The big thing this year — 4K television. Here are a few factoids that Roberts, clearly having been educated by his peers in the Sony family, shared:

• The storage footprint of 1 hour of 4K video is 512 gigabytes.
• That’s a lot of data to move across IP, so 4k cameras just send everything straight to production storage systems over fiber-optic cable.
• The picture is so detailed that it’s difficult for one person to shoot scenes and focus at the same time. The answer: new two-person camera setups where one guy shoots and the other stands next to him focusing the shot on a larger screen.

Oh, and there were drones, too:

The Schiebel Camcopter S-100.

This is the civilian version of the Schiebel Camcopter S-100. There’s a military version, too. Its sticker price of several hundred thousand dollars probably isn’t surprising.

For the more cost-conscious aerial cinematographer, Freefly Systems had its own booth:

The Freefly Cinestar helicopter

Or for those who prefer the ground:

A video rover, I guess.

This all kind of makes me wish I shot video for a living. If I had a flying, rotating video camera or an off-road setup, I’m sure I could find some way to use them.

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What do you get for that kind of cash? In terms of hardware, the Xperia ZL rivals the flagship phones from any other handset maker these days. Sony’s Reality Display offers 5-inches of full high-definition resolution and uses the company’s Mobile BRAVIA Engine 2, bringing Sony’s television technology to the small screen. Even with the large display, Sony kept the phone dimensions relatively small at 5.18 x 2.7 x 0.39 inches.

The main camera is 13 megapixel camera with Exmor RS sensor and f/2.4 aperture. A range of photo modes, 1080p video support and HDR capture for both stills and videos are included.

Sony includes 2 GB of memory to run Google Android 4.1 — not Android 4.2, sadly — on Qualcomm’s 1.5 GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset. Internal storage tops out at 16 GB, but can be expanded by up to another 32 GB through removable storage. At this price, the handset only supports HSPA+ networks on down. An Xperia ZL model with LTE support is available for $759.99.

While the phone may be worth the price, I wouldn’t expect Sony to sell too many units here. The U.S. is only now just flirting with full price phones as consumers have been addicted to hardware subsidies for years. T-Mobile is the first of the big four to be making any headway towards a BYOD model, and as the smallest of the four, won’t have big traction to help Sony move the Xperia ZL.

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Pottermore at Playstation Home will be available in April. According to an announcement on Pottermore’s blog, “you’ll be able to actually step inside Diagon Alley™ and board the Hogwarts™ Express as an Avatar, and once inside these 3D environments, experience the mayhem of book herding, test your knowledge with a Pottermore quiz, share and collect Trading Cards, and take part in an illicit Wizard’s Duel.”

“Pottermore reaches across multiple digital platforms, and our ongoing partnership with Sony has allowed us to forge this exciting connection with Playstation Home,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in a statement, “creating the most immersive experience possible within that space and giving users wonderful new ways to explore locations from the Harry Potter stories.”

Sony is a Pottermore partner, and last November the companies launched a Harry Potter-themed PS3 game, “Wonderbook: Book of Spells.”

Pottermore launched as a digital bookstore in March 2012 and opened up its interactive features the following month. The most recent available user stats are from October 12, when Redmayne said at the Publishers Launch Conference in Frankfurt that the site had 36 million unique users.

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Amazon U.K. matched all of Sony’s prices, leading to a deeply discounted market for many ebooks and causing concern for publishers about the devaluation of their product (even though the retailers were paying them the full prices on the discounted ebooks).

The end of the 20p promotion is tied to Sony’s redesign of its U.K. digital bookstore. “Discounted 20p pricing is not currently offered on the newly relaunched UK Reader Store,” a Sony rep told The Bookseller. “However, pricing is always subject to revision. The duration of our 20p pricing is indicative of our commitment to provide great eBooks at exceptionally accessible prices, which is a philosophy we continue to hold.”

Many of the books included in the promotion shot up U.K. bestseller lists, but some publishers and others were concerned that the promotions would devalue ebooks by permanently lowering the prices that consumers were willing to pay. Those concerns may be lessened now, though Sony could always start its 20p promotion again — or Amazon could start one.

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On Wednesday in New York, Sony announced the PlayStation 4, which comes with souped-up hardware that the company says will virtually eliminate the time video game players must wait for their games to load. The company also touted a new “share” button on its controller that will let players capture video clips, not just screenshots, of their game play to send to friends.

During a presentation heavy with video game demos, Sony also touted its Vita portable device as the vanguard of mobile play. An executive explained how a player, bumped by others from the living room big screen, can immediately continue his game on the handheld Vita — a tablet experience of sorts.

Reaction by video game fans on Twitter and live blogs at Wired and the Verge was underwhelming. This included disappointment that the new PlayStation 4 would not include backwards compatibility via streaming with earlier PlayStation games.

Perhaps surprisingly, Sony spent little time addressing the role of consoles like the PlayStation as an onramp to the larger world of media. In this context, the PlayStation is just one of a growing number of devices — including Roku, Boxee, Apple TV(i aapl) and (soon) Intel — that link consumers to movies, music and more.

A Sony executive did note that the PlayStation was the most popular device for accessing NetFlix. But the company didn’t devote time to expounding a larger media vision such as that of Microsoft’s entertainment and digital media president who, at a recent media event, announced the company is producing its own interactive TV shows.

Sony did not announce a price or even display the console itself during the two-hour long event, but did announce in closing that the device will be available around “holiday 2013,” presumably in time for the November/December shopping season.

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Long-form TV dramas were a tough sell in the past, Lynton argued, because story lines had to accommodate audiences that wouldn’t tune in every week. With Netflix and other methods of catch-up, TV has gotten a lot better, he said: “One of the reasons that you are seeing this explosion in creativity going on right now…. is the fact that you can now create these 13 episode long-form narratives.”

Common wisdom in the industry has been that long-form dramas like Mad Men and Homeland are attributable to the rise of cable networks like AMC, HBO, and Showtime, but Lynton disputed that notion. “This is something completely different,” he said, and completely attributable to technology. Lynton went on to say that it’s still not clear how technology will have an impact on the creative process in the area of movies.

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According to IDC, all of the top 5 smartphone vendors showed sales growth in last year’s final quarter: Combined, these companies sold 141.6 million of the total 219.4 smartphones sold in the last three months of 2012. Look at the chart, though, and you’ll note that Huawei grew its final quarter sales by 89.5 percent from the year-ago period. That’s impressive considering the company has essentially no foothold here in the U.S., where we’re practically addicted to our handsets.

In fact, Huawei leapfrogged past Sony and ZTE in the last quarter as compared to a year ago, jumping from the then-no. 5 smartphone seller to no. 3.

I’ve noted before that the smartphone market is one of momentum: It takes time to build it, but once a company has some, it can keep sales rising for quite a bit. Clearly, Apple and Samsung have had momentum for some time. Apple’s started in 2007 and has chugged along impressively. Samsung didn’t have such momentum at the time and watched its smartphone share dwindle away until it regained motion with the first Galaxy S phone in 2010. Building upon that with a full line of Galaxy devices that improve yearly has completely turned Samsung around from bottom-feeder to market leader.

That doesn’t suggest that Huawei will keep growing and surpass these two; after all, HTC and Motorola had momentum at one time which proved short-lived for both.

To be sure, Huawei has a long way to go before it’s considered a rival to either Apple or Samsung. However, being a China-based company — where there are still over a billion people without a smartphone — and a global leader in networking equipment, tells me that Apple and Samsung should be looking over their shoulders at Huawei to see if it keeps quietly catching up.

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For those that value a thin device, here’s how Sony’s tablet compares to Apple’s market-leading slates. The current iPad is 9.4 millimeters in thickness while the iPad mini is 7.2 millimeters. The Xperia Tablet Z is lightweight as well, tipping the scales at 495 grams. That’s favorable compared to the iPad’s 652 gram weight; not to shabby when you consider the iPad uses a 9.7-inch display v. the 10.1-inches Sony is using.

That screen is full high-definition as well: 1920 x 1200 resolution using Sony’s Mobile Bravia 2 display engine. It’s like a portable high-definition television in terms of specifications. Other components include a backlit 8.1 megapixel Exmor R sensor, LTE support, NFC chip, 1.5 GHz quad-core processor and Android 4.1. Sony says the new tablet will come to the Japan market first, but there are no details on price or availability in other countries.

Hardware specs aside, Sony would be wise to remember that software is just as important, if not more so, than what’s inside a tablet. To that end, I expect the new Xperia Tablet Z to compete more against other Android tablets than Apple’s line of iPads.

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The U.S. Patent Office issued two of the patents to Nokia in 2000 and 2002 and the other to Sony in 2001. Records show that the companies transferred the patents to a shell company called MobileMedia in 2010 which then proceeded to sue major players in the phone industry, including Apple, Google, HTC and Research in Motion.

The three patents in question appear to be exceptionally broad and at least one title reads like gibberish. They are U.S. Patent 6253075 (“Method and Apparatus for Incoming Call Rejection”), U.S. Patent 6427078 (“Device for personal communication, data collection and data processing… also comprises a camera unit”) and U.S. Patent 6070068 (“Communication terminal device and method for controlling the connecting state of a call into a desired connection state upon a predetermined operation by a user”).

The jury’s verdict, which was first reported by Bloomberg, is reproduced below. So far, court records do not show that the jury has made any damages finding against Apple. The company has yet to offer a statement but it is likely to appeal the ruling.

The Delaware jury finding comes at a time when many, including the companies themselves, are acknowledging the patent battles are getting out of hand. Many of the patents used to fuel the litigation date from the early 2000′s when the patent office had a reputation for granting patents on nearly anything (including a method for swinging on a swing).

Jury Verdict Against Apple Copy

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