CES-2012 – Bring on the new toys!
CES-2012 – Bring on the new toys!
Next week all of the CES loyalists will be climbing into planes, trains and automobiles and making their annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show(CES).
So, what do I think the show has in store for us this year? Well, let’s start with looking at what Santa brought us in our stockings for last year’s show and then do some extrapolating for technology and product growth and development during the last year.
At the 2011 show, we saw beaucoup vendors selling the usual parts and components. Things like wire, resistors, capacitors, circuit boards of all kinds and custom designs, as well as power supplies to juice up about anything you wanted to plug in. These vendors will always be there. Most are from southeast Asia and basically they’re a regular at CES.
Interestingly enough, right beside them were a plethora of vendors selling support products for iPads, iPhones and associated devices. There were all kinds of cases, keyboards, mice, book-holder type cases to insert your iX into. They came in every shape and color imaginable and given the market explosion for iPads, Honeycomb based “pads” as well as pad portable computing in general, I fully expect an explosion in this area. Basically, if you have anything that looks like a tablet or pad, these guys will have just about every imaginable holder, case, desktop docking unit, mouse and cover your little heart may want to spend money on. And, some of them are really creative solutions!
Honeycomb will be HUGE. In 2011 we basically saw most of the new stuff that came out in the computing space, came out with a Honeycomb option. It was really laughable to see new tables from people like Toshiba running BOTH Honeycomb and Windows 7. But then, Toshiba chose to keep their new toys sequestered behind a one inch Plexiglass display case so you could never really play with them to see how and if they worked beyond the demo Tosh was running.
The drawbacks with Honeycomb, as with most other Linux centric operating system supported products will persist – the HUGE LACK OF DEVICE DRIVERS. People like HP, Dell, IBM, etc., give lots of lip service to supporting Linux, but when it comes right down to it, end users are still missing major amounts of device drivers to make the new toys they’re buying actually work on a Linux centric network or system. This NEEDS to change if vendors are going to hope to make their share of this market as they have with the Windows world.
Speaking of Windows (the product we all love to hate), this will be the last year for Microsoft’s CEO giving the kickoff keynote presentation. In fact, rumors are than Microsoft isn’t going to even be at CES 2013! Your guess is as good as mine right now as to why. Perhaps the rumors of how buggy Windows-8 is are in effect true and they need to keep the folks home to clean up that mess. Perhaps they’re tired of people coming up to the counter and wondering why things don’t work like they used to and don’t work for the better – things like Window-7 backup, why we’re still limited to a 2Tb boot partition when Win-64 can address a heckuva lot more! You’d think that something as simple, basic and required as a good backup/restore function would be mandatory and you’d think Microsoft would have taken lessons from those huge IBM AS/400’s they leased (so they could say they never “owned” one) to run all their back office functions back as far ago as when they were telling us to buy NT4 Server! Gates wasn’t dumb, he was using AS/400’s while telling the rest of the world to buy NT! Oh P.T. Barnum was right once again!
You’ll find every auto power converter, amplifier, speaker, tuner, CD/DVD player, radio and everything else you ever wanted to stuff into your car to make it sound louder than the Hiroshima bomb, but with better tone quality. The auto section was HUGE in 2011 and I expect that given consumer buying sentiments, it will not get any smaller.
Speaking of the auto section, interestingly enough, in the auto section is where you would find the folks from Trojan giving out sample condoms of every size, shape and color. So, if Santa didn’t fill up your stocking with enough goodies, drop by the Trojan booth. I guess they put Trojans in the auto section because it gives new and improved meaning to the phrase “where the rubber meets the road”.
Solar applications and resource vendors have tended to grow in the last several years. Vendors providing everything from solar panels to converters and plugs seem to be doing well and their market is growing strongly. So, look for some increases there and perhaps some surprise products as well.
Home security vendors will be out in force, but a minority presence. There will be lots of nice network and wireless based systems to secure your property and be able to view and manage it from anywhere in the world over the internet. You never know when you’re going to be standing on the Tower of Pisa and want to see who’s ringing your doorbell back in Pig’s Knuckle Iowa.
TV’s, TV’s and MORE TV’s! Trying to quantify the types, shapes, sizes, thickness, power requirements and heat dissipation of these things will remind you of the combinations of Dr. Seuss’s “Green eggs and ham”! I fully expect 3D-TV to continue making inroads in quality, price and hopefully standardization of those pesky little glasses. So many vendors have their own tweak on how the 3D glasses are supposed to be made that there really isn’t a standard yet.
You can always expect new breakthroughs in digital photography. 2011 brought us new 3D cameras in HD, Single lens reflex type cameras that could flip into HD movie cameras with detail to the point you were almost able to tell just how many angels COULD fit on the head of a pin! Photography equipment will abound as new equipment, lenses, higher density and faster memory chips are touted. Taking video pictures on tape is going out and quickly being replaces with fast and large memory chips.
Even expect the good old hand held calculator to have had a work over since the 2011 show. It never ceases to amaze me how we’ve gone from things the size of a bread box with some nixie tubes on them down to hand held wafers that can be used to calculate your trip to the moon when not doing your algebra home work.
Cell phones of every size and functionality will be present, with of course, the exception of Apple who still thinks CES is beneath them, for whatever reason.
Droid operating system devices will be common place. Not only in hand held communications, but in tablet and laptop technologies as well.
Intel I expect will bring out some of their new prototype tablets and laptops. They brought some really nice ones running on Atom at 2011 that roused up a lot of interest. It will be interesting to see what they come up with for use after the Atom and the Ix processor lines and how they’re implemented. Hopefully the folks like Intel, Asus, etc., are really taking more to heart the need for extremely robust onboard RAID functionality for the disk drives that that goes above and beyond what we’re seeing today. With users implementing disk drives in the terabyte realm on their home systems, the need for disk data redundancy is a requirement versus a nice to have. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of doing a recovery, you will easily understand why.
Solid State Drive (SSD) memory is a hot technology trend and will continue to be so. The prices are finally starting to come down from the stratosphere and capacity increasing, but no where near to the points where they need to be nor really financially feasible for the larger home user to even consider using them.
Speaking of RAID technology, look in the near future for your laptop or tablet to have SSD’s that are at least mirrored. This will be a bit of a costly item when they come out, but for those heavy power users and road warrior’s that can’t afford to have a disk crash or lose data, they’re going to be very cheap insurance. It’s basically a technical impossibility to do it now due to power consumption requirements and limited battery life.
Which brings us to laptops, tablets, pads and other PC’s. The laptop and tablet space is booming. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see this. However, you’re finally seeing some rationality coming into the buying decision process. Keep in mind that when Apple released their iPad, it had no external connectivity options and for all practical purposes it has no onboard connectivity options at all even still. People like Lenovo, Asus and especially Acer with the Iconia line are adding much needed external connectity with onboard connections for Micro-SD cards, Ethernet RJ45 plugs, USB terminals as well as built in WiFi and GPS. When you look at something like a SuperPad™, you’ll wonder why you settled for something without these features! Simple, it’s all marketing. Apple and other vendors are going to milk the product space, and very slowly add new connectivity features with newer versions, each time forcing you to buy more stuff. The drawback that exists now to the products that have all this connectivity is that most of them are running Honeycomb and the application depth for Honeycomb just isn’t there like it is for the Apple products. But, it’s growing and fast.
I’m hoping to be able to sneak into the HP, Verizon, Lenovo and a few other vendor areas. They tend to like to hide behind closed doors, behind lots of guards and only let a select few see and play with their new toys. I’m not sure if they’re ashamed of their new stuff or just bashful.
Finally, let’s not forget the home audio and entertainment products. Many of these are in the hotel room suites since they want to imitate your home family or media room’s design and acoustics. So, you’ll have to look them up and hit the elevators. Rest assured that you’ll find as many items to entertain your block with Beethoven’s 7th as ever. Frankly, I still have and use some old paper cone speakers and I prefer vinyl over digital, but then, that’s me. But every headphone, ear bud, audio and satellite component you will see on sale at Christmas will be at CES next week.
I’ve only tipped the iceberg and CES is a HUGE iceberg. I’ll tell you more when I get there.
I’m Don Rima and that’s the view From Where I Stand.
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