CES 2011 – a look at the future – 3D, wireless and tablets

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 about twenty-seven hundred exhibiting companies. The first CES was held in 1967 in New York City and was moved permanently in 1998 to Las Vegas, Nevada. This editor was again privileged to be at 2011 CES which was held January 6-9, reporting for ABT for his second year in a row.

Look at the picture above on the right.  The Hilton in the distance houses many CES exhibits.  In about 15 minutes at a very fast walk, you can walk from the South Hall, past the Central and North Halls to the skybridge connecting CES to the Hilton.

In other words, CES is really huge. It covers several oversize giant city blocks with about 1.7 million square feet devoted to the show – way up over last year – and also several nearby hotels are devoted to showcasing the overall 20,000-plus new products for 2011. There were over 127,000 in attendence on the first day and over 140,000 at its peak – a solid increase over the past few years and definitely back to pre-recession levels.

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 of the main site.  Sometimes it is faster to walk or you can take the excellent public transportation that Las Vegas offers. Just remember that when someone tells you that the Bellagio is directly across the street from Caesar’s Palace, it still may be a 20 minute walk from the parking garage of one hotel, through both casinos and up into the suites where you are meeting. If you have issues with gambling, it is wise to stay away from the hotels and only remain at CES proper.  The weather was also perfect for a Las Vegas Winter, with sunny daytime temperatures in the low 60s Fahrenheit and nights only required wearing a 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 CES directories that are the size of some small cities’ phone directories.  Unlike last year, this editor knew only to take the barest of essentials along with the most comfortable walking shoes.  This year, all of the meetings and appointments of four days had to be crammed into a single day and at 7:30 AM began an all-day marathon that certainly included ten miles of walking.  Fortunately, Las Vegas is only a 4 hour drive from this editor’s home and everything was done in less than twenty four hours.

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 there 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 direct you to where you want to go.

Security is everywhere but there are no visible metal detectors and backpacks are welcome.  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.  There is also a free press bag that doubles as a backpack that this editor missed last year but got this year.

Some of the best presentations are those you must be invited to.  Here is ABT behind the scenes with AMD at CES 2011 and a look at the year to come.

We got to meet with AMD’s officials, John Swinimer and Asif Rehman (pictured above) and we were treated to Notebook eyefinity and the launch of the HD 6000 series of GPUs as well as the launch of the Fusion API. There has been an impressive improvement in GPU power as HD 6970 M is about equal to HD 6870 desktop in performance.  Here we see productivity with webcam eyefinity powered off of a single mobile GPU!

In less than a four month period, AMD has gone from introducing the their second generation HD 6000 DX11 desktop graphics cards, to now introducing netbook and notebook HD 6000 series mobility Radeons.  The one you see can also be setup for 2-6 monitors in Eyefinity. 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.  You can be on the road and still not give up advanced web conferencing!

Not to be outdone by AMD, Nvidia released their own 500 M Graphics series for notebooks at CES and they have their own 3-panel version, Surround – in 2D/3D versions which must be driven by SLI’d video cards.  Both companies have also moved their notebooks into 3D and ABT is looking forward to evaluating them for our readers.

Nvidia and many other manufacturers are considering 3D – TV, movies and games – as the next “big thing”. Just two years ago, the CEA estimated that over 2 million 3-D TV sets would be sold in 2010 and that by 2013, more than 25 percent of all televisions sold will be 3D televisions.  This has proved to be an over-optimistic prediction and we shall analyze why.

Of course, all of the big names are here – Microsoft has a huge booth as does Intel; and Samsung, LG, Sony, Toshiba, AMD and Nvidia are well represented along with the other giants of the industry.  Much 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 of floorspace at CES devoted to the iPhone and applications for it, even though Apple is not officially represented.  Last year, it began at CES and this year there are over 80 tablet manufacturers represented.

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 can only give a tiny slice of what he experienced in a single day at CES this year and he 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 several ABT reporters at CES to give you a much more thorough day-by-day coverage.

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.  Some of the interesting items this year included apps like a blood pressure monitor for your
iPhone.  We saw new Android tablets from Archos and AOC and the world’s first robotic keyboard that learns from the way you type.   As evidenced at CES, tablet PCs will be one of the top technology gadgets for 2011 and beyond. Staying on top of the trend, Nvidia touted the design wins of its next-generation Tegra 2 processor which is designed to complete the web browsing experience on tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices.

Here is Razer getting into the handheld gaming market with their new gaming tablet.

We saw outstanding in-home content solutions that let you stream HD audio and video anywhere in the house with Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Second generation 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.  “Green” is also still very popular as a theme as power savings is always a good idea for consumers.