CES: Nvidia CEO Huang Talks Tablets, Tegra 3, Cars
Nvidia is holding a standing room only press conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas this afternoon as part of 2012 CES press day. (Every press conference at CES is SRO, actually.) I’ll be live blogging proceedings; stay tuned, and excuse any typos.
CEO Jen-Hsun Huang takes the stage. He says he will talk about tablets; a surprise feature of Tegra 3, the company’s app processor; and cars. (Cars?)
First, tablets. Tablets sold about 20 million units in the first year, 2010. Sales were 60 million units in 2011. Nearly 40% were non-iPads in 2011. He says the question is how the category will grow – but he says there is no question it will be a very large industry. He makes the point that just because the Apple iPad is the most popular tablet, it doesn’t mean that everyone will own one. Different strokes for different folks, he says. Huang compares the tablet market to the car market, with a diversity of design options
He says Ice Cream Sandwich turns all Android devices into one single platform. 250 million Android devices, growing at 700,000 activations a day will be one enormous installed base for content developers. He thinks this will be a big shift in Android devices – a collection of Android devices. He’s doing a little demo of an Asustek tablet running Ice Cream Sandwish; you’d think the guy worked for Google. He shows a demo of an app called Snapseed, a photo app for tablets.
Huang invites Manuel Wille, the senior VP for engineering at Nik Software, which makes Snapseed, to do a demo. It is a purely touch UI that allows you to easily edit photos. (Note to self, download the Snapseed app for my iPad.)
Next, Huang does a demo of using game controllers to play a game called Riptide GP on a tablet running a Tegra processor.
Another demo: a first-person shooter ihttp://blogs.forbes.com/ericsavitz/wp-admin/post.php?post=17554&action=edit&message=1n a multi-player setting on a tablet. A game called Shadowgun is the subject of the demo. Which they are doing over a LAN, using tablets with attached controllers. On site to help do the demo, the celebrity gamer Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel.
And yet another demo. This one is called Splashtop THD, which allows tablets to remote into a PC. Uh oh, demo Gods not with Huang here. Ah, wait, here we go. He is running iTunes on an Android tablet, from a PC via Splashtop. You can access video. Or PowerPoints.
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