Wins and Fails While Covering CES 2010

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Home, sweet, home. As much fun as I have during the CES week, there’s nothing quite like coming home again. I am unpacked and settling into a normal routine, at least normal for me. During my trip home yesterday I had ample time to reflect on the week-long activities of the CES, and kept coming back to what worked well and what didn’t work. My thoughts were from the viewpoint of someone covering the show, not a standard attendee. What worked and didn’t work for me may not be the experience of someone else in a similar position; this is my unique perspective. Note that this covers both the tech I used, and the show itself. It is a compendium of the entire week from the view of someone covering the CES. Read on to see what I found to be the major wins and fails during CES week.

WIN- Verizon MiFi. The major win for me at CES was having the MiFi in my bag and available at all times. This insured I had good connectivity no matter where I was working, and no matter how bad other connections were. I ended up using the MiFi the entire time I was working in my hotel room, due to the first FAIL on my list.

FAIL- Venetian Hotel room connectivity. On the surface it appeared that connectivity in the Venetian hotel room would be the least of my worries. They had both wired and wireless connectivity in every room, and “free” as part of a mandatory $15/day resort fee. Unfortunately, it seems the hotel was not up to the influx of geek guests who were obviously saturating the network. The wired connection in my room didn’t work at all, and I didn’t have a few hours to work with hotel techs to get it working. The wireless was spotty, if it worked at all. I found that often my PC would immediately connect up to the “SuiteWiFi” hotspot, only to have no access to the web. Other times I could get straight to the web, only to have the connection drop off every few minutes. When I opened up the ThinkPad Access Manager to get a graphical look at the hotspots present, I could see at least 10 other rooms with the same SSID. I suspect the problem was exacerbated by not knowing which room’s hotspot I was connecting to. Big FAIL!

WIN- ThinkPad x200. The ThinkPad worked wonderfully for me during the CES, and I would estimate I spent almost half the entire time in slate mode working by touch. It was a common site to see me in some uncomfortable setting with the x200 in my hands allowing me to get solid work done. I was approached by a lot of people during the week, given that slates were on everyone’s mind, and was repeatedly amused to tell them that this ThinkPad was nothing new at the show. The lack of Tablet PC marketing was obvious over and over during the week (mini-FAIL for that).

FAIL- AT&T. I won’t say much about the total failure of AT&T during the CES week as it has been shouted from every corner. I’ll just say that my iPhone 3G was basically useless the entire week, until late Saturday when it was obvious many iPhone owners had departed. The coverage came back at that point, and worked in the same exact locations it had failed all week. ‘Nuff said.

WIN- Venetian Express Shuttle. The organizers of the CES provided a shuttle service that was an express route between the Venetian Hotel and the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). These buses left both locations every 10 minutes, and the service was wonderful. Kudos for this, as it made getting back and forth very simple.

FAIL- Press facilities at the Venetian. In years past, the CES has provided separate blogger and press rooms at both the LVCC and the Sands/ Venetian. This year, due to the size of the show being smaller, they only provided one small room at the Venetian. While I liked having both press and bloggers in the same space, the facility was smaller than either one last year. This often made it difficult to find a space to work, especially given that half the allotted space was taken up by CES functions. The Wi-Fi was spotty in the press room too, making a wired connection (provided) almost mandatory, when you could find one.

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