CES 2009

I just flew back from CES, and boy are my arms tired. I couldn't pass up that joke, but actually its my feet that are tired. Despite reports of a slow CES, there was still plenty to see. Highlights for me included 3D TV, widgets on TVs, SSDs, and applications for Blackberry's.

In TVs, there certainly were big ones, like Panasonic's 150 inch TV - which was impressive, but of course not practical. More interesting in TVs was 3D. There was a cool demo from TCL in the RCA booth that showed 3D without special glasses. It was pretty impressive with animated content, but less so with non-animated. For the other vendors 3D demos, you had to wear some form of 3D glasses. This was the case in the Intel and Sony booths, and both were pretty impressive. The big wow was the 3D theater in the Panasonic booth, which among other things showed amazing 3D content from the China Olympics. This was just a technology demo though. I'm sure 3D is years away at best, but the prospect was certainly compelling.

I was also very interested in the various combinations of internet and TV. Yahoo's widgets are very interesting, though Samsung had their own version. Some of the vendors had the technology built into their TV. But unless this is all software upgradeable (and even if it is, you can't upgrade any hardware), I wouldn't want this since we know technology will move much faster than my next TV purchase. All of these were very interesting, and I think is clearly going to catch on in the near future. Though it will probably be in a Blu Ray box like LG has done (includes Netflix downloads - very impressive), or in some other dedicated box. I know everyone thinks people don't want another box, but its better than TV integration. And Sorry Sony. I don't want Blu Ray either - I've moved past buying physical disks when I can download my content.

SSDs were also very interesting. Yes, I work for Intel, and we recently launched SSDs. But these REALLY speed up application load time, consumer less power than SSDs and are less likely to break as there is no moving spindle. But if you don't trust me, check out Anandtech, or the many other amazing reviews (Anantech Review). SSDs were also in a couple of camcorders, including over in the Samsung and Canon booths. I've been waiting for a fully digital camcorder with good image quality for some time, and we may be there. But the SSDs are expensive. Then the next tricky question - once I have all of my movies in a digital format, and not tape, I'll want to back it up somewhere. But those movies will quickly fill up my standard hard disk at home - so can a local storage device (NAS) ever be simple/intuitive enough for mainstream users?

And finally, I spend sometime in the Blackberry booth, as I'm a Blackberry user. What they need is a huge number of free or cheap apps like the iPhone. They don't have that yet, but they did have about two dozen app providers in their booth. I liked Slacker Radio, and the Wall Street Journal app that pushes news to your phone. I was also interested in Flycast which offers 1200 stations for listening and watching. Its ad supported and free, but frankly I prefer that over mobiTV where I have to pay a subscription. Especially if they can figure out a way to make the ads targeted, so I don't mind listening to them.

That's it from CES. Thankfully it took me a few days to finish this blog entry, so my feet don't hurt anymore.