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Welcome to CES, Brought To You By iPod

LAS VEGAS – While I’m at the Consumer Electronics Show, product announcements coming from MacWorld in San Francisco are proving where the real center of the consumer electronics industry is – wherever Apple’s Steve Jobs is standing. Even here it feels like every third or fourth vendor you see is pitching something that works with an iPod.

Most of them are ho-hum products, tossed into the marketplace. A couple I’ve seen here deserve mention.

One is the wiDock, from Silex Technology (www.silexamerica.com) In keeping with the iPod’s design esthetic it has all the visual pizzazz of a bar of soap, but it does some neat things. It has three connectors in the back: stereo audio out, S-video out, and power. Put your iPod in the dock connector (most models fit) and it charges. There’s an infrared receiver that works with Apple Remotes, so connect it to your audio rig in the living room and control it from the couch.

So far, not so unique? Inside the case it’s also got 802.11g WiFi, so you can sync your iPod with iTunes on your PC wirelessly. That should get your attention. The $150 list price is interesting, too.

George, from Chestnut Hill Sound (www.chillsound.com), costs a little more than that, but it does a little more. It’s a tabletop unit built on the model of the Bose Wave Radio. Set your iPod in the dock on the top and it plays through George’s five-speaker system (including a down-firing subwoofer). The front control panel comes off to work as a Zigbee remote, and you can put the unit on a shelf wherever the acoustics are best in the room and set the control unit in its own recharging dock on a tabletop. There’s even a plate that matches the speaker grilles that fills in the hole in the front of the unit when you remove the remote.

George includes an AM/FM tuner and alarm. A Preamp Out connector lets you plug into a bigger stereo system and control the music with George’s remote. The most interesting connector is a USB port, which makes George updatable, and expandable with things like HD Radio modules.

George doesn’t just look like the Bose, it costs like it too, at $550 list -- but features like onscreen labels for the preset station buttons don’t come cheap, do they?

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