The aisles seemed painfully crowded at times, and the show organizers (the Consumer Electronics Association of Arlington) confirmed record-breaking attendance and exhibition space: 129,328 attendees and 2,491 exhibitors. The show covered 1.38 million square feet (128,206 square meters, or nearly 32 acres) mostly in the Las Vegas Convention Center, in whose immense halls you typically could not see one end from the other.
For its size and its strain on the public facilities of Las Vegas, the show reminded many observers of Comdex in the 1980's, before the hotel building boom began in that city. Those who had not reserved a hotel room months in advance were forced to seek hotels far outside the city. Traffic was routinely snarled around the convention center, and waiting for a cab was like waiting for rain.
Most of the show, as the name implies, was devoted to consumer goods, such as TV's, cell phones, MP3 and CD players, home theater component and furniture, DVD players, car audio, etc., but there was still plenty of action in the computer field - mostly marked by vendors moving away from the profit-starved commodity PC field and into the more profitable consumer device field, where product differentiation is still possible.
Media Center PC
Accordingly, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates made his traditional show-opening keynote address to the traditional standing-room-only crowd. People were waiting for hours just to get into over-flow rooms to watch him on closed circuit video. With the help of Tonight Show host Jay Leno, Gates announced a second generation of the Media Center PC. Set-top boxes will ship later this year from Dell, Gateway, Hewlett Packard, Samsung and Alienware, that will (using Windows Media Extender technology) sit beside TVs and audio-video systems and connect them (wirelessly or via cable) to a central Media Center PC. Thus, the contents of the PC can be viewed throughout the home - and Microsoft has a shot at becoming as central to consumer electronics as it is to office computing. However, analysts agreed that consumers are not likely to embrace a central entertainment device, but would rather be assured that all their devices can effortlessly interconnect.
Gates also showed an Xbox Media Center Extender Kit, which lets user access their Media Center PC through an Xbox game console. He also touted new features of the MSN online service. Previously offered as an enhanced broadband Internet access service, Microsoft is now downplaying its ISP offering and touting MSN as an Internet gateway like Yahoo.
At this time last year Gates was touting Microsoft's new Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT.) At the show, he was showing again one of the first SPOT watches, which pick up weather and news (as well as time signals) through sub-carriers of local commercial FM radio stations.
Gates also gave the audience a peek at possible future products. First was the 'Media Variations' project that offers ways to probe large amounts of data. Using a three-dimensional interface, he showed how you could use it to find movies of interest based on common actors, directors, or themes, etc. A second research project was called 'MSR Media Browser' and was designed to let users interact with collections of photos and video based on attributes like content and dates.
Intel's president, Paul Otellini, also gave a keynote address, and among other things announced Intel's development of an 'entertainment PC' or EPC. Basically a thin-form PC that is operated via a remote control instead of a keyboard, the EPC will let the user store and organize digital content and display it on entertainment devices (wirelessly or through direct connections.) It will also serve as a wireless network access point.
EPC's should be available mid-year from various manufacturers. He said they should cost less than $ 800. However, you can get office PC's now for $400. He also previewed Intel's new Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS, formerly code-named Cayley) technology, intended to dramatically improve the appearance of large-screen displays while bringing their prices down. He predicted 50-inch HDTV's for under $1,800 in 2005.
Another speaker was Michael Dell, who took the opportunity to tout what he called the 'Dell Effect' - quality goes up and prices go down after Dell enters a field, he said, citing the consumer electronics product market which Dell entered a year ago. Reportedly, he spent much of his speech talking about electronics recycling. He announced funding to promote community recycling programs.
Dell took advantage of the show to announce that it is planning to significantly expand its printer offerings. In additional to its existing relationship with Lexmark, it will be carrying products from Fuji Xerox, Kodak, and Samsung. No further details (such as exactly what products Dell will carry, and when they will be available) were announced, however. Dell's competitor, Gateway, was not at the show, but did announce that it would be producing a PC Media Center set-top box.
Hewlett Packard announced that, starting this summer, the HP iPAQ handheld would include the ability to act as a remote control for entertainment devices, lik ethe Sony Clie. HP also announced an alliance with Apple to deliver HP-branded digital music using Apple iPod technology. HP consumer PC's and notebooks will come preinstalled with Apple's iTunes jukebox software and an icon for the iTunes online music store. Otherwise, most of HP's efforts at CES seemed to involve its line of handheld calculators.
The other main American PC maker, IBM, was not at the show.
On the floor, the Toshiba Storage Device Division announced what is said was the world's smallest hard drive, just .85-inch in diameter (The entire unit measures 3.3 x 24 x 32 mm and weighs less than 10 grams.) Expected to be available in two- and four-gigabyte formats, Toshiba will start sampling the new drive during the summer, with mass production by the end of the year. It is expected to show up in portable devices, such as PDA's, phones, camera's, and MP3 players. There was no mention of pricing. Just before the show, Apple brought out a new iPod based on a one-inch hard drive.
Modular
One of many examples of the on-going convergence of consumer electronic and computers was the announcement by Sony of what it called a location-free TV. It was a 12.1-inch wireless flat-panel touch-screen LCD display with a base station. Using 802.11a, b and g, it can display TV programming as long as it is within 100 feet of its base station. It can also be used for Internet browsing and e-mail access, although it is not a PC. It is supposed to be available later this year, but no price was announced.
Although they were not exhibiting at the show, pioneering modular computer vendors OQO of San Francisco and Antelope Technologies, were displaying their new units at an off-site reception. Both were showing Windows XP machines that are the size of palmtops.
OQO was showing its 'ultra-personal' machine, which is small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. The cover on one side of the unit is a 5-inch VGA-W screen that slides up slightly to reveal a tiny 'thumb keyboard'. There was also a USB and Firewire port on the unit, plus a docking cable. During my trials the keyboard proved too small for productive input. The exhibitor kept saying that it was a prototype subject to revision, and an analyst who also tried it was demanding a different keyboard. However, it could easily be plugged into a real keyboard (which can be had at any office supply store these days for trivial prices) and also into a larger screen. Therefore, your computer can be with you at all times. The company said the unit would be widely available by the second half of 2004, probably with a 20 gigabyte hard drive and a low-wattage Transmeta processor.
Antelope had taken a different approach. Its core unit is a 9.1-ounce 3x5x.75-inch box containing the Transmeta processor, memory and hard drive, and just enough battery power to keep the software in suspended animation for a while. When it's time to compute, you plug it into a cradle with connections to a keyboard and monitor, letting you use it as a desktop PC. Or you can plug it into a shell with a touch screen, making it a handheld PC.
Antelope will be asking $ 3,900 for a kit that will include the core unit (the one they were showing had a 20 gigabyte drive and 256 megabytes of RAM), a shell to turn it into a handheld PC, a cradle to turn it into a desktop, and various accessories. Antelope raised its startup money in Switzerland and is setting up production in Neuchâtel. The initial market will be various niches - the US Army is an early customer - with retail sales beginning next year.
Big Screens
For those who have been waiting for head-mounted displays for the masses, Ingineo of Middleton, was showing its Eyetop, a pair of sunglasses with a miniature 16-bit LCD screen mounted just to the side of one eye. The user can watch the screen on the periphery, or pay attention to what's straight ahead (Military-grade units overlay the video image atop the actual scene). The unit costs $ 345.
Among the purely consumer items, those who felt jaded by 57-inch high-definition flat-panel wall TVs being offered for $3,999 (such as Epson was offering) could welcome an 80-inch plasma unit offered by Samsung for $70,000. Many of the smaller units were additionally offering memory card slots, so that the user can take a card from a digital camera and put it in the TV, which will automatically turn the contents into a slide show. Connections to printers and CD burners were also offered.
During the show, the CEA also announced the latest figures for the American consumer electronics market. It figured the 2003 market amounted to $ 96.3 billion, an increase of about two percent over 2002. For 2004, the CEA projects growth of five percent, to $ 101 billion. Of interest to the computer sector was its finding that home desktop computer category was the second fastest projected growth category, after mobile phones. Projected growth was measured in terms of the percentage of the market that planned to buy a unit in the next 12 months, either for the first time or as a replacement. Thirty-one percent said they planned to get a cellular phone and 19 percent said they planned to get a home desktop computer. After that, 18 percent planned to get a digital camera, 16 percent a DVD player, 15 percent a portable headset CD player, 13 percent a color printer, and 13 percent planned to get home Internet service.
Lamont Wood