New York-based Copia, the “preferred” software for eReaders that run on the Windows 7 operating system, is trying to distinguish itself as a purveyor of not only hundreds of thousands of downloadable books, but of a “social” experience that allows readers to annotate and share notes.

Billed as an ideal medium for book clubs, as well as students, the company didn’t have figures on how many installs of its free app have occurred.

Copia is also supported on the iPad and Android platforms (click here for the free iPad app).

All of Panasonic’s 2011 TVs will have VIERA Connect on board, rather than the current VIERA CAST system. The change is not a mere cosmetic one. Unlike VIERA CAST, VIERA Connect is an open platform, which means it will be available to developers of third-party content to promote the expansion of IPTV services and applications.

This will be collected into a new VIERA Connect Market section, where users will be able to select individual apps to personalize their IPTV portal.

Apps include Netflix, Amazon VOD, Napster, Pandora, Facebook, CinemaNow and Skype functionality. Other content includes the ability to play 3D games online through Gameloft.

Fifteen new flat-panel TVs models (42- to 65-inches) are compatible with this service, on release in the US market this spring.

The company expects to drive its IPTV sales up to 70% of its total television sales in the global market by 2012.

VIERA Connect is also shared with Panasonic’s first tablet device, shown in prototype. Few details were available about the VIERA Tablet but it will be capable of streaming content from a VIERA HDTV onto the tablet device, allowing users to effectively take their TV programming with them throughout the house. Samsung is showing a similar functionality on its Galaxy tablet and smart TVs.

T-Mobile is making a major 4G push, promising to “double” the performance of its network to peak download speeds of 21Mbps during the first half of 2011 and 42Mbps by the end of the year.

The company additionally announced 25 new devices, including its first tablet, the Dell Streak 7, scheduled to hit retail first quarter. The Streak 7 runs Android 2.2 on a dual core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor with Adobe Flash support.

It has a 7-inch multi-touch screen, up to 32GB of internal storage, and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera for face-to-face communication via Qik or Skype.

A new Silicon Valley company is discreetly showing “The Kno,” a dual-screen tablet being marketed as the future of college textbooks. While several companies are pushing dual tablets here at CES, this one is unique in that it’s already shipping, is designed as a textbook replacement, and offers a large catalog of ready-to-purchase digital textbook content from all the major educational publishers.

Navigating on the customized Ubuntu 9.10 OS was intuitive and easy, and the tools really did reflect the way students want to use textbooks: highlighting, note-taking, zoom, definitions, and a lot more. The Wi-Fi enabled device plays video and has a built-in Internet browser. The textbooks themselves are PDFs of the print version, enhanced for greater interactivity.

The 14.1-inch dual-screen is frankly humongous, and weighs in over 5.5 pounds (although that’s still an improvement over the 40 pounds of textbooks this reporter remembers lugging around).  Other specs include NVIDIA Tegra T200 CPU, 512MB RAM, 16 or 32GB onboard storage (no option to upgrade further), microUSB, microphone, 3.5 mm audio ports, and 6-8 hours of battery life in normal use.

The glare-resistant touchscreens are bright and pretty, and Kno claims they are densely packed with sensors and run with “new smoothing algorithims,” but in five minutes of fooling around I witnessed multiple bugs, freezes, and problems with the stylus.

The Kno is pretty pricey: $899 for a dual-screen or $599 for a single-screen version, and digital textbooks in their online store are nearly as expensive as the print versions. Kno, Inc., won’t say how many they’ve shipped.

Not a perfect device, but there’s nothing else like it. A product worth watching.

“CES is a celebration of optimism.” – Gary Shapiro

Kicking off the largest Consumer Electronics Show ever, Gary Shapiro, CEA’s CEO, opened the event to a packed convention center crowd, citing the theme of Innovation – the “engine driving the US and global economy” – as the theme of this year’s Vegas soiree.

The expected record crowd of 126,000 includes 25,000 from outside the US, with 2,700 companies represented in 1.6 million square feet of exhibit space – the ‘best of the best’ of new consumer devices and services from around the world. Gary’s remarks covered the waterfront, from upbeat commentary on the criticality of innovation in reviving our economy and improving our standard of living to political commentary on the need for Washington to remove barriers to innovation, more thoroughly detailed on the CEA supported website, The Innovation Movement.

Being practical, Gary also invited CES-goers to buy his new book on innovation, “The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream,” released this week (it’s a good read).

Gary cited steady growth in consumer electronics this past year (up 3.5 percent worldwide in 2010), driven in part by the acceleration of change with mobile technology, Internet TV, tablet computing, home automation and 3D. He also noted the rise of the user-created app marketplace, a rapidly changing landscape which helps fuel the fulfillment of the long-heralded ‘anywhere, anytime’ promise for content, news, information, sports and education. He predicts CE sales to rise 3.5 percent to $186 billion in 2011.

Gary turned over the opener to co-keynoters Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon; Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner; Motorola co-CEO Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, and executives from Google.

Building on Shapiro’s exuberance of the “unique American sauce which fuels our growth,” Bewkes and Seidenberg painted a landscape where network services and platforms provide an “extra hard drive for the brain, a second skin” with which to sense the world.  Bewkes hawked the “second golden age of television,” citing the surprising-to-some increases this year in viewership, ad revenues and program options.

Verizon, Google and Motorola followed up by unveiling several practical examples in the mobile space, notably the new Android Honeycomb platform running on an also-new Motorola XOOM LTE tablet and the Droid Bionic smartphone. The Honeycomb/XOOM combination aims squarely at the iPad and tablet computing market with Android’s refreshingly thoughtful user interface, growing range of applications and high-speed LTE-based wireless connectivity. This demo can be found at the Android Community site and includes good examples of the coming generation of capabilities, including fully 2-way videoconferencing on wireless handheld devices, new e-book options, 3D building and terrain mapping under multi-touch control, 3D multiplayer games and other capabilities not previously seen in a tablet or handheld.

Shapiro and Seidenberg noted the developments shown were the result of the “expanding circle of collaboration” between companies and industries. They alluded to massive scale changes in the telecom landscape, where double-every-18-months-volume of wireless video/data is becoming a new corollary to Moore’s law slamming existing business models and igniting consumer expectations. Seidenberg wrapped up with a resonant message on “even more disruptive social models are in our future.”

Verizon, which has arguably led the industry in terms of infrastructure but lagged in terms of debuting 4G phones, made a splashy announcement of new devices for the carrier’s 4G platform, called LTE. None of the new products have release dates beyond “sometime in 2011,” but the company did say it expects to end the year with high-speed mobile broadband in 175 markets.

Verizon vp networks Tony Melone said at a Thursday press conference that customers can “conservatively” expect download speeds of 5 to 12Mbps and upload speeds of 2 to 5Mbps from LTE (up to 10x faster than 3G).

The company didn’t ignore content, unwrapping a deal with Viacom’s Electronic Arts to bring the game “Rock Band” to its 4G mobile users. “It’s not just about apps, it’s about how deeply and seamlessly they’re integrated,” Verizon vp and chief operating officer Marni Walden said.

Verizon’s new phone offerings include the Android powered HTC Thunderbolt, one of the first phones to fully integrate Skype mobile with video calling (through one-touch calling). A 4.3-inch screen and 8 megapixel camera make the Thunderbolt multimedia-friendly. And as with the LG Revolution, also announced (see separate post), the Thunderbolt is an Android 2.2 device, capable of HD capture and playback, in this case 720p, and is DLNA-compatible.

The company also announced the first Samsung 4G LTE phone, which will take advantage of Samsung’s Media Hub content service, offering premium movies and TV shows. The Samsung Galaxy Tab was another new device on tap, with a 7-inch display and – a novelty among tablets – front and rear facing cameras for live video chat. Rounding out the Samsung offerings is a 4G mobile hotspot dongle.

Verizon also touted two notebook computers that will be able to take advantage of its 4G network: the HP Pavilion dm1-3010nr Notebook PC and the Compaq CQ10-688nr.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke to an enthusiastic crowd at Wednesday night’s keynote address, summarizing the company’s success in 2010: “We have taken our biggest step toward transforming entertainment for the whole family.”

The star of the show was the Xbox gaming system, which has been the #1 selling console for the last six months and whose Kinect gestural interface system sold over eight million units during the holidays. In additon to the impressive demonstration of gestural controls using the Kinect, Microsoft has also added a host of voice-activated commands to control content. Starting this spring, XBox LIVE users can use Kinect to navigate controller-free within Netflix and Hulu Plus, in addition to the Zune video and music marketplace already available.

Microsoft was also promoting its exclusive deal with ESPN3 that allows XBox LIVE users to access their content. The real game changer here is tapping into the XBox social utilities so that fans can interact live while viewing ESPN3 content.

Ballmer got a laugh when he was replaced onscreen by a giant avatar of himself to introduce “Avatar Kinect,” a new service coming this spring. With face recognition, body tracking, facial expression mirroring, and 15 “creative sets” for avatars to inhabit, it’s basically an animated chat service … but it looks pretty fun.

While Xbox delivers entertainment and social media to families’ biggest screens, Microsoft is trying to lasso the small-screen market with the Windows Phone 7. The demo revealed a snazzy device, designed to delight smartphone customers” and simplify common phone tasks. It’s currently only available on AT&T, but coming to Sprint and Verizon in the next few months, along with some incremental improvements.

The user interface is stylish and colorful, and substantially different than the “sea of apps” to which we’ve all become accustomed. It’s built on a “live tile” concept, where the main screen provides an immediate view of constantly-updated squares that adjust to display the incoming data from the user’s social network and calendars.

Ballmer mentioned several times that “job #1 is getting people to see this phone,” which may be code for “no one is buying it yet.” It is a crowded marketplace between Android and Apple and the jury is still out on how this viable competitor will perform.

Ballmer & colleagues also unveiled a tableful of new Windows 7 PCs, as well as some prototypes for the next operating system. Several PCs use Intel’s new second-generation core processors or AMD’s new Fusion processors, allowing six to nine hours of battery life.

Improvements to the touch screen on the Windows Tablet PC include “palm rejection,” so the screen can differentiate between intentional stylus use and accidental hand touch, and “ruggedized” Gorilla Glass screens.

The Microsoft Surface had a predictable host of upgrades, the most interesting of which was the new “Pixel Sense” technology. Infrared sensors across the whole screen mean each pixel is a camera, so it can provide intense resolution and even read documents you set on the screen. Expect to see Microsoft Surface and Pixel Sense show up in marketing, displays, and a variety of commercial applications in the next few years.

Microsoft discussed Windows’ next incarnation, which will support System on a Chip (SoC) architecture, and displayed the super-tiny SoC motherboards. They also announced new partnerships for the next version of Windows to support SoC architecture from Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, and Texas Instruments.

In all, Ballmer celebrated a year of innovation, but failed to reveal any big surprises: No tablet and no real revelations about Windows 8.

Riffing on the fact that some consumers are using the phone as their primary digital screen, Motorola and AT&T on Wednesday unveiled the ATRIX 4G, which puts the power of a Netbook, and then some, in the palm of a user’s hand.

Billed as a gaming, music and video-on-the-go powerhouse, the Android 2.2 unit runs Firefox 2.3 and has Flash integration on a 4-inch screen. It can be juiced to a custom docking station complete with keyboard and an 11.6-inch screen, as well as HDMI output for TV connectivity (up to 720p HD on release, which Motorola plans to upgrade to 1020) and three USB ports for a mouse, speakers or gaming controller. As a bonus for business users, it has an integrated Citrix receiver for VPN access. The Atrix runs on a dual core (2GHz total) processor , with 1GB of RAM, and offers up to 48GB of memory – 16GB on board and an optional 32GB microSD card.

Motorola also introduced the XOOM tablet, for Verizon, which it billed as “the first tablet PC built to run on the Android 3.0 OS” (dubbed Honeycomb). The device, which features a 10.1-inch (16:9), 1280×800 display, will connect to the new Google Mobile Innovation service offering HD-optimized books, music and movies. It debuts in 3G in the first quarter, with an upgrade to 4G expected in the third quarter.

It seems this may be the year of “smart” or “smarter” devices and solutions with a number of companies claiming the space with meanings ranging from integration to sustainability. The Samsung press conference highlighted some subtle product advances and an advanced laptop that actually garnered applause by the over-crowded, cramped and somewhat testy press corps.

Leading off was a new series of televisions with a “pencil width” bezel that hopes to integrate the picture into the living space along with a new connectivity model that joins objects within one foot of the television into the network of devices in the home. While the thin look was interesting from a consumer perspective, the seamless integration if communicated clearly might be more of a selling point that fosters a positive decision to buy. Both D8000 and D7000 LED TV Series benefit from these changes for 2011.

The Series 9 Notebook was well received at the event and it was stylishly presented in a new Duralumin skin. Perhaps more of an advancement was the 400-nit bright screen with a true 16 million color screen. Even standing at the back of the hall with bobbing heads obscuring the view it was possible to sense the visual advance of the slim light device. A Series 7 crossover sliding keyboard touchpad also was shown that was warmly received.

A full range of  ”smart” devices awaits at the show floor with promised new introductions at tomorrow’s keynote…