@ CES: Let The Games Begin; Storage, Connectivity, Movable Content Among Key Players

CES UnveiledThis is my third Consumer Electronics Show for paidContent.org and my fourth overall. (Yes, I know I’m a pretender compared to a lot of you true CES vets.) So am I feeling a little lukewarm because it’s too familiar or have I just set the wow bar a lot higher? Case in point — lots of nifty stuff at CES Unveiled, the pre-CES press showing of new/innovative products, but nothing that compelled me to plop right down and tell you about it that minute. So what did I see? On the obvious side, the remote-controlled BladeRunner Recon, a model helicopter with a video and still camera for pilot’s eye views; a robotic singing Elvis head and compact functional robot from appropriately named WowWee; HANNSpree’s 19-inch monitor embedded in a leather baseball frame and another one in a toddler-size firetruck.
Looking a little closer, the crowded small ballroom at the Venetian carried more than a few clues about the present and future of digital media and entertainment as it intersects with hardware: storage, connectivity, access without a computer, sharing, moving content from smaller devices to big screens and vice versa. When I asked Ross Rubin of NPD if he saw a theme, his first response was “storage.” (For those of us who had IBM XTs and ATs, holding Matsunichi’s 12G USB hard drive that weighs 2 ounces and runs $130 is a little mindboggling.) Taking that into our realm, as storage options become cheaper, smaller in size and larger in capacity, the ability to move, manage and store content gets easier. For instance, SanDisk’s V-Mate, a device about the size of a paperback book is a PVR with the ability to put up to 7.1 hours recorded from an analog device on to a 2G memory card that can be used with a variety of playback options. I swear I think I saw jaws dropping when people gazing at it realized it is already on the market; so many of the gizmos and services being shown off or announced here aren’t and won’t be for months (if ever).
— Samsung and LG Mobile showed off some snazzy handsets, some already on the market or in various carrier pipelines; of course, the Samsung slide model with QWERTY keyboard that weights half of my current PDS/phone is not one of those. Multimedia capabilities continue to improve whether users want them or not.
— Radio continues to evolve with the times. HD radio (table top models en route) and small internet radios were on the scene.
A shout out to Kathy and the gang at Shure for helping me realize that keeping replaceable headset earpieces indefinitely isn’t a virtue and actually denigrates the sound — and for sending me on my way with better sound for my retail-purchase Shures. Their upcoming versions are out of my league but serious audiophiles with wallets to match will want to listen to the SE530 and its slightly less costly sib the SE 420.

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