Hey folks, I know the following like belongs in Coaxial... but I ran out of space over there on the side of the screen so I decided to place it here. Why? Because I'm Harry and break the rules as I see fit. If you are an electronics and gizmo freak like me... You're gonna love this. Everything from Dick Tracy-ish cell phone watches to head-mounted digital cameras. Remember... it's the year 2000. We live in the future, and that is where we will spend... the REST OF OUR LIVES!!!!
After last year's exciting CES show, I couldn't wait to get back to Vegas and see what the world of consumer electronics had in store for us. Sadly, this year's show did not compare favorably to last year.
Last year's show had the introduction of TiVo and ReplayTV, two similar innovative products that look to replace VCR's in the future. And last year almost every major manufacturer was showing off some HDTV or DTV and how flat it was or how crisp it was or how flat and crisp it was. One year later and nobody I know has a DTV or HDTV and I only know one person with a TiVo (and he promptly took it apart to see what he could do with it). But back to this year.
This year had one major theme--portable bits. Everyone is in the market of getting you to transfer some of the bits from your computer into something that they've made, allowing you to walk around with your information. For the vast majority of companies, this simply means an MP3player. *Everyone* had a portable MP3 player, it seemed. Anybody who could scrap together 16 or 32 megs of memory made one of these devices and put it on the floor saying how innovative it was. Ick. Only two stood out from the very, very large crowd.
The first was Casio's MP3 watch. A somewhat clunky watch that has an earphone port along one side holds MP3s and allows you to walk around(connected to your watch, of course) and listed to your favorite pirated...er, ripped songs. It's an interesting idea, and a good one at some level because most people wear a watch, so if they're watch does something else that's fine by them. No need to carry around something new. Right now it's anticipating a price of about $300, which is a bit steep for something this clunky. But I would anticipate it being a hot item for teens (if they can afford it) and other people who've always wanted to be able to put an earphone into their watch.
The second standout MP3 player was either called or made by a company called Rome. It was your typical MP3 player with 32 or 64 megs of memory, but the player was in the shape of a cassette tape. And if you put the tape into a standard tape player, a magnetic decoder would put out the songs similar to those CD-tape converters. Plus, the tape reels, if spun faster or in reverse, would fast-forward or rewind within the songs. The buttons for hand-held control were in a recessed portion of the top of the tape, and the whole unit was very light. Overall, it was an innovative and impressive product--if my car stereo didn't have a CD player already then I would buy one ASAP.
Along the MP3 watch line, Casio also introduced two other watches with digital features. The first takes pictures. Not very impressive pictures, and very small, but they can be printed out in some kind of sticker-sized format. I'm not exactly sure who needs a watch that takes pictures, but if you've been waiting and waiting for one--well, the wait is almost over. The other new watch from Casio is one that holds appointments and notes and numbers, but has infrared connectivity so you can exchange information with another person who has the watch. Just think of a Palm PDA but with less functions and a much smaller screen and no software on your wrist. All for more than your entry-level Palm. Oh yeah, this one will be big.
Dick Tracy fans can rejoice in that a watch cell phone was also released(by Philips if I'm right, but don't hold me to it). It wasn't very impressive in my eyes because the thing was huge--almost the size of a StarTac but pressed horizontally against your wrist by a band of cloth. It looks clunky and I wouldn't think someone wearing one was cool. So, you have been warned.
Our old friends TiVo and ReplayTV were back with some minor fixes and some major corporate partnerships. ReplayTV has partnered with Panasonic, so they'll be around for a while. But TiVo has been quite busy, partnering with, among others, Sony. And the Sony TiVo system has a nice feature that allows you to automatically archive your TiVo recorded programs onto your Sony VCR with a single button. Both TiVo and ReplayTV are still duking it out, but it seems that TiVo has the early edge in partnerships. We shall see in the year ahead if any one company emerges as the victor.
Speaking of Sony, they had their usual impressive display this year. Last year they were talking about the future of Sony and how they would soon be introducing Memory Sticks. This year, they showed how they have made good on that promise with over a dozen products using the Memory Stick and more on the way. For those of you that don't know, a Memory Stick is about the size of a stick of chewing gum, but it's just memory and a controller. Right now they're available in 4, 8 and 16 sizes (megs of RAM), with a few select 32 and 64 sticks for some devices. By the end of next year a 256 meg stick will be out, and they've announce plans to have a one gig stick someday in the near future. This is all part of the theme I mentioned before--getting you to carry your bits around in a Sony device is Sony's next big strategy. Having an interchangeable memory system, like the Memory Stick which allows you to store digital pictures or movies or music or anything (even doggie tricks for the robot Aibo) is Sony's plan.
Sony also had a very cool display of "X Stick" prototypes and Memory Stick device prototypes. "X Stick" is my own jargon for other devices with an interface that allows them to be used in the place of a Memory Stick. Most of them look like a Memory Stick with something on top, but it's the something on top that's cool. Like a zoom-in microphone or a digital still or movie camera or a GPS receiver. All of these devices could conceivably run in PDA's or other devices that handle Memory Sticks. And with the increased amount of memory in the stick size, these devies probably carry around their own drivers as well as their own memory. Memory Stick device prototypes included electronic "books" with small screens and speakers, a Memory Stick PDA, Memory Stick radio players, and a future Memory Stick walkman.
I say "a future Memory Stick walkman" because Sony has one now, and it's pretty cool. The one being used had a dark blue plastic casing, which is a refreshing change from everyone using iMac plastics these days to be cool (everyone knows I love Apple and I really like the translucent plastic stuff, but give it a rest folks). It looked like an oversize pen with a rectangular screen towards the top. This walkman could hand from a cloth necklace and could hold a Memory Stick with your own music. Sony also had two all digital walkmans, one smaller and silver and one that looked like a slightly enlarged fancy pen (like a Mont Blanc). Both were very slick and didn't use the Memory Stick, so I'd expect Sony to hype them for a short while in order to compete with the other portable MP3players. The real future for Sony is in Memory Stick devices.
That is, of course, unless Sony loses the next big standards war I see looming over the horizon. That's because on Thursday, San Disk announced a number of corporate licenses for companies to develop its new SD Memory Chip. The SD stands for Secure Digital (or just San Disk, since they make it) and it's a competing standard with Sony's Memory Stick. The SD Memory Chip is very, very small, a little bigger than my thumbnail. Which, to me at least, makes it instantly unattractive. The Memory Chip is nice because I think it's the smallest size possible without getting into the "too small to comfortably use" size. But who knows?
Panasonic has jumped onboard the SD bandwagon, displaying a number of SD prototypes including a head mounted camcorder (remember those reporters from Star Trek: Generations?), telephones, PDAs and even a microwave oven with a large LCD display. The press release on Thursday announced several licensing agreements to develop SD Memory Chip products or software. Two of the agreements were with Microsoft and Kodak, so it looks like it will definitely be a battle for Sony, who announced a number of licensing agreements of their own in previous weeks. San Disk does have their success in CompactFlash to build on, which will help them out. For those that don't know, CompactFlash and SmartFlash (I've also seen it as SmartMedia) are the two competing standards for digital cameras. Right now they're neck and neck, but CompactFlash will pull ahead soon because it has a higher limit on how much memory it can hold. So a number of cameras will already support SanDisk in one way or another, while Sony is the only current manufacturer that makes devices that use the Memory Stick (although some companies, according to Sony, were demonstrating Memory Stick products at CES-I didn't see them).
It should be an interesting battle to see which one, if any, emerges as a clear victor for an interchangeable memory format. San Disk has one edge in experience and use (current digital cameras and the Casio E-100 PDA uses them as well), while Sony has the means to integrate the product into a number of different areas instantly. San Disk must rely on other companies to support the standard, while Sony can do more on its own (even though other companies will have to come on board for the scales to tip in the end). In the meanwhile, I think we'll see some interesting developments come along. Yay us!
The best of show winner this year was disappointing. Called the CyberGenie, it was an unimpressive mixture of voicemail and phone routing system through your computer. Software handled all the routing to cordless handsets throughout your office. Sara thinks they won best of show not because they were innovative, but rather because their large display area had a working 12 foot waterfall. It paled when compared to last year's winner, ReplayTV, who had the potential to become a major player in a technology that's bound to revolutionize the consumer electronics field. There used to be a product called the Yo-Yo, which may even still exist. The CyberGenie is just a glorified Yo-Yo with phone handsets. Boring.
Another dull technology called Nuon had a small pavilion. This is a chipset that wants to be included in DVD players in order to allow DVD players to check e-mail, browse the Web and play video games that conform to the Nuon standard. They had a number of these Nuon games playing in the area, and all I could think was "You have got to be kidding!" The games, pardon my French, sucked big time. They all looked like clunky 16-bit games from the Super NES and Genesis days, and I couldn't help but wonder why someone would want their DVD player to play these lame games when they could fork over a hundred bucks and get a Nintendo 64 or Playstation and just run a few wires to their TV. As for having your DVD player check your e-mail, well, I personally have never been watching a movie on my DVD player and thought to myself, "You know, this DVD player has great resolution, extra features and amazing sound quality-but why oh why can't I check e-mail on it? Or browse the Web? It just plays movies...what's the use in that?" Nuon is destined for failure because it performs undesired functions in an unimpressive way.
Also in the category of "things that don't need to be put together" is an MP3 player with a video screen. I know that people like to watch TV on the go, but if they have the video screen will they really be content to just listen to music? And if they just want to listen to music, why fork over the extra money for a video screen? This one was by Philips, I think, and it's also something that will come out and quietly slink away.
On the other hand, there were a number of "things that should be put together" that were released this year. Including combination digital satellite/TiVo receivers and satellite/DVD players. It's time to start getting rid of some of these boxes in my entertainment system, and it's smart to combine them. Sony was showing it's new cable box, which hopefully will combine with a TiVo box soon enough.
Speaking of set-top boxes (well, I wasn't, but now I will), there were a number of very small companies all trying to compete with WebTV by bringing out a set-top box that had e-mail or Web capabilities. All of them looked pretty crappy compared to WebTV (who's allure I still don't understand), but you had to feel bad for these people when AOL showed up an announced they were producing a set-top box of their own to compete with Microsoft's WebTV. The new AOL.tv looked pretty slick in demos, and in this arena AOL is pretty much the only company that could compete with Microsoft (especially when Apple abandoned their plans for a TV-internet device a few years ago). So these small companies are pretty much dead in the water, and you could see on their faces (and their sparsely attended demos and booths) that they knew it. Such is Technological Darwinism.
Some small items were interesting this year, especially Palm accessories. There's a GPS receiver for the Palm III and V for around $170-but it can't store too many maps given the Palm's memory and the program can't do address-to-address directions; you have to hook up to the internet to get those directions. PocketMail had a device that hooked up to a Palm so you can use their e-mail service. If you haven't seen these things, they are placed up against any phone and call a 1-800 number and can check mail. Pretty cool, and they were giving away one every 15 minutes but I didn't see the booth until just before I left, and the one drawing I was in (with like 2 other people) I didn't win, which made me sad. So I'm boycotting them-unless of course they decide to send me one after all in which case I'll promote them. :)
There were a number of areas showcasing digital radio and satellite radio. Commercial free channels of content beamed straight into your radio, or additional services like location finding and the like. Not very impressive, in my eyes, and I find it a bit scary. Right now, in any one area there are only a few radio stations that any one person will like playing. So the odds that they'll change channels while driving in front of me is fairly minimal. But with over 100 channels of content, I just know that the idiot in front of me in the far left lane of the highway with his left blinker on driving 43 MPH is going to be flipping through his radio instead of driving. Just what we need.
One more small note. Last year, everyone displaying a HDTV was showing Lost In Space. Maybe it was the only movie available to them or something, because the movie sucked and only the screens themselves kept people looking at them. This year, almost everyone was showing The Matrix, a vast improvement.
So that was this year's CES. Vegas is always fun for me, and CES is a great place to check out the current state of technology. Hopefully next year there will be a little more innovation and some cool new devices. And hopefully I won't have such a losing streak in blackjack next year.
Ryan
