CES 2010 Wrap-up – Looking to our Future

Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2010 has come and gone.  This mega-trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada was held in perfect Winter weather from January 7-10. Everything about CES is huge and it is the place where well over 2,700 exhibitors – a record increase of 330 over last year – showed off and demonstrated more than 20,000 new products.  This trade show takes nearly 3 weeks to set up and take down, and is housed at the Las Vegas Convention Center and at nearby hotels in over 1.4 million square feet of jam packed show space.  Early numbers coming in on CES show that attendance was up this year over last year. CES attendance was calculated at more than 120,000, which was way up from 98,495 for the first two days at the 2009 event.

This year there appeared optimism and hope in contrast to last year’s CES.  There is also an emphasis on efficiency and going “green” – being thrifty while still getting excellent results.  This editor can only give a tiny slice of what he experienced at CES this year and hopes it is relevant to your interests.  Much of the time ABT spent at CES was spent on PC-related products and especially how they relate to PC gaming and PC hardware.  Next year, we expect to field a team of ABT reporters at CES to give you much more thorough and quicker coverage.

I do not believe that the CES management anticipated the large numbers of the members of the press who covered CES.  If you did not get your (free) lunch before 12 Noon, you could generally forget it.  CES was an enjoyable if exhausting event for the press, exhibitors and attendees who were there for all four days.

There were over 20,000 individual products on display at CES but certain categories got a disproportionate amount of interest.  You could divide these up generally, as follows:

• 3DTV
• Smartphones/Super-smart phones
• eReaders, tablets
• Storage
• Wireless/Content everywhere
• Gaming
• Automotive

There were a lot of e-reader and tablet systems.  Lenovo introduced a combination notebook/tablet PC.  As evidenced at CES, tablet PCs will be one of the top technology gadgets for 2010 and beyond.  Staying on top of the trend, NVIDIA launched its next-generation Tegra processor which is designed to complete the web browsing experience on tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices. We can expect that NVIDIA will showcase new tablets and other devices at Mobile World Congress, February 15 – 18, in Barcelona, Spain.  These new tablets will show off 1080p HD video, super-fast web browsing,  complete Flash Player 10.1 support and several days of battery life.

Both D-Link and Netgear demonstrated outstanding in-home content solutions that let you stream HD audio and video anywhere in the house with Wi-Fi or Ethernet.  Their all-in-one control stations are setting the stage for future complete home management solutions including security and energy.  These boxes allow you to expand by adding features – not just more boxes.