The Consumer Electronics Show – Final recap
CES – The Consumer Electronics Show – Final recap and impressions
Las Vegas, NV
This past week the curious and the die hard techies made their annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas and the annual Consumer Electronics Show(CES). This show is four days of walking, talking, looking, playing and asking lots of questions of vendors from all over the world who bring their latest gizmoids and gadgets to Las Vegas. I was there. Now that I’m back from the show, I’ve had a little time to review my notes on the five major show floors and give my feet a much needed rest.
Like with any show of this type there were a few losers, but we’ll talk about them later as there were A LOT of winners. So, let’s get started.
Televisions – HD, 3D and portable
Actually, I could say 3D-HD for the combo units. There were lots of really incredible HD units on display. I think LG’s technicians boosted up the brightness on each of theirs just to light of the convention floor. They were so over bright that on some of the displays the contrast between white objects like clouds and snow capped mountains lost their separation. But LG’s selection was nothing less than awesome.
Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, Samsung and many others had large HD displays as well. In fact, in the Central Hall, it was hard to turn anywhere and not see something that was an HD TV or for an HD!
The really interesting new stuff where the 3D-HD goodies. Here again, folks like Sony, LG, Panasonic, Sony and basically everyone else that was a serious player had some display of something showing 3D programming on HD. Frankly the demos were very fine tuned and incredible. You could even watch Avatar in 3D there at the show on a TV!
Now with 3D-HD there’s a couple of things to keep in mind. 3D is still early in its development. Some of the current HD units will be able to be retro fitted to project 3D images with a quick firmware update, others won’t. If I were in the HD market right now I’d wait buying anything that’s this much of a capital investment until next summer or fall when the 3D products really start to come out. The nice thing about these products is that they’ll have 3D projection capability from the design stages on up to production – you won’t be doing a fix to make the 3D imagery work.
Then there’s the issue of the 3D viewing glasses. There doesn’t seem to be much of a standard yet in the industry on 3D projection glasses so, when you get your unit, keep in mind that your viewing glasses may only work for that model unit or its family of products and not with another vendors. This means you may want to make sure you get enough viewing glasses for as many people as you think will be viewing at any one time and then a couple extra just to have as spares.
The directions that 3D are taking are very nice, but 3D is not the leading edge of video technology. To see that demonstrated you had to go by the Innovision Labs booth and look at their HoloAD product. Now holograms are still the thing of Star Trek, but in the future you’re most likely going to see 3D replaced with HD imagery done via holography. These can be projected either out from a wall type TV unit or can come up from a table. In either case, in the future you’ll have a much truer three dimensional viewing and interaction capability. I can just imagine the options for webcaming in 3D holography!
Portable TV’s were also a big hit, but a niche area. Haier America had really nice array of small portable digital televisions as well as portable media players (www.haieramerica.com).
Given how many attendees were at the conference from places like Best Buys, I would look for a good smattering of product availability later this summer at your preferred store.
Cell Phones and PDA’s
If you wanted it in a cell phone or PDA combo, chances are you could find it. Verizon finally announced that they’re going to support the Palm Pre starting on January 25th. Their version is called the Palm Pre Plus and Verizon Palm clients have been screaming for it ever since the Pre was released to Sprint. Among other things it sports a 16gig internal memory versus about half that for the original Palm Pre. My sources at Verizon say that you should be able to actually find the Pre in Verizon stores on the 18th. Call ahead and make sure. Unfortunately, if you were at the conference you didn’t get to see and play with any of these or any other Verizon items unless you were in Verizon’s elite list of guests. Frankly that went over about as well as a cold cup of coffee.
There was almost as much floor space allocated to cell phones as HD TV’s. And, yes everyone was touting the iPhone and their iPhone look alikes or Blackberry variations, but the one that I found interesting was a combination cell phone and tablet PC by Shenzhen Suilong Tech. This unit, although a little on the big and bulky size for a cell phone, was a functional cell with full tablet PC. Close the unit and it’s a cell, open it and it’s a small book sized fully functional Tablet PC. Very impressive. We’ll talk about Shenzhen again in the PC area.
Nokia, amongst others had some very impressive products including their new N900. The N900 is a Meamo (linux) driven PDA that you can also load your own applications on according to their tech folks.
One of the best eye catchers and most neat toys at the conference was the iPhone controlled quadricopter AR.Drone by Parrot(www.parrot.com). Using your iPhone you controlled this four propellered hover craft and viewed in real time the video feed from its onboard camera on your iPhone. If you have a gizmoid head on your Christmas list, this little unit would make a great stocking stuffer next December.
Tablet PC technology
Just when you thought it might be dead, Tablet PC’s come back with a roar. The days of Star Trek and the small tablets they used for everything isn’t that far away. Many of us have used 5×7 pads of paper. We put them in a little closeable portfolio with a pen and business cards and that’s what we take our notes on when we’re at clients, meetings or just thinking on paper. With Tablet technology, all that note taking and doodling is doable now on basically a 5×7 tablet which also comes with wifi, Bluetooth, cell phone capability, and a fully functional PC. All at about the size of a 250 page hardback novel.
HP tried to steal a little of Apple’s thunder with their release of the Slate. Where they lost the thunder was that HP didn’t have a display on the floor and nobody could see a Slate except by special invitation only appointments at HP. Needless to say, attendees weren’t impressed and its hype died almost as fast as an old, cold cup of coffee.
Not to be outdone, Lenovo also announced some new Tablets including the U1 product line. The nice thing about this unit is that you have both the configuration of a traditional laptop device with the top opening up into the screen and a keyboard on the bottom, BUT, the screen top part is removable. The top contains all of the tablet’s processing and battery hardware and it can be unmated from the laptop into a very nice tablet! But here again, like HP, Lenovo kept all their stuff behind closed doors and referred you to their business partners for information. Yet more cold coffee.
Let’s go back to Shenzhen Suilong Tech that we talked about during cell phones. Shenzhen has a really nice fully functional Tablet PC that actually looks like a book(www.lonbook.com/en/). This thing is seven inches long and looks and acts just like a book. For those that are used to carrying around those white 5×7 pads of paper portfolios, well it’s a little thicker but now you have about that size with a fully functional Tablet PC with wifi and all major connectors. This unit is a salesman’s or student’s dream! And, it is this kind of a unit that is going to put all the e-book readers out of business in the near future. I’m not sure when the Lonbook will be available in the US but it clearly is a trend to watch for and some really incredible capabilities.
E-Book Readers
There were several e-book readers adding themselves to the foray of market currently held by folks like Kindel and Sony’s electronic reader. Products like Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sprint Skiff, Plastic Logic’s Que reader, Spring Design’s Alex, as well as products from Samsung and Qualcomm. Conceptually, these products are basically the same in that the present monochromatic presentation of printed material. You can get you newspapers, Wall Street Journals or whatever books they have in print and available and read them at your leisure. Most of them contain at least wifi connections to be able to download media from a source and a couple actually contain cell and internet connectability. I sat next to a Kindel user on the flight out to Vegas and he was getting an internet sync of several bars from his carrier even at 30000 feet.
But, I predict that these devices are going to continue to be expensive and in the long run they’ll be short lived and replaced by tablet PC technology. The simple reason is that space and functionality are a premium to the average person. Having the ability to have a book reader and fully functional PC in a compact book sized package far exceeds the limited functionalities offered by what are currently offered by e-book readers. Why should a person spend $350 or more for just a book reader when for a few more bucks they can get a fully functional PC? It just makes no sense that this technology with this functionality level will last very much longer.
Cameras
I’m not going to get into the battle of Nikon versus Canon versus Sony versus your favorite brand. We’re almost to the point where digital photography is a commodity and what sets brands and models apart is brand loyalty, features, options and pricing.
Suffice it to say, there were plenty of cameras to choose from, many offering the same functionality and pixel densities.
One thing that did start to show some attention was the concept of shooting HD video sequences instead of shooting single or a series of frames. The idea being that you can take a quick burst of pictures at HD quality then chose which frames you want to use. This would be great when shooting action shots or perhaps something that you want both stills as well as video from and don’t want to carry more than one camera. The problem is that you have to be careful that the camera you’re choosing has enough pixel density and fast enough shutter speed to take pictures in which the stills won’t be blurred. You want nice crisp in focus details for your final result. Well, the problem here is that a lot of what was being demonstrated is still early technology and just didn’t have enough shutter speed to freeze the action for crisp detail. So, when you’re looking for this kind of feature in your camera, test, test and test some more.
Home Power and networking
Being “Green” was a very “in” thing. There were multiple vendors offering their brand of home electrical load service monitoring products. Several looked good, but a lot were still early in their product life cycle. Some you could monitor the loads and control the workings of devices via a PC and some you couldn’t. If you’re used to the concept of treating a device plugged into your home power grid with a programmable logic controller (PLC) device, that technology isn’t there. Most of the vendors are attempting to treat this home electrical use functionality from their own proprietary schema, which isn’t bad but in some cases it’s limiting.
One of the home monitoring systems that really impressed me was the product by Energy Hub (www.energyhub.net). These guys seemed to have the best to offer in terms of monitoring energy consumption down to the appliance level as well as being able to do appliance control. And all from a central dashboard. Checkout their website as this is the trend for home and business power utilization. In the future, the power companies are going to want to even reach into your home and control appliances like water heaters, etc.
For those that want to expand their home computer networks yet don’t want to string cables but want speeds faster than wifi, there were several vendors offering network accessibility via your electrical power network. This is generally referred to as “home plug” technology. Basically you plug their adapter into the wall socket and into your router and presto things are up and running.
Several impressive products here but the big thing you need to be watching for here is security. When you plug your system into a power circuit, you’re potentially putting your whole house network open to the neighborhood. Make sure you have a strong security schema in place before you plug in the first module. Most of the vendors I spoke with sent their units out without any security in place. After all, they need to work quickly when you plug them in. So, if you’re going to plug your network into the grid, make sure you have your security well thought out ahead of time.
Solar
Solar was all over the place. From having photovoltaic(PV) cells embedded in the products to having PV arrays for general use or putting them on your roof, you weren’t at any shortage of vendors and products.
One of the things I was looking for was a cheap, small and efficient way to be able to power a laptop, TV, or XM radio while camping off road in the back woods. Also if I needed to charge batteries for evening use I wanted to have a 12 volt power supply that pushed enough wattage to power the device directly or be able to power a small converter, yet be light and compact. Two of the product lines I was most impressed with were from Sun Gen (www.sungen.com) and Wagan Tech (www.wagan.com).
Other goodies
In addition to some really interesting new processors (i3, i5, i7 and Atom), Intel demonstrated their document reader for the visually impaired (reader.intel.com). This unit is either hand held or table mountable and allows the user to point it to a document, newspaper, book page and have it read to them. It has a built in strobe for low light and is fairly rugged. When I was playing with it, I noticed that there were some bugs yet in the OCR as it was mistranslating what it was scanning. Technicians pointed out that there are some minor issues still being addressed in things like newspapers where you have font changes, bullets for headings, and some other special charters which can cause some minor mixups, but for normal layed out text, this is a really good tool and teaching aid for people who have a visual handicap or forms of dyslexia.
You can always depend on something interesting from Altec Lansing. They were touting a really nice portable iMT800 speaker system. This fairly rugged but aesthetic box is a 12 volt speaker system that you can either feed from an iPod or external sources. It comes with iPod socket and is great for the office or taking on a picnic when you want some good quality tunes to go with your trip out.
Home security systems were another popular item. Most were centered around some form of real time video monitoring, a few of which you could view from the net and a few that also were integrated into a home access system. I found two here that were interesting. Schlage (www.schlage.com) has a really nice integrated system that even allows access control and monitoring down to the lock level. This is to say that you can assign access codes down to the individual and lock within a determined time. So, if you want the maid service to come in a particular door within a certain time, you can allow access to that granular of a level. This also allows for monitoring access. The other one I liked was Observation System from Clover Electronics (www.cloverusa.com). Clover’s niche is that they sell a total video surveillance system in a box. You determine how many cameras you need and they ship you a total turnkey solution that you just unpack and install. Their drawback is that currently the cameras are all hardwired which makes installation a lot harder, especially for some of those hard to reach places. But their monitoring station was nice, clear and you could also monitor activity from anywhere via the internet.
The battery free radios offered by Eton (www.eatoncorp.com) got a lot of attention. These ranged from the home preparedness line of Red Cross radios with solar cells and built in hand crank generators to really nice high end multi band receivers.
Finally, for those that travel a lot or take lots of pictures when you travel and want to make sure you’ve got a copy of them when you get home, or perhaps you just want to backup parts of your laptop while on the road there was no shortage of small external hard drives touting capacities upwards of 400gig. One thing that I liked was the external shock mount offered by Iomega (www.iomega.com). This is a hard rubberized substance that encases the corners of a external portable in such a way that when it’s dropped on a hard surface the shock mount helps to dampen the impact shock. I have to caveat that this is just a precautionary item as sometimes when you drop a drive, it’s a total loss. But this product helps to protect a drive from sustaining damage from impacts in the area of 5 feet or so. Most drops are in the area of 3 feet or desk/hand height.
I mentioned that there were a few losers in this conference and I’ve already talked about a couple of them. Unfortunately at a conference like CES, there are a few vendors that for whatever reason don’t think they need to meet with the public that actually are the folks buying and using their products. This year companies like HP, Verizon, Palm, Lenova, and a few others hid themselves behind locked doors and only let their select few in. To many attendees, this was a slap in the face and frankly made some of the attendees concerned as to the real readiness of their products for prime time. And with comments spreading about at least one of these vendors’ products shorting out during a closed demo, some were more than just a little concerned.
Fortunately, these are the few exceptions to the rule.
I’m Don Rima, and that’s the way I saw it, From Where I Stand.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
