By Charly SHELTON

E3 stands for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. It is an annual convention held in Los Angeles that showcases the newest and hottest games and systems.  It is a trade-only show, meaning only members of the video games industry and members of the press are invited or allowed into the show.

Anyone who follows the interactive gaming industry has probably seen E3 reports on IGN or G4 or some other gaming news source. This reporter has been covering E3 for many years, and of all the years I have been doing it, this was the best year. All of the vendors had interesting games and products to show, even the small time independent gamer companies had some really fun games like “Magica” from Paradoxical. But the focus of this article will be less on games and more on the new technologies and gadgetry that the convention debuted and showcased.

The Internet is abuzz over the new Nintendo Wii U. It is essentially a tablet like an iPad or a G Slate, but its sole function is to play games. It is a high quality screen with a mighty processor under the hood and it plays Wii games to go on the tablet then you can plug it into the TV when you get home to keep playing. Pretty cool. But it is well covered in the other articles all over the Internet, so I will spare you the boring repeats.

The tech that needs mentioning is the other competitors. Boss Electronics. LG. Samsung. There are a lot of tablets out there to compete with the iPad. Tablets are the single layer touchscreen computers that are like the screen of a laptop. Some tablets actually can be as powerful as laptops – it just depends on what the maker decides to put in.

Boss Electronics has a great tablet. It runs Android 3.0, it has pretty good quality cameras, and it has a 10-inch-diagonal screen in 16:9 widescreen ratio. It’s fantastic. To top all of that off, it has a 1 GHz processor built in. My laptop is 2.1 GHz, and this little tablet is 1 GHz. That’s spectacular. More powerful than the iPad, bigger and has better cameras. That is the comparison to the leader, and it stacks up even higher.

The other tablet that caught this reporter’s eye was from T-Mobile. It is the LG G-Slate. The really cool thing about this one is the camera. Yeah, its screen is HD and it outputs in HDMI to 1080p, but the great selling point is the camera. Or should I say, cameras? It has two cameras on the back – high quality cameras – they are right next to each other on the top of the back side. They combine to shoot in 3D. You can shoot 3D movies and pictures on this tablet.

The 3-D video is shot in 720p. Eat your heart out, James Cameron! You can take this powerful little tablet on the go and capture red/cyan movies and pictures of your child graduating or of your girlfriend opening Christmas presents. This is going to be a new feature we may start seeing in phones and tablets – these 3-D capabilities. The Nintendo 3DS is kinda 3-D. This is really cool 3-D. And on top of all that, it has America’s first 4G network from T-Mobile. This will be one to keep your eye on.

Among the other technologies were a micro-projector for your iPod or iPhone that is actually pretty powerful, a mobile gaming system from Gaems that allows you to take your Xbox 360 to go anywhere with a built in screen in a nice little carrying case, and even a DVR system meant specifically for recording gameplay. Show all your friends how you owned that noob on COD over Live. (For those of you who need to go to Urban Dictionary to decode that message, it just means you can record your gameplay to showcase at a later date.)

There were lots of new technologies and even better, improvements on old technologies that will keep us interested for years to come.

  Charly Shelton, E3, JUNE 16, Leisure, MICHAEL WORKMAN