Summing up the major trends of CES is more or less hopeless; there were 2,700 booths and 140,000 attendees, for heavens sake. But Apples iPad was everywhere. They should have called it the Consumer iPad Show. There were iPad cases, iPad holders, iPad keyboards, iPad chargers, iPad alarm clocks - and 85 iPad clones. It seemed as if anyone who knew the phone number of an Asian touch-screen factory had a tablet prototype.
Most of the new tablets run Googles Android mobile operating system - a new version that Google says is better suited for a tablets larger screen. There are exceptions, though. The great-looking, forthcoming BlackBerry Playbook runs its own special operating system, for example (bummer - no well-stocked app store). And Hewlett-Packards eagerly-awaited tablets werent on display at the show, but the company makes no secret that theyll run WebOS, an attractive chunk of software that Palm developed for its Palm Pre app phones. (H.P. bought Palm last year for $1.2 billion.)
The new tablets would take aim at the current iPads weak spots. The rivals have built-in cameras, for example, or offer a choice of screen sizes. This battle should make for some fascinating spectating. With a tablet, you dont particularly need a cellular connection. Plenty of people lead long, happy lives having only Wi-Fi connections on their tablets. In other words, the iPad-versus-clones battle will boil down to quality, price and features - exactly as it should be.
The second theme of CES was, once again, Technologies We Desperately Wish You'd Want. For the 417th straight CES, the industry trotted out yet another vision of the Connected Home (your appliances, home theatre and other gadgets all on a big network). And for the 417th straight year, nobody will have any interest.
This year, too, was the biggest push yet towards connecting your TV to th! e intern et. Not to download movies and TV shows; that's a natural, popular feature. No, we're talking about browsing the Web and doing e-mail on your TV screen - an idea that dies year after year, and will die again this time (sorry, Google and Yahoo). Nobody wants to sit down at the TV and pick up a keyboard and mouse, except maybe a few people on the lunatech fringe.
The technology the industry most wants to push down our throats, though, is 3D. For the second CES in a row, blurry, double-vision flat panels were hung on every available surface of the Las Vegas Convention Center - televisions that looked sharp only when you put on ridiculous-looking 3D glasses. Many of those glasses are just as big, heavy and expensive as last year's crop (at $100 a pair, exactly how many friends will earn a place at your movie marathon party?).
Fortunately, an effort was clearly in progress to make the glasses less hideous - or even to eliminate them altogether. More companies than ever (Sony, Toshiba and others) had new, glasses-less 3D TV sets on display.
Theyre pretty awful; you have to sit exactly dead-centre, which means that only one person at a time can watch. Even then, the image isn't sharp; in fact, it seems to be made up of little beads. But the engineers and marketers will no doubt keep at it. What else is there to do when they're not designing iPad clones?
So far, not many people have expressed an interest in 3D - maybe because it requires buying a new TV, new Blu-ray player and all-new discs (the lack of discs in the first place is another issue). But Panasonic, Sony and others paraded 3D still cameras and 3D camcorders this year, in hopes of jump-starting the whole mess.
As always, the most fun at CES was in finding the little gems that weren't on the obligatory list: radar detectors, pico projectors, baby monitors, no-name e-book! readers , car theatre and on and on.
General Electric, for example, made its first CES appearance to show how high tech can mean low energy bills. The company estimates that by 2012, 40 million American homes will be billed for electricity depending on the time of day they use it. GE's new appliances, therefore, communicate with your electric meter to shift the heaviest loads to off-peak times: dishwashers, fridges and water heaters that wait until the wee, cheap hours of the night to do their washing, defrosting and heating.
More obscure companies did some eco-thinking, too. An outfit called ThinkEco demonstrated its 'intelligent power outlet - a wall plug that learns when you use whatevers plugged into it, and then cuts power during the hours when you never use it.
Nobody knows if Casio's new, still unreleased Tryx digital camera will take decent photos. But its design is fresh and ingenious. You clutch an outer frame; the touch-screen camera part spins freely inside it, like a gyroscope. You can point it away from you, toward you or at any angle, which is handy when you use the outer frame as a stand to prop the camera up by itself.
The darling of the show, though, may have been the new Motorola Atrix. At first glance, its pretty much like any other modern Android app phone: front and back cameras, biggish screen. You swipe your finger across a fingerprint scanner to simultaneously unlock and wake the phone. But the twist is the accompanying laptop. It's beautiful - like a black MacBook Air - incredibly sleek, thin and light (2.4 pounds). But it has no processor, storage or memory of its own.
Instead, you snap the phone into the laptop. You dont have to shut anything down or enter any special mode. It's like putting the brain into Frankensteins monster. Suddenly, whatever was on the phones screen now fills the laptops screen, g! iving yo u much more real estate, plus a trackpad and full keyboard. You can attach an external hard drive and mouse, if you like. The phone provides the processor, memory, internet connection and, of course, all your photos, videos, music and files.
It's a very clever idea. Now you don't have two copies of everything. You don't have to sync anything (music, photos, videos, mail, Office files) - your phone contains all the live copies. And what a neat twist that you can run the hundreds of thousands of Android apps on a full-size screen. The Atrix seems like a winning idea that could save a lot of mobile workers a lot of weight, hassle and equipment.
There were, of course, about 2,695 other gadgets on display at C.E.S. this year - and the show itself was a lot more exciting than last years Tanking Economy Edition. In the end, that - the resurgence of innovation and investment - may be the biggest CES news of all.
Most of the new tablets run Googles Android mobile operating system - a new version that Google says is better suited for a tablets larger screen. There are exceptions, though. The great-looking, forthcoming BlackBerry Playbook runs its own special operating system, for example (bummer - no well-stocked app store). And Hewlett-Packards eagerly-awaited tablets werent on display at the show, but the company makes no secret that theyll run WebOS, an attractive chunk of software that Palm developed for its Palm Pre app phones. (H.P. bought Palm last year for $1.2 billion.)
The new tablets would take aim at the current iPads weak spots. The rivals have built-in cameras, for example, or offer a choice of screen sizes. This battle should make for some fascinating spectating. With a tablet, you dont particularly need a cellular connection. Plenty of people lead long, happy lives having only Wi-Fi connections on their tablets. In other words, the iPad-versus-clones battle will boil down to quality, price and features - exactly as it should be.
The second theme of CES was, once again, Technologies We Desperately Wish You'd Want. For the 417th straight CES, the industry trotted out yet another vision of the Connected Home (your appliances, home theatre and other gadgets all on a big network). And for the 417th straight year, nobody will have any interest.
This year, too, was the biggest push yet towards connecting your TV to th! e intern et. Not to download movies and TV shows; that's a natural, popular feature. No, we're talking about browsing the Web and doing e-mail on your TV screen - an idea that dies year after year, and will die again this time (sorry, Google and Yahoo). Nobody wants to sit down at the TV and pick up a keyboard and mouse, except maybe a few people on the lunatech fringe.
The technology the industry most wants to push down our throats, though, is 3D. For the second CES in a row, blurry, double-vision flat panels were hung on every available surface of the Las Vegas Convention Center - televisions that looked sharp only when you put on ridiculous-looking 3D glasses. Many of those glasses are just as big, heavy and expensive as last year's crop (at $100 a pair, exactly how many friends will earn a place at your movie marathon party?).
Fortunately, an effort was clearly in progress to make the glasses less hideous - or even to eliminate them altogether. More companies than ever (Sony, Toshiba and others) had new, glasses-less 3D TV sets on display.
Theyre pretty awful; you have to sit exactly dead-centre, which means that only one person at a time can watch. Even then, the image isn't sharp; in fact, it seems to be made up of little beads. But the engineers and marketers will no doubt keep at it. What else is there to do when they're not designing iPad clones?
So far, not many people have expressed an interest in 3D - maybe because it requires buying a new TV, new Blu-ray player and all-new discs (the lack of discs in the first place is another issue). But Panasonic, Sony and others paraded 3D still cameras and 3D camcorders this year, in hopes of jump-starting the whole mess.
As always, the most fun at CES was in finding the little gems that weren't on the obligatory list: radar detectors, pico projectors, baby monitors, no-name e-book! readers , car theatre and on and on.
General Electric, for example, made its first CES appearance to show how high tech can mean low energy bills. The company estimates that by 2012, 40 million American homes will be billed for electricity depending on the time of day they use it. GE's new appliances, therefore, communicate with your electric meter to shift the heaviest loads to off-peak times: dishwashers, fridges and water heaters that wait until the wee, cheap hours of the night to do their washing, defrosting and heating.
More obscure companies did some eco-thinking, too. An outfit called ThinkEco demonstrated its 'intelligent power outlet - a wall plug that learns when you use whatevers plugged into it, and then cuts power during the hours when you never use it.
Nobody knows if Casio's new, still unreleased Tryx digital camera will take decent photos. But its design is fresh and ingenious. You clutch an outer frame; the touch-screen camera part spins freely inside it, like a gyroscope. You can point it away from you, toward you or at any angle, which is handy when you use the outer frame as a stand to prop the camera up by itself.
The darling of the show, though, may have been the new Motorola Atrix. At first glance, its pretty much like any other modern Android app phone: front and back cameras, biggish screen. You swipe your finger across a fingerprint scanner to simultaneously unlock and wake the phone. But the twist is the accompanying laptop. It's beautiful - like a black MacBook Air - incredibly sleek, thin and light (2.4 pounds). But it has no processor, storage or memory of its own.
Instead, you snap the phone into the laptop. You dont have to shut anything down or enter any special mode. It's like putting the brain into Frankensteins monster. Suddenly, whatever was on the phones screen now fills the laptops screen, g! iving yo u much more real estate, plus a trackpad and full keyboard. You can attach an external hard drive and mouse, if you like. The phone provides the processor, memory, internet connection and, of course, all your photos, videos, music and files.
It's a very clever idea. Now you don't have two copies of everything. You don't have to sync anything (music, photos, videos, mail, Office files) - your phone contains all the live copies. And what a neat twist that you can run the hundreds of thousands of Android apps on a full-size screen. The Atrix seems like a winning idea that could save a lot of mobile workers a lot of weight, hassle and equipment.
There were, of course, about 2,695 other gadgets on display at C.E.S. this year - and the show itself was a lot more exciting than last years Tanking Economy Edition. In the end, that - the resurgence of innovation and investment - may be the biggest CES news of all.
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