HomeTroller-mini will work with gear from major players in the home automation market like Cooper, Schlage, Kwikset, Lutron, Leviton, Russound, Microsoft, Centralite, DSC, Aprilaire, ACT, RCS, and others. I works with Z-Wave as I said before and UPB and Insteon protocols are supported too. It will ship in Q2 2011 for under $300.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - Cooler Master has big plans for their expanding Choiix mobile device accessory line in the next few months, and they were nice enough to invite us to their suite at CES to take a look at the upcoming lineup. Here are just a few products they've got on tap for 2011:

The Choiix BoomBoom portable speakers are getting an upgrade when Choiix releases the BoomBoom 3D. It's not a whole lot different to look at, but there's a noticeable difference in sound quality; especially when you switch it from "Stereo" to "3D" mode, which gives a 2.1 sound effect.

The speakers don't end there; Cooler Master has also implemented a small pair of stereo speakers into their Power Fort mobile charger. While fully charged, the Power Fort Go Music has enough juice to fully charge a US based smartphone with enough left over for about 5 hours of music playback. Without a phone plugged in the Go Music will play about 20 hours of music.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - Casio has been around for a long time and makes so many products that it's hard to keep up with all of what the company offers. One of the big categories for the company is digital photography and at CES Casio has pulled the wraps off a new digital camera that tosses out the traditional design we are used to seeing and forges its own path into fracking awesome point and shoot design.

The new camera is called the TRYX and it has a very unique design. The camera has a LCD that can swivel 270-degrees to allow the user to turn the thing to the front or back for ideal visibility. While the screen swivels the frame around the sensor, lens and screen swivels 360-degrees. That means that the frame can be positioned anywhere the user wants to allow it to act as a tripod or a handle for taking photos over a crowd.

The camera is very thin at 0.59" thick and it can shoot 1080p HD video at 30 fps in portrait or landscape modes. The camera has a ton of automatic features, functions that you expect to find on digital cams today, and it can record in slow motion with 240 fps video at 432 x 320 resolution. The LCD is a 3-inch touch capable unit and the sensor resolution is 12.1MP. The camera will ship in April 2011 for $249.99.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - The Corsair booth at CES 2011 was a happening place today. Corsair, in their effort to move past being a memory and solid state drive company introduced a new software called Corsair Link (C Link) that takes hardware monitoring and control to a new level.

C Link has a completely custom interface that can be arranged with a picture of your chassis and then the monitoring points moved to the locations you see fit. Nothing is off the table in this software, you can even monitor how much power your GPU is using in watts.

Reading the data is the easy part and Corsair's new software goes one step further to allow users to program certain actions based on the hardware's status. If a system component reaches a temperature deemed too high the software can turn up the speed of a specific case fan and change the color of the internal case LEDs to keep you informed of how the system is performing.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - I haven't reviewed a motherboard in several years but I use them daily and build new systems every couple weeks. In 2010 I praised Gigabyte quite a bit for their USB 3.0 work and even used their X58A-UD7 for most of the year for testing storage products on. While running through the CES show floor today the new G1 Killer caught my eye and I had to stop to take a peek.

Here we see the new G1 Killer next to the new P67A-UD7. The G1 is a serious motherboard that will require a new case for most users. Gigabyte told me that only 12 cases on the market will work with the new G1 but many more are on the way.

The P67A-UD7 is no slouch either and it's ten USB 3.0 ports are certainly worthy of high praise. Gigabyte was able to reach this high number by using two NEC USB 3.0 chips and a pair of VIA hubs. The USB 3.0 bandwidth is shared at that point but how many USB 3.0 devices do you plan on running this year? The fun really starts though when you think about the power delivery system since all ten USB 3.0 ports are capable of charging power hungry devices like Apple's Ipad.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - One of Corsair's big announcements at CES this year is the introduction of their very first PC speakers.

You may know Corsair has a newish audio group within its company that has a range of headsets and now Corsair continues its long lasting transition from being just a memory company, to one who I reckon wants to eventually buildup a big enough product portfolio that it can make its own high-end gaming PC systems from its own parts. Alright, so I might be getting ahead of myself here, but this is happening bit by bit.

Back on track, we hooked up with Dylan who is in charge of Corsair audio and he gave us a look at the SP2500 2.1 speaker system. It comes with plenty of neat features I won't begin to pretend I know about, but if you are an audio enthusiast and want a solid set of new PC speakers for your desk, it seems like Corsair is right on the money here.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - January 5th 2011 GIGABYTE launched thier new series of gaming motherboards; the G1-Killer series. In what was setup to look like a paramilitary rally GIGABYTE launched three new motherboards designed for gaming. These new boards are aimed straight at the gamer with many features that will appeal to even the most deamanding of customers. These boards are part of GIGABYTE's war on gaming. Each is deisgned like the perfect soldier. GIGABYTE calls these parts Super Sight, Super Speed, Super Hearing and Super Shield.

The baords come in three flavors;

The Assassin

Wow - rumors are coming in thick and fast for this! Rumor is that the next Call of Duty title might be a prequel to the super-awesome Modern Warfare. According to the rumor, this new game will explore the backstory of the "Ghost" character and explain how he was recruited into Task Force 141.

Included in the rumor is the game will run on the Modern Warfare 2 engine, rather than new tech. The biggest bit of this rumor is that Raven Software may be taking the helm in this new title. There has recently been a job advert for a lead FX person mentioning that it requires driving the development of stunning visual effects for "an established console-based, realistic, first-person military shooter".

I would have preferred something next-gen, but I think we're going to watch the CoD franchise burn in flames.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - Fujitsu has unveiled its smallest portable scanner ever called the ScanSnap S1100. This scanner is aimed at the business users that travels a lot and needs to be able to scan documents and all sorts of other stuff into the computer on the go. You can scan documents, cards, and anything else that you can feed into its maw without having to wait until you get home or back to the office.

The S1100 is the smallest ScanSnap in the world measuring in at 10.74" x 1.87" x 1.33" and weighing 12.3 ounces. It is fast despite the small size and can scan a full size sheet of paper in only 7.5 seconds. It can also scan documents directly to cloud storage like Evernote and Google Docs.

Continuous document feeding makes it fast and easy to scan multiple-page documents into a single PDF for easy archiving and other uses. The scanner also supports plastic cards, thick paper stock and other material that would jam a normal scanner. Another cool feature is that the user can mark a page with highlighter or pen and the scanner will use the marks as keywords to enable searching. The S110 is available now for $199.

ThinkGeek has some really cool products and accessories for all sorts of gadgets and gear in their line. The company is also famous for making things as jokes that have enough cool to them to be appealing and enough realism to fool people. If I had laid eyes on the Joystick-It a few months from now around April I would have called BS on this thing, it looks too cool to be a real product.

It's a shiny chrome joystick that claims to stick to your iPad screen and allow you to control games that use a virtual joystick with a real joystick in your hand. The thing has a thin stalk and a big ball on top that reminds me more than a bit of the arcade sticks I grew up playing at the arcade.

The Joystick-It has a patent pending and needs no batteries. It is shown with the iPad, but it will work with any capacitive touchscreen device. ThinkGeek will sell the controller for $24.95 with limited quantities available at the end of January.

CES 2011, Las Vegas - Corsair has unveiled a new computer chassis at CES 2011 along with lots of other gear for computer fans. The new chassis fits into the Obsidian series that Corsair has been peddling for a while now. Corsair says that it built the case to last an enthusiast through years of hardware upgrades and still look good.

The case is made from steel with matte black on the inside and outside of the case and a brushed aluminum faceplate for good looks. The front of the case has a dust filtered 200mm fan and shoots the hot air out the top and back for efficient cooling with a 200mm fan on top of the case and a 120mm fan on the rear of the case. The dust filters of the case are easy to access to clean and the side panels are quick release. The chassis also has an integrated fan controller.

The case has a CPU back plate that is cutout for easy installation of a CPU cooler and it has a routing system for internal cables to keep things clean. The drive cages are removable and can be located in different areas. The case also has room for long power supplies and video cards inside. The case will sell for $199.99 and will ship in April.