At last night’s keynote kickoff to CES, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer took on the role of everyone’s kindly uncle, reassuring us that while things might be a bit tough right now, we should buck up, because the world will always need innovative new stuff. Which is fair enough, but I think what really cheered the audience up was a performance by Australian troop Tripod, who sang a song with a tale of Xbox-widowhood that was all too familiar, (“Oh get ready get ready/Ready for loving tonight Baby/Before we get down to love/Before we get down/I just gotta finish this level…”).
More substantively, Ballmer announced that the next version of Windows, Windows 7, would be available for beta downloads starting this Friday. The new interface looked slick enough in the demos, but as always the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, so I’m looking forward to seeing user reports following Friday’s release.
Beyond the dream about 3D television, the other big trend among TV makers are their (considerably more concrete) moves to bring Internet video direct to your big home screen. Netflix and YouTube were the big names of the day, and the two category leaders have partnerships with most of the major TV makers that allow viewers to download and watch free and premium content without having to touch a computer. This functionality is already available on some TVs, and expect to see it rolled out across entire product lines in the near future.
For those who can’t afford a brand new TV, Netgear has announced its ITV2000 Internet TV player. Unlike the TV makers, which tend to restrict choices to approved partners, the ITV2000 lets you get video from pretty much anywhere you want — including nearly 100 live TV streams, and it’ll even do bit torrent downloads direct to the player. It will be available sometime in the summer of this year, and cost about $200.
I love a neat booth demo, and Corsair have managed to pull one off by freezing one of their extra-durable flash memory drives inside a huge block of ice. The water- and shock-resistant drives come in various sizes up to 64 GB and sell for about $50 to $150, depending on the capacity. While it was still embedded in the ice, Corsair’s folks hooked it up to a computer to prove that a being turned into a flashsicle wasn’t enough to stop the memory from chugging away.
With cable and broadcast companies switching to HD television, TV makers have gotten a nice bump in sales as viewers upgrade to sets capable of doing the higher resolution video justice. But with the transition to all-digital broadcast television just 40 days away, TV makers are looking for the next big thing that will drive consumers to purchase a brand new TV. And they think they’ve found it — 3D.
Companies like LG and Panasonic are touting plans to develop standards and technology so that you can take advantage of the 3D content currently being made for IMAX 3D, and even watch live 3D TV for, say, sporting events. Panasonic in particular went so far as to have a taped testimonial about how awesome home 3D will be from director James Cameron (who was announced as the director of Titantic, but I prefer to remember him for The Terminator instead. Cameron was in Hollywood working on post-production of his sci-fi epic Avatar, which is being filmed in 3D.)
The only thorn in this rosy picture is that all of the current 3D technologies still require viewers to wear glasses, albeit not the red-and-green cardboard ones of 50′s b-movie fame. Modern glasses use LCD shutters to send different images to each eye, but it still remains an open question as to whether or not people will really want to dig out a set of 3D glasses when it comes time to watch the big game or a movie, either alone or with friends.
This week, DISCOVER is blogging from fabulous Las Vegas — today is the official opening of the annual Consumer Electronics Show. 130,000 consumer technology makers, buyers, and watchers have come from 140 countries to show off their latest gadgets.
Previous years have seen the debut of technologies that eventually became so ingrained into our lives that it’s hard to remember life without them, such as the VCR (1970), the camcorder (1981), the compact disc player (1981), the DVD (1996) and HDTV (1998). Throughout the show, we’ll be telling you about the products, events and trends we think are the most important, coolest, or just plain weirdest.
