The top 5 CES trends that will matter in 2012

A flood of news is par for the course at CES, however every year a few major themes emerge that will resonate for the rest of the year. During the value of CES has arguably declined over the past decade — with companies like Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft announcing plenty of products at their own press events throughout the year — the show for all that provides us an interesting glimpse of what lies ahead. This year’s trade show is poised to be one of the biggest in years, as the Consumer Electronics Association believes it will draw 149,000 attendees to more than 2,700 exhibitors occupying more than 1.8 million square feet of exhibit space.

Here are our predictions for the CES trends that will make a profound impact on the research world, both for businesses and consumers, in 2012.

Verizon Wireless’s LTE (Long Term Evolution, latest standard in the mobile network technology) 4G network was all the rage eventually year’s CES, having launched just a month prior, and it marked the arrival of cellular networks that could after all achieve speeds comparable to home broadband connections. During Verizon has had its run of the LTE (Long Term Evolution, latest standard in the mobile network technology) field for the past year, this year it’ll at last have some competition from AT&T and Sprint.

At CES, AT&T will be showing off its first run of LTE 4G phones, following the launch of its network  back in September. Leading the pack for AT&T will be the Nokia Ace, AKA the Lumia 900, which we think could turn the tide for Windows Phone. AT&T truly has a lot of catching up to do, and we suspect that the carrier will be making some major announcements regarding aggressive expansion of its network.

Sprint, in the meantime, has said that it will have a major roll out of its LTE network in the middle of 2012, which will be followed by the arrival of LTE phones later in the year. The company was the first to launch a 4G network years ago, however it ran the slower WiMax standard. Now that LTE has proven to be faster and easier to deploy, Sprint has to jump ship from WiMax. We expect Sprint to divulge many more details about its LTE plans at CES.

That leaves T-Mobile, which for the past year has been embroiled in a potential takeover by AT&T. Now that that’s not happening, the carrier will likely move forward with plans to expand its HSPA+ 4G network, which at this stage has already reached 42 megabit speeds in near 100 cities.

Eventually, all laptops will resemble what we’re calling ultrabooks. The laptop industry has long aspired to fit as much power as possible in a tiny package. Ultrabooks are the realization of that dream. It used to be that ultraportable laptops came at a premium, at the time low-cost netbooks in the long run proved machines didn’t need to be expensive to be very portable. With ultrabooks, you get extreme portability and a decent amount of power at a price not much more expensive than mainstream laptops. Intel researchers say Ultrabooks enable “flow,” or the idea of being able to work in an uniterrupted manner.

The smartphone

Silently powering the smartphone and tablet revolution are mobile chipsets that are powerful, while nevertheless being heavily optimized to not eat up too much battery life. Last year saw the rise of dual-core chipsets, including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, Nvidia’s Tegra 2, and Apple’s A5 chip.

This year, the race is on for quad-core chipsets that will bring to mobile computing power on par with some desktops. We’re expecting to see plenty of devices featuring quad-core chipsets from many of the above companies at CES. Qualcomm has the new Snapdragon S4, and Nvidia has Tegra 3, both of which will be able to run complex 3D games and high-definition video without a sweat. Qualcomm has one of the keynote speech slots, during Intel and Nvidia have press conferences on Monday.

The game with its new Atom-based mobile chipset

Intel is taking everything into account stepping into the game with its new Atom-based mobile chipset, codenamed Medfield. It may not be at first as powerful as the competing Tegra and Snapdragon platforms, nevertheless after sitting out the mobile chipset wars until now, Intel has to start somewhere. The company will reportedly show off its first Medfield-based Android phone, built by LG, at CES.

“Cloud” has been a code-word for enterprise for a during, however this year might be a big one for the consumer cloud. When iCloud and iTunes Match were introduced in mid-2011, we had a feeling that consumer-focused cloud technologies were about to start getting hot. Many other tech companies notably follow Apple’s lead, so it’s not hard to imagine other companies cashing in with their own cloud-based media services this year.

Impression at CES is Shodogg

One company we expect to leave an impression at CES is Shodogg, which uses the web and cloud power to seamlessly move video content between screens, from TV to phone to computer. Another company that could shine is former DEMO winner WeVideo, which makes video editing in the cloud a reality.

As more car manufacturers develop electric engines and green solutions to help with gas mileage, they are as well looking at ways to add more communication and media innovation to vehicles. This year at CES, companies like Ford, GM, Mercedes-Benz and Audi will be showing off mobile apps that interact directly with cars and dashboards that function more like full-fledged computers. CES will as well play host to a panel about cars that use short-range vehicle-to-X research that will allow cars to interact with other cars, traffic lights and pedestrians.

With the ever-increasing demand that innovation should help make driving safer, we can as well expect that sort of tech getting a spotlight this year. CES will have a number of companies detailing technologies to help with "auto collision avoidance, land drift assistance, parking, speed monitoring, hands-free, text-to-voice, driver drowsiness detection and more."

While CES is bastion of consumer research, there are on the whole plenty of trends that will dominate the year that won’t have much of a showing at the trade show. One of the biggest is Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system that will boldly attempt to unify a tablet and desktop interfaces. From what we’re hearing, Microsoft won’t be announcing much significant Windows 8 news at CES, even though you can be sure plenty of other companies will have Windows 8-related news in tow.

Looking beyond CES, there’s plenty to look forward to this year: Tablets that won’t suck; the eventual release of Apple’s completely revamped iPhone; and broadly speaking for me, the many surprises that 2012 will bring.

Next Story: Dropped your phone in the toilet? Use Bheestie to fix it Previous Story: Bad Siri: voice assistant doubles iPhone 4S data usage