Live From Las Vegas, CES 2010 – Day 1

The first thing a visitor to the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will notice is the incredible size of this venue and the sheer amount of people attending as well as nearly three thousand exhibiting companies.  The first CES was held in 1967 in New York City and then moved permanently in 1998 to Las Vegas, Nevada.  This editor is again privileged to be at 2010 CES January 7-10 after being away for thirty years and both Las Vegas and CES are barely recognizable as they have had incredible growth.

CES is really huge.  It takes up a huge city block and also several nearby hotels are devoted to showcasing over 20,000 new products for 2010.  The Las Vegas Monorail is directly across from CES and hundreds of shuttle buses stand ready to take the show’s attendees back and forth to venues that are off the main site.  If one is not lazy, one can also walk or take the excellent public transportation that Las Vegas offers.  The weather is also perfect, with sunny daytime temperatures in the low 70s Fahrenheit and nights only require a light jacket.

CES is not a public event but rather a trade show for the electronics industry.  They treat their press rather well and there are two directories that are the size of some small cities’ phone directories:

There is not one map, but at least six separate maps to cover each exhibit area.  After one has walked through aisle after aisle of just one huge building, you begin to realize that it is just one floor – and their is an upstairs or downstairs of the same size!  And there are many such exhibit areas !!  Fortunately, there are helpful people hired by CES to help direct you to where you want to go.

Just one map is open in the above image; there are at least five more that are still folded!  As you can see, each attendee has to wear a badge and the press is treated nicely with a free lunch every day.  The food is very expensive otherwise – consider paying nearly $3 for a bottle of water at the show if you get thirsty.

Some of the best presentations are those you must be invited to.  Last night, AMD’s “tailgate party” afforded a chance to get great free food and to watch Alabama’s Crimson Tide beat the Texas Longhorns 37 to 21 (it is “live” on the bigger screen in the image below).  Of course, the game was shown in the main room on a very large LCD TV.  If one could break away from it, one could go hands on with AMD’s brand new mobility 5000 series.

In less than a four month period, AMD has gone from introducing the first DX11 desktop graphics cards, to now introducing netbook and notebook mobility Radeons. The new Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series includes three different graphics chips: the 5800 series (pictured), the 5600 and 5700 series as well as the 5400 series.  The one you see can also be setup for 4-6 monitors in Eyefinity and is quite different as it connects to a netbook via an external PCIe bus.  It is ideal for taking a small and light mobile PC with awesome battery life with you –  and then playing any game (or working with multi-display) when you choose to plug into a wall socket.

AMD also intends to follow NVIDIA by offering notebook graphics drivers directly from its website, as opposed to relying on their partners to provide updates.  This is welcome news to those who never seem to get any new driver updates for their notebooks from the vendors who tend to drop support for their mobile products pretty quickly.

Not to be outdone by AMD’s Eyefinity, NVIDIA has their own version – in 3D.  Do not attempt to adjust your display – there is no way to show 3D properly in the following  2D image:

This is very similar to NVIDIA’s “Mosaic” that allows for multi-monitor displays on current Quadro cards.  This feature will be supported on the current GeForce 200 series as well as the upcoming Fermi GeForce (GF 100).  As you can see. Samsung has come through on its promise to make a much thinner bezel for its LCDs.

NVIDIA and many other manufacturers are considering 3D – TV, movies and games – as the next “big thing”.  The CEA estimates that over 2 million 3-D TV sets will be sold in 2010 and that by 2013, more than 25 percent of all televisions sold will be 3D televisions.

Of course, all of the big names are here – Microsoft has a huge booth next to Intels, and AMD and NVIDIA are well represented.  During his keynote address at CES yesterday, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer gave details of how Microsoft intends to transform home entertainment via enhancements to their Xbox 360 gaming console.   He also unveiled a new tablet-style Windows PC and he detailed interfaces that will respond to gestures.

Here is one of ASUS’s extreme PCs:

Of course, a lot of the emphasis is also on small with many significant developments coming in the mobile smart phone sector and in netbooks.  There is an entire huge section devoted to the iPhone and applications for it.  The CEA believes that the consumer electronics (CE) industry will generate more than $165 billion in U.S. shipment revenues this year, a slight increase from 2009, according to the semi-annual industry forecast released today by CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro in his opening address.

There is much space at CES devoted to gaming, to the auto industry and to just about everything “electronic” that one can imagine.  This editor is about to head back to CES for three more full days.  What are you interested in?  Let us know – either in comments or by joining our forum.  We will be glad to cover it for you.  We got ourselves a brand new pair of comfortable walking shoes and will put them to good use for you over the next three days at CES.  Tell us what you want us to cover and what you are interested in.

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor Live in Las Vegas

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