3-D TV in the home. Some years, it’s hard to figure out the trends at CES. This year, it was easy because every big company talked about viewing 3-D movies, TV shows and games in the living room. Blame it on Avatar. The advocates include LG Electronics, Toshiba, Samsung, Sharp, Panasonic, Sony, Intel, and Nvidia. Some of the companies gave 30 percent of their press conference airtime to 3-D. Nvidia had the best 3-D viewable images (as far as we saw) on a racing game. That’s because personal computers can use the best dedicated 3-D graphics hardware, making for more realism. Both Panasonic and Samsung unveiled a whole ecosystem of products from glasses to 3-D ready TVs.
As good as this sounds, we’re not sure it’s going to be as big as HD TV itself. There are still lots of skeptics out there who won’t watch in 3-D because it gives them a headache. They’re not likely to pay extra for it. And it could be some time still before all of the 3-D ecosystem — with content, cameras, TVs, and glasses — are available in a lot of homes. We don’t expect every movie to be as good as Avatar, either. Samsung and Sharp may be able to boost the market some because they have technologies that can convert 2-D programs to 3-D on the fly. But 3-D is at least off to a good start in 2010 and it will trickle down from the theaters to homes in due time.
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New devices may bring e-books to the masses. It looks like both device-makers and publishers are expecting books to be a major part of the content on those tablets. After all, Microsoft’s Ballmer showed off the HP tablet’s touchscreen by accessing an Amazon Kindle application and flipping through a few pages of the bestselling novel Twilight. Meanwhile, Plastic Logic launched its Que e-book reader, which is one of the most impressive-looking devices in its market (it had better be, since the device is also substantially more expensive than Amazon’s Kindle).
With these devices, not to mention Apple set to announce its all-but-official tablet/e-book reader later this month, readers’ embrace of e-books as a complement or even replacement for physical books may ramp up dramatically in the next year. As that happens, the question is whether e-book readers can compete against fully-fledged tablets. Are the reader manufacturers in trouble? Will they have to make their devices more tablet-like to compete?
Oh, and the shift may not be limited traditional books — a startup called Graphic.ly, which was also demonstrated on-stage at Ballmer’s keynote, is developing a digital comic book reader and store.
Netbooks are getting more and more attractive. These machines make perfect sense with their smaller screens, low prices, and sole purpose of cruising the web. But the first generation of netbooks that came out about 18 months ago had return rates as high as 40 percent. They didn’t play games, choked on a lot of web sites, and were generally a lousy consumer experience. Despite that, netbooks are selling in the tens of millions and there were dozens of new models at the show. Now, with the newest generation of low-power technology, the category is no longer just a bunch of hype. The machines can live up to their billing. The latest Intel Atom chips give these $400 or so machines a lot of oomph to do tasks that once required full laptops. Toshiba’s new Toshiba Mini NB 350 has an 11 hour battery life. HP’s new Mini 5102 netbook has a touchscreen. About 33 million netbooks sold in 2009, and that should grow 20 percent in 2010, according to market researcher DisplaySearch. The category will get competition from smartbooks, which are hybrids of smart phones and netbooks, and perhaps e-book readers and tablets as well.
Everyone’s jumping on the app store band wagon, and they’re bringing plenty of devices. After Apple found big success with its iPhone/iPod Touch App Store, other smartphone makers followed suit. Now the model is moving to other devices, particularly those netbooks we mentioned. Intel announced AppUp, which netbook makers can customize to offer their own stores to customers. Samsung announced its store too, which appears to use AppUp technology. Netbooks seem like the obvious next step for this model, since they sit between the sophistication of a normal laptop and a smartphone. At the same time, you could see this as a blow for native apps over the “net” part of netbooks, since netbooks are supposed to be all about accessing the web, not downloading applications. Google has been the most vocal about this, declaring that “all apps are web apps” in its forthcoming netbook operating system, Chrome OS.
The vision isn’t limited to netbooks, but encompasses TVs, PCs, and other devices too. Samsung, in particular, promoted its apps’ cross-device capabilities. It’s not about TV apps, or phone apps. It’s about apps that work across all devices, storing your activity so that your behavior on one device carries over the others. As companies release new gadgets (see the tablet trend above) and old devices get web connected (see the TV trend below), these kinds of cross-device features will become more crucial.
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Gesture controls are also taking a leap forward. Microsoft said it would launch Project Natal, which has camera-based sensors that can detect your full body movements, for the Xbox 360 in the fall of 2010. Sony was strangely silent about its rival technology debuting this spring. But companies such as GestureTek, Canesta and others showed off their own technologies for controlling TVs or other gear with gestures. It remains to be seen how well users will warm to these new control schemes, and how soon software takes advantage of it.
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Not every car is going to be so connected in the future. But Ford’s moves show that the car companies are finally moving to an annual cycle for driving new technology into their vehicles, instead of the usual five years. It’s also heartening to hear that we’re not all heading for a big pile-up. Ford says that Sync lets drivers choose a new song with voice commands in 4.9 seconds, while it takes 30 seconds without it. The company is trying to minimize distractions for the driver even as it adds more stuff for you to do while you’re driving. Ford was just one example of myriad other car-related announcements at CES.
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