We came across this lip reading prototype during our exploration of the CeBIT 2010 halls, and while we’re a bit tardy in bringing it to your attention, there’s a certain timeless quality to strapping your face with wired sensors that transcends conventional restrictions of timeliness. That’s our story anyway. Devised by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, it picks up the motion of speech (via electromyography ) without requiring the sound, and then translates it into audible communication via a delightfully cold and robotic voice. The purposes of such a project are obvious — from helping people who’ve lost their speech to making private telephone conversations actually private — but the fun is in seeing someone use the thing in its current unrefined form. You’ll be able to do that just past the break.

Mama always said that some folks just never learn , and we reckon there’s plenty of wisdom to be had from that very statement. Year after year , German police are called in to raid select booths at CeBIT ( and IFA , to be fair), and yet again we’ve seen a booth cleared out at the request of powerful lawyers from a few companies you may have heard of. Word on the street has it that Apple, Siemens and Sisvel were all kvetching over patent infringements made by an unnamed company exhibiting at last week’s show, and within an hour or so of the fuzz showing up, the whole thing was stripped and a hefty fine (€10,000) was levied. Unfortunately, the exact details of who was violating what remains clouded in mystery, but for whatever reason, we get the feeling that something extremely similar will be going down in Hannover next year.

There are already plenty of fish in the sea when it comes to VoIP picture-frame phones, and only a few have succeeded in arousing us, but this well-guarded fella here at MSI ’s CeBIT booth seems to have some potential with its unusually large touchscreen. According to the label, the MS-9A31 landline-VoIP hybrid phone will support DECT , video conference call and instant messaging, all courtesy of Android . A quick glance around the phone also reveals two LAN ports, a USB port and a card reader — the latter two presumably for stuffing multimedia files. No word on price or availability, but if MSI’s prominence can win over Skype ’s heart then we might have a winner here (and ASUS better watch out ).

Doesn’t look too bad for a $95 Android tablet, huh? Well, there’s plenty more where that came from. Scattered along the main halls of CeBIT are dozens of Chinese and Taiwanese consumer electronics resellers looking to sell products to new customers, and this year they sure loaded up the suitcases with cheap Android / Windows CE tablets. For the most part all these tablets (or small smartbooks) have ARM 9 or 11 processors and 5 to 7-inch resistive touch displays. While some like the FirstView PC607V tablet (pictured above) have attractive skins on top of Windows CE, others from companies like Forsa and Huawei have gone with stock versions of Android. In truth, all of the ones we played with felt chintzy, but it was easier to lower our standards when we learned they wouldn’t draw more than $150 from our wallets

Every year, Hanover, Germany hosts hordes of tech journalists, analysts, and PR people for CeBIT. It’s like CES , sort of, except further away, and more boring. We decided not to go this year; it ends tomorrow. Here’s what we missed! To be clear, these were some of the bigger stories of the conference, at least for American audiences. We’ve written a few other CeBIT stories up as well, which you can find here , but by and large, the event just sort of came and went. So, this is what was happening over in Hanover this week, while the rest of the tech world was going about their business.

While we weren’t able to see the “wealth of cloud infotainment” touted in the official release , we did get a chance on the CeBIT show floor to see up close and personal ASUS’ new O!Play HD2 media server. The design’s a beaut and it’s actually quite small in form factor. As for precisely what’s running under its hood, the local ASUS rep was pretty mum — what we do know is that it’s HDMI 1.3 compliant and also boasts Composite / Component / Optical outputs and USB 2.0 / eSATA inputs, card readers for CF, SD, and Memory Stick, and that coveted USB 3.0 PC link. We’ll try to dig deeper on a return trip, but in the meantime, check out our images and video below! Gallery: ASUS O! Play HD2 hands-on Continue reading ASUS O! Play HD2 spotted, spec’d, explained ASUS O! Play HD2 spotted, spec’d, explained originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:08:00 EST.

I just don’t know what to think about this router. I’ve been staring at it for minutes now, wondering how in 802.11n’s name it was created in ASUS’ laboratory. ASUS hasn’t been too forthcoming with details on the RT-N56U, which was announced at CeBIT this week, and until we hear back from them we’ll just have to entertain you with these small slivers of detail: it has dual band support with the 5GHz band being used, is compatible with both printers and scanners, and is very fast apparently—with 300,000 concurrent sessions available. Time to go back to boggling over that inconceivably thin frame. [ ASUS ]

Well isn’t this the most unlikely partnership of the year. Apparently world famous designer and maker of watches/belts Pierre Cardin thought the tablet selection in the world was lacking, and teamed up with a small Taiwanese OEM to bring some touchscreen devices to market. We checked out the line today, and though both the 7-inch PC729 and 8.9-inch PC819 tablets are rather thick the build quality is actually solid. The tablets pack resistive multitouch displays and include a stylus for navigating around Windows 7. Internally they’re packing VIA’s older C7-M processors which doesn’t mean good things on the battery life front — we can’t imagine these things running for longer than two hours

Now that’s how to get our attention. While the English-speaking portion of the Acer press conference left much to be desired, the second half, decidedly more German in vernacular, had a couple great tidbits. Most notable is a price of Acer’s AspireOne 532G , the ION 2-equipped netbook initially espied at Mobile World Congress. The slide says it all, sort of: 379 euros — mighty aggressive, and if history tells us anything, there’s a good chance it’ll be about $379 when it comes stateside, too. No word on release date as far as we can tell, but you’ll definitely want to keep an eye out for this one.

Funny how our tune on smartbooks totally changes when one’s got an $85 price tag. We happened upon Coby’s booth at CeBIT this morning and of all the fairly cheap feeling laptops the company had on display it was its 7-inch NBPC722 smartbook that cozied right up to us. Okay, so it isn’t as thin or attractive as the $499 Lenovo’s Skylight , but again let us remind you that it costs about as much as a couple of new printer ink cartridges. Inside the little guy packs a 624MHz Marvell PXA303 processor, 2GB of flash storage and runs Windows CE which all should be good enough for some light Web browsing and e-mail writing. There was actually a YouTube shortcut on the desktop, but the NBPC722 wasn’t connected to try it out