Every January, the Consumer Electronics Show sweeps through Las Vegas showing off objects of lust for gadget lovers for the year ahead. Last year MacWorld and CES ran concurrently, which resulted in the iPhone pretty much stealing the spotlight away from CES. This year, CES is running a week in advance of MacWorld, and so far, there have been some interesting items of note to appear:
Thin is In
It seems that many electronics manufacturers were showing off new televisions this week, with several manufacturers revealing ultra thin plasma and LCD televisions. The thinnest being Pioneer's 51 inch plasma Project KURO, at a mere 9mm (0.35 inches) thick and weighing a scant 40 pounds. They're claiming an infinite contrast ratio, as it is capable of getting pixels to emit no light.
In the old days of CES, video game systems and game software used to showcase here. I think people were having too much fun playing videogames and pretty much ignoring the other vendors, so they made the videogame industry start their own version of CES, called E3. E3 grew until it imploded on itself, creating the lame version of E3 at the Santa Monica Hangars, and the extra lame "E for All Expo".
The New York Times is saying that the CES is still too diluted with products:
Now, electronics makers and industry analysts say the show has become so loud, sprawling and preoccupied with technical esoterica that for many companies, it is as much a place to get lost as to get discovered.
The runaway hits of the last year were products not introduced at CES. The Nintendo Wii (introduced at E3) and the iPhone (introduced at MacWorld). New York Times brings up a good point -- the CES is so packed with product announcements that they drown each other out, which was the reason why a lot of videogame companies felt that E3 was no longer useful. In the old days if you wanted to see what was out there in the world of consumer electronics, you'd read an electronics magazine or maybe you'd head out to your electronics retailer and get some brochures, maybe even a product catalog. Today, I think the internet has changed that landscape drastically. Consumers can find out all the relevant details of a product by surfing the manufacturer's website. The things coming out of CES these days are more of the same of what you can already buy at your retailer -- newer cellphones, newer tvs, newer computers -- but anything that's truly innovative gets announced outside of CES, and I think a bigger part of it is that for consumers to get it, it needs to be explained to them, maybe even experienced by them so they can figure out how this new device can fit into their lives.
NYT asks whether the show could produce a new hit product, and the senior VP of Industry Relations had this to say: "It could be the Sony Rolly robot. It's a small media player that rolls around like a robot."
A rolling media player? Why in the world would I ever want that? If I don't even want it, try convincing the rest of America that a rolling media player is the killer product of 2008. Robots, in general don't do well in the United States -- a lifetime of science fiction movies, where robots are as capable, or even more capable than their human masters, has all wanting positronic androids, rather than these highly advanced single purpose machines. I think actually, the announcement that will have the most impact on the consumer electronics industry for the next year has already been made: the decision by Warner Bros. to throw their support Blu-ray's way. With Blu-ray being the winner, all those sitting on the fence about purchasing Hi-definition equipment can finally buy a Blu-ray player.
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