2008 CES Wrapup (San Diego Transcript)

I'm ready to head back to San Diego, and not a minute too soon. Taxi lines have always been long during CES, often 100 people in line at many of the hotels trying to get somewhere just a few miles away. So this year I had a car, assuming I'd beat the crowds. But trying to get my car from the valet at the Hilton last night took nearly an hour with more than 70 people in line.

A look at a few more products and then a quick overview

This morning I visited with the startup company Livescribe that will be rolling out its new product, a pen computer, next month. The company was founded by one of the founders of LeapFrog, the successful toy company. Livescribe’s product uses technology from the Swedish company, Anoto, that’s been used in previous products from both Logitech and LeapFrog.

Livescribe is the next generation product with many new features that will appeal to business people and students. It’s also much slimmer and better crafted. Imagine a pen that you can take notes with while you're recording a lecture or meeting. You can go back and touch the pen to your notes and it will play back that part of the meeting. It’s an open system so it can be customized for all sorts of uses depending on the applications loaded into it. A translation application lets you write a word in English, touch it and it will speak and display the Japanese translation. I'll be doing a complete review when samples become available. The product will sell for under $200.

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Ostendo Technologies of Carlsbad has developed a unique curved display that’s being shown by Alienware and is attracting a lot of attention. The wide panoramic image provides total immersion for the gamer. It’s also received one of CNet’s "best of show" awards.

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Epson launched the PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 UB projector with 1,920-by-1,080 resolution and 50,000:1 contrast ratio. This unit also features a 3LCD optical engine, 1,600 ANSI lumens, in a pearlescent finish nice enough for your living room ($2,799).

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iRobot’s Looj gutter cleaning robot is an interesting gadget that drops into your gutter and travels along cleaning out the debris. It’s clever but I'm not sure how useful it really is.

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So what are the big trends here?

1. More, bigger and less expensive large screen TVs. Clearly the most exciting of all categories. The price leaders are Olivia, Vizio and Westinghouse, while the more familiar brands, Sony, Panasonic, and others are trying to find ways to add value and not compete on price.

2. iPod accessories amount to a $1 billion market, and hundreds were on display, many elegant, such as speakers from JBL, but most pretty schlocky.

3. GPS devices have exploded with dozens of suppliers. Like the TVs, there are the major players, such as Garmin, adding more functionality, while many of the off-brands are competing on price, some less than $100.

4. Digital picture frames are everywhere and from nearly everyone, including HP, Kodak and others. One model even contains a built-in printer.

5. The latest premium notebook computers being introduced have solid state drives, LED screen backlighting and thinner and lighter form factors.

6. There are more handheld devices for Web browsing because many are dissatisfied using a cell phone for that purpose. A good example is the Nokia N810.

7. I should note that there were few new cameras introduced here; the upcoming PMA show is where they'll be introduced.

Now the industry is looking to next week’s MacWorld in San Francisco to see what Apple is going to introduce. They're the one huge consumer company that goes its own way, yet has a huge influence on what happens at CES.

Comments

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hi! thanks for the information.
thanks for blogging this out.

-heather-