© 2009 Bright Side Of News*, All rights reserved. CES 2012: Take a Tour of Kingston's Suite

CES 2012: Take a Tour of Kingston's Suite

1/16/2012 by: Anshel Sag

At this year's CES 2012, Kingston invited us to visit them at their dual-suites at Caesar's Palace. This year, Kingston focused primarily on two things, their HyperX line of performance products and their mainstream line of consumer products.

Kingston's Dave Leong started off the meeting by showing us their newest ultra-super-micro USB drives which are primarily aimed at the newly created Ultrabook market. Kingston currently has two designs which they have been working on.

Both are part of the DataTraveler series of products and as you can see from the image above, it is extremely small. This drive is akin to one of those wireless bluetooth dongles which enable users to leave their bluetooth dongle for their mouse in the laptop so that they can always use it without losing it. The concept here is very similar, except for the fact that these are actual USB drives and they will be coming in capacities up to 16GB.

This DTMicro drive will easily fit in your USB 2.0 port and give you easy and seamless USB storage without worrying about whether or not you've left it in. The other USB drive is the STSE9, which is a more polished design and is admittedly bigger, but still extremely thin and strong. These are designed with larger capacities in mind but are also intended to accompany the strong Ultrabook metalic design themes. Both will be covered by Kingston's 5 year warranty.

Following that, Kingston also showed us their new HyperX memory designs. These designs are intended to be updates to the current HyperX heatsink and coloring schemes. The two DIMMs that Kingston showed us are both redesigns of Kingston's historical simple blue heatsink design.

One HyperX DIMM is a red edition DIMM which really isn't very different on the inside, but rather different on the outside. These DIMMs are designed to accommodate builders who are extremely anal about their color schemes and would rather prefer a red DIMM over Kingston's (nearly trademark) blue heatsinks. These DIMMs will be available in 4GB and 8GB kits of 2 priced at $31 and $54 respectively.

The other HyperX DIMM is a redesign of their tall heatsink designs and has yet to be named. This design is set to likely replace the current T1 heatsink designs that are found on Kingston's taller high performance heatsink designed HyperX RAM. Although we don't know the current or future name of these DIMMs we can definitely tell you that they look very nice and we're hopeful that we'll be seeing them available soon.

In the consumer product category, Kingston also showed off some updates to their award winning WiDrive which is an extremely thin solid state based wireless hard drive for tablet computers. With this update, Kingston will now be offering a 64GB capacity drive as well as support for the Kindle Fire Android tablet. With the addition of these updates, Kingston will also be upgrading the iOS app for iPhones and iPads to support AirPlay and DRM support.

In our conversations with Dave Leong and Danny Ordway from Kingston we were able to conclude that even though the Kingston WiDrive may be available to Android users right now because of the Kindle Fire, it isn't going to be guaranteed to work well with any of them. This is mainly because of the fragmentation between different Android manufacturers who use different video and audio codecs for their playback functions. As a result, there likely may be issues with some Android devices when trying to use the WiDrive. With ICS (Android 4.0), though, there's a very good chance that we'll see yet another update and more devices being supported by Kingston.

Kingston also showed us a few demos using their SSDs and RAM to show off the possibilities of their hardware. One demonstration contained all of Kingston's currently available SSDs and allowed you to see the various speeds between the different drives. While the other demonstration showed off what kinds of benefits can be obtained by running dual Kingston HyperX SSDs in combination with 64GB of DDR3 RAM in photoshop.

Overall, we're very excited from what we've seen from Kingston and are hopeful that we'll be able to test these products out when they come to market in the near future. We also want to extend our thanks to Kingston and Dave Leong and Danny Ordway from Kingston for giving us a tour of their suite at this year's CES 2012

Tags:

Kingston, DDR3, HyperX, DataTraveler, DTMicro, DTSE9, Ultrabook, SSD, WiDrive, Apple, iOS, Kindle, Kindle Fire, Android, ICS