CES 2011 My Virtual Look Back

This year's CES just happend overseas without my direct attendance. So I had to try to get some direct feedback from some friends and stick to everything, that was made available on the net. Some first postings I already did but now it's time to sum up the results.

The photos I got are just a few and are mostly taken with mobile phones. But I like to include some and not to post text only. Special thanks to my friends allowing me to post them here.

I found a very good report on PC Magazine and I deeply recommend to read the whole article, because it really describes the essential movement taking place these days.


Tablets
The biggest single theme was the flood of tablets being announced. Apple's iPad really inspired the whole device industry to come up with something being it sized from 7 to 12 inch and powered by any processor concept  and operating system available on the market. Android got the bigest chunk, but Windows and QNX try to compete and even HP announced to come up with something, even if lots of details remained hidden, as the even the Android tablet release (codenamed Honeycomb) is not available yet and one of the most exiting tablets, the Motorola Xoom was just demoed playing out videoclips showing some animated screens of the new release.

Tablets were really shiny this year

The Playbook seemed nearly production ready

Super Phones
NVIDIA proudly presented the first phone using their Tegra 2 Chipset. The keynote / press conference was really impressive and watching the stream is really interesting. The ease, the built in HDMI interface can offer to show your new photos on a big screen is amazing. Tegra 2 was even announced last year, but this time devices are really available. And forget stuttering built up of flash loaded web pages. The combination of enough CPU power and excellent graphics acceleration have some deep impacts and create desire to own such a device. Not to forget the Motorola Atrix with its new usage mode when connected to a large screen. A full Firefox browser comes up and offers the full browser experience as on any laptop or PC. This is getting very close to Google's ideas on Chrome OS but just integrated in a complete different hardware. No new device, just your super phone docked to a bigger display and maybe a keyboard connected and you are done.

Plugin your Atrix smartphone and use the big screen and keyboard. Nice

Connected TV
I do not remember a similar amount of announcements of big TV content players to get their place directly inside a TV set. There will be still a lot of cheap external boxes, some streaming only ones and a lot of connected BluRay players to come but the big impact will come from all the TV screens with its embedded connectivity. Samsung still got their TV appstore in place and just announced its second million of app downloads. A small figure today, but lots of success to come. Even if the content markets still keep separated, regional variants will be possible but a lot of real over the top offerings will be possible without changing the connected TV platforms. The only problem will be to create a big enough app platform not limited to on manufacturer only. This will be the challenge of the coming years but why shouldn't it be possible to develop similar to the mobile smartphone market. Let's wait and see.

CES 2011 was truely an interesting and exiting one. It was the first time, that lots of non pure consumer electronic parts (like the tablets and super phones) were announced during this show. Not leaving very much to come i.e. for the Mobile World Forum in February. But the industry is agile and vivid and we will see so much new stuff this year coming to the mobile world of gadgets. This year might change a lot again.

Hope to be there next year!!