CES report.
The world is doomed. At least if technology is supposed to be any kind of economic savior we're all doomed. There was absolutely nothing at CES that was gee whiz must have, or even any better than what's already out there.
Walk in the front doors, there's Microsoft and wow they have a lot of space taken up but crap where's some innovative products. Oh wait it's MSFT, so innovation not possible, so where's the MSFT version of some existing products. Not even that. All stale stuff that is not going to push demand. Yes MSFT wants to take over the living room and combine gaming, dvd watching, digital recording, etc., but they aren't showing me anything as good as what I already have, and they want everything their way. If only they would have a brain and design the basics of the device and then welcome add ons and tinkering, but noooo they want total control to do things their inferior way. They'll never get us hard cord early adopters that way.
There was probably a dozen or more booths showing off their supposed simple to install(for a professional installer) home automation system, that has a controller with a few zillion buttons on it. This is an area that is begging to be standardized, an area where MSFT could really do some good for once, by building some extensions for it into Windows, so therefor they won't.
Home theater. Nothing new. The projectors didn't look any better than 2 years ago when I first started following them. Maybe a little brighter. The HDTV demo's they were showing at the myriad booths that had HDTV units all look good at first glance but then after closer viewing just seem a little better than normal. Same for plasma, 60 inch units are jaw dropping at first but then still have that kinda fuzziness that they all seem to to me. Unless of course you're talking about some Runco model, but then they all cost twice as much as comparable models because they have a video processor that comes with them.
Speakers, nothing new. Receivers. They're trying to push 7.1 surround, because somehow 5.1 isn't good enough any more, but there's no 7.1 source material, it's extrapolated from 5.1 and doesn't add enough in the demo's i saw to make it worth the extra time, money and space.
Gadgets? Didn't see any worth a crap. Panasonic had some little widget that would record the worlds crappiest video on an SD card, play mp3's and probably double as a bottle opener, but who cares. It wasn't good at anything, downright bad at all.
You couldn't get too far without finding some chinese company that made a vast array of annoying add on crap for your cell phone. Blinking crap, weird patterns, etc., Actually, if I was really there to do some business instead of look for crappo companies to short I would talk to those guys. You could probably buy that crap straight from China, set up 4 or 5 people in malls or flea market and crush the people that are already there on price, and make a decent living for a year or two.
Speaking of crappo companies, DOC Digital Angel was there, though it had to be last minute as they weren't listed in the printed floor guide. They had some ink pens and a sheet of paper they were giving out in their booth on the back wall of a floor that was as far from the main floor as possible. Wherify was also there with a lot more impressive display for their kid locator product.
VLNC was there, I thought they were going to all but beg me to tell me about their crap. Thus was the power of my purple distributor badge, as compared to 99% of the showgoers lowly dealer badges.(yeah i'm a distributor, of overpriced stock.) I got a bag from XING which was good for putting the bags from XMSR in which were good for holding the little key chains with cute little dogs on them that SIRI was handing out.
As my dad said, the complete crap they were handing out for swag shows how bad the econony is. I mean the stuff I already mention was cream of the crop, otherwise it was just ink pens. Car audio didn't seem any bigger or better than in the past. I did see one thing useful, though not at the show, in a magazine from the show. Some company has a car audio head unit with a 20gb hard drive and a wifi adapter so I can make a playlist on my computer, export it into my cars receiver, and drive off with whatever tunes I want. Gee it only took about two years after I first though of that, for someone to do it. Lots of people showing off the video screens in the car. I guess if you have kids and you're a crappy parent and don't make them mind, that might be a good way to keep them shut up for a bit. I was such a loser I guess, since I always chose to read on long trips. If only we'd had all this technology and I could have played video games all the time, i'm sure I would be a much better person today.
Cell phones are smaller and more annoying but they don't make my life any easier. It's a cell phone, I want to make and receive calls on it, not a lot else, manufactures need to get over the need to dick tracify the damn thing. Forget 3G why not make the existing technology actually work.
Video games, non existent. I'm not even sure Sony had anything more than corporate meeting booths. Microsofts Xbox demo was touting it's Xbox Live online playing. So i buy the game and then I get to pay $20/month to play against others, what a deal. I'm sure it won't be long until someone hacks a way around that. PCGames, non-existent. I guess E3 and Comdex is all they care about?
PDA's? I don't know. I personally don't need one in my life, i'm sure they were more colorful, with more memory and more doodads that you don't really need.
Basically technology is in the doldrums. If there was massive amounts of money sloshing around, then maybe we could get somewhere. I think the wired home, smart automated home, could be big, but now it won't be because it will happen after the housing market boon, not during it. A lot of stuff could start getting worked out if the video content guys would get together and do something. They need to realize, they're already as toast as the music industry is because of mp3's. Most great movies ever made are available on DVD and I can pop them in my computer and run a freeware program to copy the movie to my computer. Copying it back on a DVD that can be read in a regular DVD player is a lot more tricky but the software to automate is getting closer and closer and dvd burners and blank media prices are going down down down.
I reiterate, forget about existing technology. There is nothing there that is going to push any kind of demand for computer spending or bandwidth needs etc. Whatever in tech that could save the day will sneak up on most people(myself included i'm sure). I'm betting that there is no day saver just a slow grind forward. People just simply don't need to go out and spend money on all the electronic gadget crap out there. |
