CES – Live from Sony’s press conference

We’re in a massive crowd of journalists at the huge Sony stand at CES, learning about the tech giant’s new products for 2008

Rolly is the robotic Bluetooth speaker that dances while it plays music, and has 2GB of memory on board. It’s been around in Japan but is coming to the west in the summer. And it’s very cute.

Mylo portable messenger has been redesigned to look more like the PSP, and now has a new camera and support for Flash so you can use Facebook and YouTube.

Sony’s ebook Reader was the number one selling device on SonyStyle in December – and it now supports PDF, unlike Amazon’s Kindle.

There’s a new round sony Vaio PC that plays back and records Blu-Ray discs.

Nav-u GPS has been improved with a ‘super suction cup’ for easier positioning. and is the first device licensed to show retail icons.

Sony Ericsson is releasing more Walkman phones in the US (they’ve sold 45m in the world so far). The W760 is a HSDPA slider that doesn’t look as good as the 910, but it does have the ability to play songs according to your mood, and motion sensitivity for gaming. Not sure if this’ll make it to Europe.

The W350 is a very cool looking matt black phone with flip cover – a ‘matchbook’ design that covers the keypad with music player. It’s 1cm thick. A very cool fashion music phone.

The Z555 is a fashion phone with a diamond inspired design, with a bejewelled keypad. It has gesture control – you can wave your hand over the phone to silence a cool or snooze your alarm. It’s available in ‘diamond rose’ (aka pink) and black.

a new DVDirect recorder allows you to record hi-def DVDs direct from your camcorder, and play them on Blu-Ray players.

There are 16 new camcorders – there are hybrid models combining up to 8GB flash with discs. There are HD camcorders that record up to 1920×1080 resolution – proper hi-def.

There’s a new Sony Alpha SLR ccamera too – the A200, which is easier to use and has better optical image stabilisation.

TransferJet is a new wireless technology in development that allows tranfer of picture and video from cameras at 500Mbps – but the demo doesn’t work, so I’ll check it out later and report back. 

A new sub-$200 Blu Ray disc drive is available for PCs, turning them into movie players. Blu-Ray is selling two discs to every one HD-DVD sold, and that gap will inevitably widen following Warner’s decision to support Blu-Ray exclusively.

The Bravia range is being upgraded with the internet video link that allows you to watch internet video content. This has been available for a couple of months in the US but is updraded with 3 modules – The Bravia DVD link allows you add a DVD player to the back of your TV. The Bravia Input Link provides more HDMI devices. But most significant is the Bravia Wireless Link which attaches to you HD components up to 200ft away and wirelessly streams HD content to a Bravia TV. Seems like wireless HD streaming is one of the big themes of CES this year, following similar announcements from Toshiba and LG.

There are 17 new Bravia models, with slimmer bezel and thinner depth. There’s also a 1080p 32in LCD, which seems a little excessive to me (at that size, 720p surely is enough?). At the other end, there’s a new 52in LCD.

There’s now a 4K prototype TV being displayed – that’s 4 times the resolution of HD on an 80in display. There’s no timescale on this arriving, but at last, we’ve found out what comes after hi-def. Seems like I’m gonna need one of those glorious Red 4K videocameras for my holiday videos from now on…

Sony is gloating now: Christmas was boomtime for Bravia, the open-format Walkmans, Blu-Ray, Cybershot and Vaio notebooks. It seems that things might be turning round for the tech giant, which has been struggling in recent years under pressure from Samsung and LG.

And finally… Sony boss Howard Stringer is taking the stage for a Steve Jobs-style announcement. ‘All of us at Sony are feeling blue today. But that’s a good feeling.’ and of the failed demo: ‘we’ll do it again until we get it right.’ But the name of the game is the next ‘champion product’ – OLED TV is a gorgeous looking 11in TV that’s just 3mm thick and has a million-to-one contrast ratio. It’s on sale now.

Sony is showing off a prototype 27in display using the stunningly crisp OLED screens on its stand too. The future of TVs has been unveiled – I’ll have an 82in 4K OLED please.