(About 2,321 words)
A Comdex Veteran’s first?time visit to the Consumer Electronics Show
by DeForrest Home, member of the San Jose IBM Club PC Club, California
www.sjpc.org
After making many treks to the annual Comdex Show in Las Vegas, and watching it go steadily downhill and finally expire last year, I was eager to see how the Consumer Electronics Show would fill the techie void. I will say that I was not disappointed. Although not quite as large, the event reminded me a lot of Comdex in its heyday. Most of the big players in the industry were there with huge, elaborate displays on the exhibit floor. There were celebrities and bikini?clad models in the booths, keynoters brought entertainment giants with them to liven up their talks, and there were lots and lots of interesting products on display. There weren’t great numbers of concept products or gadgets that really pushed the envelope. Most of the products were in, or soon to be in, production. The trend was toward smaller variations of current products with sleeker designs and more features. There were lots of gorgeous flat panel displays and televisions, almost everything had some sort of wireless communication built in, and almost every category of electronic gadget was represented.
According to the CEA, there were:
142,585 Attendees
2,550 Exhibitors
1.531 Million square feet of exhibit space
The exhibit floor covered almost every inch of the massive Las Vegas Convention Center, including the parking lot, all of the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel’s convention space, and a large two?story motel called the Alexis Park.
In my mind, the CES is a lot harder to negotiate than Comdex. Comdex was pretty much about computers and related equipment. I could understand that, but almost everything in the world qualifies in some way as consumer electronics, and every last bit of it was on display at the CES. The show only lasted four days, and it was absolutely impossible to see even close to all of it, even if you ran down the aisles. My biggest problem was that much of the time I was not always able to accurately evaluate the "Gee?Whiz" factor of what I saw. Is this something that stands out from its peers, or is it much like a lot of other similar items? In the end, all I could really do was to just pick out a few things that caught my eye. I don’t make any claim that these are the highlights of the show. They are just some of the things that interested me.
The show floor was defined by the different halls in which the exhibits were housed.
At the north end of the area were the exhibits in the two Hilton Hotel conference halls. This area was called the International Gateway. It was made up of several hundred small booths representing foreign manufacturers, mostly from China and Taiwan. I really regret that I just didn’t have time to do anything more than pass by the periphery of this area.
Next was the Convention Center North Hall. This was a lot of fun. The whole, huge hall was devoted to auto electronics, mostly sound systems. The place was loaded with some of the most beautifully decorated and equipped vehicles that I have ever seen. Most of them were show vehicles, not street legal, but every one of them was gorgeous. Most of the cars (and trucks, and golf carts) had a dozen or more speakers, backed by banks of amplifiers capable of delivering thousands of watts of audio power. There was a nice balance between sounding good and looking good too. Most of the cars had finishes of gorgeous paint and many, many coats of hand?rubbed lacquer. My favorite was a 1957 Beetle Bug. It had a 15,000?watt Kicker sound system, 9 custom LCD TV’s, and 30 Kicker speakers. The owner listed his total investment as $225,000.
The Central Hall was where most of the big players had their large exhibits. For instance, Panasonic had an exhibit area that ran almost the entire width of the building. Much of the emphasis here was on home entertainment, digital cameras, cell phones, MP3 players, and high definition television. Samsung was showing the world’s largest plasma TV, 102 inches! It was enormous, and the high definition picture was just amazing. My favorite TV in the show was the Sharp Aquos high definition TV with the world’s largest LCD display, 65 inches.
In the area of large screen, high definition television, I was amazed by how far the rear?projection sets have come. All of the big manufacturers were showing thin sets with outstanding picture quality. They use a technology known as Digital Light Processing, or DLP. The process is owned by Texas Instruments. It has been around for a while, but this is the first time that I have seen such an abundance of DLP TV sets with picture quality that comes very close to that of plasma or LCD sets, at about half the price. DLP is also being used in front?projection units. Mitsubishi showed off a brilliant DLP projector small enough to fit in one hand.
Panasonic was showing a small digital video camera. It was barely larger than a small still camera and takes excellent pictures. I stopped taking videos a couple of years ago because my camcorder was too large and bulky to carry around. This little camera overcomes that. It will easily fit in my shirt pocket.
When we last visited Comdex, a year and a half ago, Palm had just introduced the very successful Treo 600, PDA and Smart Phone. This year at CES they introduced a new model, the Treo 650. It seems to have almost everything that you could possibly want in a handheld device; a mobile phone with email, an organizer, instant messaging, web access, Bluetooth technology, an MP3 player, and a digital camera that also captures video, all in a compact package with a high resolution color screen and a full QWERTY keyboard.
The Central Hall is where most of the big dollars were spent. Several of the exhibitors brought celebrities to their displays to help attract crowds. Sirius Radio put on a live talk show. When I was there, their special guest was Jim Brewer, an ex?Saturday Night Live cast member. The Olympus booth featured members of some well?known rock bands at various times throughout the show.
Speaking of satellite radio, both Sirius and XM Radio were showing hand?held portable radio receivers. If you are willing to let someone else plan your play lists, these could replace MP3 players.
The South Hall is the newest addition to the Las Vegas Convention Center. It is actually a giant two?story building that can be divided into four separate halls. The CES used them all. This is where most of the computer?related electronics was located. The booths in the South Hall were generally smaller than those in the Central Hall, and more closely packed. It was just not possible to see everything, but here are a few of the things that I liked:
Sonos is an innovative product that lets you broadcast audio from your computer, or from any audio source for that matter, to any room in your house. Each unit contains a high quality stereo amplifier, a wired Ethernet interface, audio?in and audio?out jacks, and wireless network hardware. One or more of the units connects to your home computer network and broadcasts music from your computer to the other units using a proprietary wireless mesh network. You can have as many as twelve different streams of music playing at the same time. You can also broadcast music from Internet radio if you like. The whole operation is managed from a small wireless remote control.
Orb has a software package that allows you to stream almost anything from a computer across the Internet to your cell phone or PDA. Of course, you have to have a cell phone service provider that offers this service, but if you do, it is slick. You can watch live TV, listen to your music collection, watch home movies, share photos, and get personalized web info.
My digital camera uses Secure Digital memory modules, and I often spend time looking for and attaching the flash memory reader so that I can get the pictures into my computer. SanDisk has solved all of this by putting both functions in the same module. They were showing a one?gigabyte SD card with a built?in USB connector. Just bend the module in the middle to expose the USB plug. I want one.
As handy as they are, one thing that I have always disliked about wireless mice is that the batteries last just long enough for me to forget that when the mouse starts failing the cause is probably the battery. One company had a wireless mouse with no batteries. It derives its power by induction from the mouse pad, which in turn gets its power from a USB port.
GG Telecom had one of the smallest Bluetooth cell phone headsets that I have seen. With an ear piece and a microphone, it is only slightly larger than an old fashioned hearing aid.
Among the many new digital cameras that I liked was the HP R707. It has some neat features, including automatic in?camera red?eye removal, and panorama preview mode, which shows an outline of the previous picture so that you can line up the next picture in the panorama almost perfectly. The camera uses Adaptive Lighting, which balances the exposure to bring details out of the shadows, and if your picture didn’t turn out too well, the camera will even give you advise on how to improve it.
Among the other interesting things in the South Hall were the super?thin, brushed aluminum Razr phone from Motorola, and the tiny CarChip module that connects to the diagnostic plug in your car and records information on how the car was driven.
In the parking lot in front of the convention center, Microsoft had built a full?scale house, dubbed the Smart Home. It was outfitted with a myriad of electronic devices that were controlled by a Media Center PC. You could raise and lower the window shades, adjust the lighting and temperature, and monitor video cameras over the Internet from anywhere. You could edit your digital photographs, listen to your music collection, or watch movies from a number of different rooms in the house, all using a network of Media Center PC extenders. The house had a home theater with a full?wall projection screen. There was even an oven with its own IP address, which you could program over the Internet. It was interesting but possibly a little beyond my budget.
Next I got on a shuttle bus and ventured south to the Alexis Park Hotel. This was the exhibit area for the High?End Audio equipment, a totally new and fascinating area for me. The CES essentially took over the whole hotel. They moved everything out of the rooms ? beds, dressers, chairs, tables, lamps, everything. The exhibitors then moved into their rooms or suites and set up their audio equipment. They tuned the rooms with wall coverings, acoustic baffles, and even sound absorbing dots stuck to the walls. They balanced their equipment and set up folding chairs for the audience. Then we, the audience, walked from room to room, well over a hundred of them, to listen to the music. The equipment on display was not like anything you will find in a home entertainment store like the Good Guys. Everything was truly elegant. Most of the units were hand made, and some were one of a kind. The exhibitors were, by and large, the designers and builders of the equipment. This show was a matter of pride for them. I observed that the debate over solid state or vacuum tube superiority still rages on, and it has been joined by the contest between phonograph records and CD’s. Each side has its champions. It also seemed to me that the true purists did not have stereo amplifiers. They used matched pairs of monaural amplifiers. Most of these systems cost well over one hundred thousand dollars. There were many exotic CD players and turntables. One turntable had two tone arms. The exhibitor explained that typically you would have a different make of cartridge in each arm. The one that you used would depend on what type of music you were playing.
I spent some time listening to what was for me a new concept. It wasn’t high?end audio, but it was interesting. The speaker and sub?woofer package looked much like an inexpensive shelf system. It actually was just that, except that it had an added feature. The people showing this unit have developed a sound expander chip that simulates large stereo sound from a single speaker enclosure. Actually, the enclosure has three small speakers in it, but the sound appears to come from all sides of the room. They can’t generate sound from the back of the room, but the "half surround sound" which they do achieve is truly impressive. The exhibitor was demonstrating this little package by playing the sound from the movie "Pearl Harbor". It really did sound as though the planes were coming from all sides.
Another interesting unit was an in?the?wall speaker?amplifier package from Polk. The unique thing here is that each amplifier has its own IP address, and the audio is carried to it over your home network. You can have different audio in each room if you like. This would be a great idea if you were building a new house, but putting network wires and power in existing walls seems to me to be a major retrofit. The Sonos system is probably a better idea for existing homes.
There were many more interesting things at this year’s CES, but four days were just not enough time to see them all.
There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author. The Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this group is a member, brings this article to you.