A look back at CES 2011

CES was huge this year because Hollywood was there to broker content deals, the telecoms were there to talk content distribution, the auto industry was there to showcase the latest in vehicle telematics, and print media was there to work out the post-iPad future of magazines and books. And all of this is to boot to the normal roster of OEMs and consumer-facing electronics brands from across the globe. All things considered, there are so many different industries that are however looking to consumer electronics as "the future" of their business, and those industries want to present their specific ideas for how that will and should play out to anyone who will listen.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes' comments at the opening keynote on the newly elevated cultural status of TV are a case in point. Bewkes pointed out that shows like Mad Men have given TV such cachet that the big screen is nevertheless no longer where stars want to be—increasingly, movie actors and directors want to be on television. Simultaneous with TV's rise as the premier content venue is a redefinition of the term "television" from "a device with a screen and a set of channels" to, "a growing pool of cloud-hosted, episodic content that's usually available on any device with a color screen and a network connection." So when you combine TV's new cultural status with its cloud-enabled ubiquity and durability, you get a sense of just how important a formerly obscure electronics trade show has right away become for everyone in the entertainment business.

Likewise with automobiles—in-car computing and telematics are this year's trend, thanks to the rise of multicore embedded chips and the advent of 4G connectivity. So the automakers, because they're using the same chips as the tablet makers and the same networks as the smartphone makers, have to be at CES.

The downside of all of this activity is that the show has become quite unwieldy. Whether you want a cup of coffee, a cab, or a peek at a new gadget, you have to stand in a long line. There are lines everywhere, and they're all massive. The crowd as well makes it very hard to stay connected to the Internet, since everyone is hitting the same few cell towers then and there. If the show gets any bigger, it will be too big.

Specifically, I'm thinking of hybrid computing devices that anyway you look at it want to be tablets and have sizable touch screens, yet however have keyboards attached to them. It's unfortunate that, in a market where the keyboard-less iPad is the model to beat, manufacturers just can't be comfortable sending clients out into the world with tablets sans the security blanket of a keyboard. Either the manufacturers don't trust virtual keyboards, or think the clients won't, and it is holding back the evolution of ultra-portable and convenient tablets in the aggregate.

That said, there were a couple devices that in effect committed to the tablet design and may turn out to give the iPad a run for its money. The dual-core ARM-powered Motorola Xoom and BlackBerry PlayBook look like they will be promising competitors, especially once they get access to 4G networks come summer. The PlayBook may turn out to be in the worse shape of the two with its small app selection.

The increasing push behind 3D

Two big trends that actually stuck out to me while CES were the increasing push behind 3D and the staggering array of accessories for Apple's iDevices.

Movie studios and theaters have used 3D as a way to generate more revenue at the box office and offer an experience that's different than what most people can get at home. Nevertheless now, TV and Blu-ray player manufacturers are pushing 3D tech into the living room. Sets using active, LCD shutter-type glasses have been around for a couple years, and scores of companies were showing off sets that use passive glasses or no glasses at all. Most new Blu-ray players support 3D as then.

The 3D trend extends beyond the home theater

But the 3D trend extends beyond the home theater. I saw laptops with 3D capabilities. I saw however cameras capable of shooting 3D images. I saw camcorders capable of recording 3D videos. Nintendo is about to release a 3D-capable handheld gaming system. As late as this, I half-expect Apple to release iMovie 3D sometime in 2011.

The other thing that in effect struck me is the sheer number of various iPad and iPhone accessories. In particular, there seemed to be an endless array of cases made in every color and of every material. I saw iPad cases made of carbon fiber, of various thinly-carved exotic woods, and silicone cases for iPod touches in near every color in the Patone swatchbook.

There were tons of licensed accessories, many featuring cartoon characters like Hello Kitty, Sesame Street, Captain America, and M&Ms. There were hundreds of speaker docks, some in the shape of animals, some in the shape of old-school audio elements, some in amorphous shapes that defied description. Several companies had Bluetooth keyboards marketed exactly for the iPad, in both "full-size" and compact form. A few companies had various styli for writing and drawing on iPhones and iPads. And accessory maker Griffin teamed up with Crayola to create an iPad-specific stylus that worked exclusively with a Crayola coloring app. You know, for kids.

The iOS device market has begun to mature

Even as the iOS device market has begun to mature, and alternate platforms like Android have begun to catch up in terms of unit market share, it on the whole boggles the mind that so many companies can continue to exclusively target Apple's mobile devices.

Although a large chunk of the mobile industry has become fixated on that tablet craze, there are nevertheless some legitimate innovators out there aiming ahead of the curve and developing new kinds of mobile form factors and experiences. What impressed me most at CES were the unusual mobile computing devices with novel designs and capabilities.

The most compelling example

The most compelling example was Motorola's Atrix smartphone, which can plug into to a netbook shell or multimedia dock in order to provide a more desktop-like computing experience. The device has a whole separate software environment with GNOME and Firefox for conventional computing. The then generation of Android smartphones, with powerful multicore processors, are nearly capable of handling an average user's desktop computing workload.

Although the Atrix was the most impressive smartphone that I saw at CES, there were a handful of other products that similarly blur the boundaries between device categories. Razer's Switchblade, a 7-inch Windows-based pocket computer, offers a radical new take on mobile PC gaming. Samsung as well had a compelling twist on mobile computing with its sliding PC, one of the best tablet/netbook combo hardware concepts that I've ever seen.

It seems like the biggest barrier holding back more of this sort of technology are the limitations of Microsoft's Windows operating system, which doesn't scale down so then to these kinds of devices and creates an x86 dependency. If Microsoft can make its new ARM-based version of Windows into a credible mobile computing platform and deliver a fresh new user interface in other words better-suited for small displays, it's possible that we could see hardware vendors start to do a lot more experimentation with unparalleled mobile form factors and new kinds of mobile computing experiences.