CES 2005 - More Tech Notes From the Floor
by Kristopher Kubicki on January 14, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Closing Thoughts
For many of us, CES doesn't give us any really juicy details in small dosages. The show floor is usually crammed with products that we already saw on roadmaps three months ago.
CES Predictions in '05: Media Center
CES was all about media "integrated" devices - TVs, set top boxes, PCs - all running some form of Windows and all doing the same thing, but with different degrees of quality. The SBC demonstration during the Keynote on Tuesday showed us the power of a handheld phone previewing a clip of a broadcast before the MCE device was told to record a four stream IPTV feed remotely.
MCE has some competition. CyberLink and InterVideo were both very pleased to demonstrate their MCE clones; SageTV and BeyondTV had powerful presences on the floor; we even found a tiny booth running their next generation set top box on the Linux based MythTV. The non-MCE devices have some advantages over MCE including multiple tuners, transcoding abilities, commercial skip, etc. But, on the other hand, Microsoft's partnership announcement with TiVo, Comcast, SBC and content providers like Starz!, Viacom and MLB may be too overwhelming. After all, Content is King. CyberLink was probably the most prevalent media player on the floor outside of MCE as multiple partnerships announced that they would ship their devices with CyberLink's media center free, including CoolerMaster, Hauppauge and ASUS.
Whether or not Microsoft will come out on top of the MCE war is moot. The message is that multifunction, set top box replacements and improvements are here to stay and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg as more companies start to embrace the idea. Case manufacturers are putting LCD displays on their units to interface better for media devices; Hauppage is putting multiple tuners on a single card; NVIDIA and ATI are integrating video optimizations on their hardware; and, motherboard manufacturers are creating ultra-small, ultra-cool PCs designed specifically for the HTPC market. No matter where we turned to on the floor, someone had something new to bring to the media center.
CES Predictions in '05: Phone
Like many others who have recently adopted VOIP solutions, I took a personal interest in investigating SIPs, Vonage and other VOIP solutions. Voice Over IP drew a very mixed crowd at the show. On one hand, Microsoft and SBC gave the demonstration during the keynote demonstrating "integrated" devices and phones transmitting data to MCE devices and set top boxes - but not on a WiFi network! On the other hand, you have the push from services like Vonage, Kiwi and Soyo that would love to see WiFi everywhere. Although it might have just been my personal opinion, it seems as though there is a large push to converge as many devices as possible, yet leave WiFi off voice devices that could use WiFi for VOIP. Palm and ASUS, for example, were happy to show us their newest GSM enabled devices that lack 802.11 capabilities. Vonage was very excited about debuting their VOIP WiFi phone, but the phone was nowhere near as polished as something that we would see from Motorola or Siemens. I would certainly embrace a GSM/WiFi hybrid phone that could switch between VOIP and GSM depending on my proximity to an 802.11 hotspot. Most likely, it will take a PC manufacturer and a VOIP provider like Vonage to spec out a product like that, and hopefully, we won't have to wait until CES 2006 to see it.
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jiulemoigt - Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - link
I've used one of the light scibe drives, wheres the fact it burns in monocrome, which looks color but is not color, they look like the windows hologrph cds. The other thing is you can burn the CDs when ever as your burning the other side and use a normal burner for the normal side.nullpointerus - Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - link
What's with the vaccum cleaner on page 2?skunkbuster - Sunday, January 16, 2005 - link
that Vento was damn fugly!Determinant - Saturday, January 15, 2005 - link
#10, you misunderstood me. I also want to see what downfalls a product has. I too believe in non-biased articles and Anandtech is one of the best sites for that.#9 & #10, If you are people that go to these events then you are justified to say that about events (I agree with both of you when talking about products) but most of us don't attend these events.
So if you want a quick way of deciding wether to read the article or not then saying "nothing interesting happened" would really help you out. My comment was directed at authors rather than readers because an author wants everyone to read the article.
I still stand by what I said earlier.
overclockingoodness - Saturday, January 15, 2005 - link
I agree with #9. We don't need to see the positive side of a trade show or a product. We can just looking at the specifications and read the press release if we only want to see positives of everything. I want to see what kind of downfalls does the product has. I don't want independant review organizations to show me the positives: what will be the difference between in-house marketing departments and publications?AnandTech and all other publications are doing right by showing the wrong sides of the product or a trade show for that matter.
stephenbrooks - Saturday, January 15, 2005 - link
#7 actually I disagree, it's nice to see reviews that don't sugar-coat everything and if a show is really "some interesting widgets but nothing too revolutionary", says so!semo - Saturday, January 15, 2005 - link
#6, i don't know the exact speed but 16x dvd buring is 22,000kb/s or 22mb/s not 22kb/s. at 22kb/s a 4.7gb disc will burn in about 55 hours lol.anyway, i'm glad anandtech has finally reported on lightscribe. too bad mr. Kubicki didn't seem to like the idea too much. i, on the other hand, have been waiting for a whole year. i really really need a dvd burner now!
Determinant - Friday, January 14, 2005 - link
Just a suggestion:Instead of saying something like:
"CES doesn't give us any really juicy details in small dosages"
(this next quote is from the previous article)
"With the death of Comdex in 2004, the computer press had every expectation that CES would fill the void. That expectation turned out to be overly optimistic "
It would be better to just talk about what CES does instead of mentioning what it doesn't. Instead of talking about disadvantages or pitfalls, articles should focus on the positive aspects.
The reason for this is because whenever a reader reads an article that is "downbeat" then it makes you feel like just skipping to the conclusion since the article won't have anything interesting anyway (the author basically says so).
I'm not trying to criticize this article it's just that I've been seeing this quite a bit lately at many websites. The readers can't be excited about something that sounds "downbeat" and will be less inclined to continue reading.
I can only hope that authors will keep this in mind in the future.
mbhame - Friday, January 14, 2005 - link
In http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i... you said"Keep in mind that the physical limitation on hard drive read speed is what keeps DVD burners from writing faster than 16X"
But I have read multiple times previously that an optical drive's RPM becomes dangerously-fast >52X CD/16X DVD speeds - plus 16X DVD's transfer rate is 22KBps. StorageReview.com also points out that even ancient HDDs like the Seagate U6 has an initial transfer rate of 29.9MBps.
I think you ought to modify your article sir. Thank you.
jamawass - Friday, January 14, 2005 - link
Hope DLP wins and the 1080p move into front projector lines. I love my early gen Infocus X1 projector, can't imagine how a 1080p dlp will look.