I spent most of my time at CES focused on mobile devices, but did note a few overriding trends:
- The story of the show was definitely flat panels, which were everywhere. LG showed off a particularly interesting integrated plasma/HDTV tuner/DVR, and Samsung showed off a plasma so big you couldn't get it down the stairs and into my basement even if you took out a second mortgage to pay for it. On the opposite end of the pricing spectrum, there were countless Asian importers with booths at the show displaying large LCD and plasmas at much lower prices.
- The other big deal at the show was that the focus of the computer industry is solidly on the living room - Microsoft, Intel, and HP all had huge booths dedicated to moving audio and video around the home. The problem with Media Centers for me has always been cost and form factor. HP's new HD Media Center looks especially sweet because once you're talking about HDTV the price jumps dramatically (the only standalone HD-DVR on the market costs $1,000), and the new horizontal cases look like they belong in your A/V rack, not your desk.
- Conversely, there were barely any new portable media players introduced other than the Olympus m:robe (a strong iPod mini competitor which I have in for review, and which looks gorgeous). I take this as an indication that other than the video players (which have problems getting content unless you have a Media Center PC), Apple has this market completely locked up. Now that the iPod shuffle appears to be the Next Big Thing, watch for copycat products (not that copycats will succeed - when pricing is down to $99 to start with, how do you compete with cachet?).
- In projectors, CEDIA was the land of $2,500 - $3,000 720p LCD boxes with automatic iris adjustment and great contrast from Panasonic and Sony. CES was the TI DLP team's chance to strike back: BenQ showed me a great 720p DLP HD2+ projector for around $3,000 (the 7700). Several products debuted with TI's new DarkChip such as BenQ's 8720; pricing on those is above $10,000, but the HD2+ products were nearly as good. This looks like it will work out so that custom installers will recommend the higher end products while enthusiasts buying/installing on their own will gravitate towards the $3,000 products. ...but we're not done. A slew of sub-$2,000 DLP projectors with 480p or 576p resolution were also introduced. I didn't see any of them at the show, but Evan Powell over at ProjectorCentral has a good recap.
My final trend is a question: could CES be getting too big to be relevant? It's always been hard to get around the show, and the weather didn't help (when it snows in Vegas it's fair to say hell has frozen over). Next year CES kicks the Adult Video show out of the Sands and takes over that venue, too. But at the same time, CEDIA has been getting a lot of the big home theater announcements, the wireless device vendors are saving their news for CTIA, and the mobile media player market is all focused on MacWorld.
-avi
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