WinHEC Keynote: Hybrid Hard Drives and Other Cool Stuff

Windows keynotes are generally pretty dry affairs, but here's what I'm taking away from Will Poole's Windows Vista keynote at WinHEC:

Hybrid Hard Drives and Windows ReadyDrive are going to be very cool.
Microsoft showed off a PC with one of Samsung's hybrid hard drives opening a number of applications while completing a large drive copy. These HHDs use built-in flash memory to cache reads and writes, letting the hard drive spin down and save power (great for notebooks), or continue churning on more important tasks, increasing the responsiveness of your PC. In the demo, the HHD-equipped machine was able to open Outlook, OneNote, and another app in less than 40 seconds while a PC with a standard HD took more than a minute to complete the first task.

Sideshow keeps getting more interesting
Microsoft has showed off its standard for always-on external displays before, but it seems like they have a new cool Sideshow application at every conference. This time around, they showed a Logitech G15 keyboard that had been modified to support Sideshow, allowing it to run gadgets that let you check e-mail, get IM notifications, and see calendar info all without leaving your current application. They also had a Sideshow-equipped digital photo frame that should ship in time for the January release of Vista and a cell-phone-size Wi-Fi-equipped remote.

CableCard support is coming
We've known about this one for a while now, but it was nice to finally see it in action. It's going to be a nice day when I can finally snag a PC that can record real HD content off cable.

Wireless cameras may not be hopeless after all
So far we haven't been too impressed with any of the Wi-Fi-equipped cameras we've tested. Still, at least Vista should make working with them quite a bit easier. After a brief wireless connection to transfer a few settings, the wireless camera Microsoft was showing appeared automatically in Windows explorer and photos taken while it was connected showed up in real-time.

That Crysis game looks bloody amazing
Crytek, the makers of the game Far Cry, have been showing off their first foray into Direct X 10 gaming recently at shows like E3. I caught a brief video clip of some of the jungle scenes in that game at the end of the keynote, and had to retrieve my jaw from the floor. Stunningly realistic environments.