CES: Corporate Summary

Here's my Corporate Summary I wrote for CES. Three day reduced to a page. "CES 2011 Recap DM: Tablets, 4G and Internet TV’s

140k people when to CES this year, up 16% from last year, and they saw a show focused on 4 things: Tablet Computers, 4G enable smart phones, Internet Connected TV’s and 3d TV’s’ Most major manufactures had all of these devices, all had at least two out of four.

Mobile & Tablets

Samsung, Motorola, LG, Blackberry, Dell and other smaller firms all showed off their Ipad killers. Most of the next generation machines where 7inch across versus 10inch for the Ipad, had a similar feature set, and ran on either the Android (google) OS, Microsoft 7 or in Blackberry’s case a propriety one. The distinguishing feature was usually on the hardware of each tablet, some where just cpu equivalent while others, could be turned into a laptop. Everyone is aware that with Ipad’s explosive growth last year, all these manufactures need to catch up and see the tablet as the huge growth market. Interestingly enough, last years cool tech items, net-books, where barley mentioned at all unless they where paired with a tablet.

Married to the plethora of tablets came a ton of announcement around 4G enabled tablets and mobile devices coming to the marketing in 2011. 4G stands for the next generation of cellular networks, and Verizon, Sprint and even AT&T all are creating devices for this network. For some sense of the scale,   AT&T  announced a total of 20 or so planned 4g devices for this year alone.

What’s very clear is the mobile tablet space has become very crowded field with lots of players:  traditional Computer manufactures (Dell, HP and Blackberry) compete directly with consumer electronic manufactures (Samsung, LG, Sony, etc) that compete with traditional phone manufactures (Motorola, HTC, Nokia). There is also, far to many operating system for all these devices to be popular, I counted at least 6 mobile OS’s on display.

Best in Show In this Category

Motorola “Xoom Tablet” and the “Atrix Phone” which you will be hearing a lot about in the future, both exceptional strong hardware with new Android 3.0 OS.

Connect TV’s

Is 2011 the year we can watch HDTV without a set-top box or a cable!? In a word: no. If anything CES demonstrated how fractured the Internet/connected TV landscape is, every manufacture has their own app store, particular interface, OS and partners. Samsung, took this fractured landscape to an extreme: demonstrating Connected TV’s that use Google TV, their own IP software, as well as a custom Connected TV interface for Comcast and cable.  Like Tablets, if you add similar connected TV devices, that are somewhat a different offering but still occupy the same space, such as Apple TV, Sling box, Boxee,  wii, Playstation and Xbox, this is another space with a lot of congestion, different platforms and a lot is going to change in the next few years. As Lois was right to point to me, while all these TV alternative are great for user options they don’t do HD, and won’t be able to 3d anytime soon. Overall, it’s safe to say, that the TV best function is still high-quality programming.

Best in Show In this Category

Samsung Connect TV line: The only TV line with an app store that actually has working apps (over a thousand  - including our own this day In history)"