CES turned out to be quite interesting, albeit quieter (as expected) than last year. IMO, most of the action was in the vehicle and mobile spaces. Elsewhere, I mostly saw incremental improvements over last year.
Here's a top 10 of the most interesting announcements, from my point-of-view. These included (from best down to good):
1. Palm Pre - The new device seems to be a (temporary?) rebirth of Palm - the functionality is great, superior to the iPhone in some cases. Sprint may launch this early in 2009. New Nova OS with multi-threading. Multi-touch screen, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 8 GB storage, GPS, WiFI, Bluetooth, removable battery, accelerometer.
No word on an app store concept yet. Photo: Palm.
2. Ford Sync next-gen, including Venrock-portfolio company INRIX. I blogged on this a couple of day back here.
3. 3D TV - even though 3D TV seems to make a small comeback every five years, this year the quality of the experience is good. I went to the Sony booth - great experience from multiple angles. Had to wear 3D glasses. LG, Panasonic and others were also showing their technologies in this area.
4. Toyota-VoiceBox announcement - Toyota announced its new telematics platform - Safety Connect (for Toyota cars) and Enform (for Lexus), with a conversational voice interface provided by VoiceBox and telematics provided by ATX. The Lexus Enform system will be in Lexus cars and dealerships early this year. I believe that conversational voice will become a must-have HCI requirement for cars in the near future as more and more connected services are brought into the car - there is no way to handle this increasing complexity in the future using a hierarchical, menu-driven approach.
5. TomTom Go740 LIVE - connected PND. Interesting given the demise of Magellan and Dash as PND companies. Good to see connected PNDs hit the market (including Best Buy late last year). Photo: TomTom.
6. Microprojectors - there are finally some working products in the market, including Samsung's MBP200, 3M's MM200, Nextar's Z10. These are projecting images from between 20 to 50 inches. I also saw a microprojector embedded in a mobile phone.
7. Boxee - while Boxee had no announcement at CES, they were present at booths at CES - this is worth a mention here. Fred Wilson, Boxee's investor at Union Square Ventures, calls this a 'Firefox for media centers'. I have Boxee installed on my Apple TV and Boxee's intuititive UI helps me watch Hulu, Comedy Central and various other Internet video destination sites on my TV. A platform approach such as Boxee's has a much greater opportunity than individual content widgets built for each separate TV model or media center model.
And finally, it was amazing to see how some concepts from last year have taken hold and have been broadly adopted across the CE landscape. These provide no real differentation between the different CE vendors but are worth mentioning below.
8. Youtube/Netflix everywhere - seemed to be everywhere. This is similar to how the studios are licensing their content to anybody who is willing to pay the prices and follow the business models that the studios want. In other words, at the end of the day, CE vendors will not be able to differentiate based on the content they can offer.
9. Web widgets on TVs - a number of TV vendors, including Samsung, were demo'ing widgets from Yahoo!, Youtube, Flickr, sports, weather etc., based on broadband enablement of TVs. I don't believe an model-by-model approach or even a vendor-by-vendor approach to web access will scale. There needs to be broader platform approach which WebTV/Tivo tried/are trying and Boxee is going after currently.
10. Green / energy savings - a number of the PC and TV vendors were talking about energy savings but again, didn't seem like a differentiator between the CE vendors. Consumers, in my opinion, are seeing this as mostly a must-have.
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