Website

On the eve of the massive Consumer Electronics Show—a bacchanalia of gizmology, with 140,000 conventioneers packing Las Vegas to visit 2,700 companies spread over several football fields' worth of booths last week—Gary Shapiro sighed when he talked about who wasn't there. "We invite him every year," says the CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, which organizes the show. "It would be great to have him here." But in 2007, as in the past, instead of joining an all-star keynote lineup that this year included Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Motorola's Ed Zander, Disney's Bob Iger and CBS's Les Moonves, Apple CEO Steve Jobs presided over his own conference in San Francisco. So for the first two days of CES everybody obsessed about what Steve would do. During the last two days, after Apple had introduced its iPhone, they obsessed about what Steve had done.

Of course there were plenty of things to see at CES. Electronics behemoths rolled out major products at packed press conferences, competing for mind space against innumerable cool gadgets serendipitously discovered at some obscure booth in the annex space at the Sands Hotel. In case you missed anything, an army of bloggers blasted a blizzard of postings—a "wisdom of crowds" approach that ensured that no gizmo went unnoticed. (Many bloggers hung out at an informal "Bloghaus" at the Bellagio, having more fun talking to each other than stomping the show floor.) Some people buzzed about the $249 Sansa Connect Wireless MP3 player, a Wi-Fi music device that lets you hook up to music services and recommendations from any hotspot. The cognoscenti whispered about the Sound-olier DUO Wireless Speaker Lamp, which integrates the otherwise intrusive rear speakers of a surround-sound system into a torchiere floor lamp. And for those interested in the physics of pain, there were gaily colored $300 consumer versions of Tasers, the electrical stun devices.

The big theme this year was making video utterly ubiquitous. There were 100-inch-plus LCD screens from LG, Sharp and Samsung, and there were screens as small as poker chips, running broadcast television from cell phones (check out the LG VX940 using Verizon MediaFLO). In the TI booth you could see a prototype of a system that could let your cell phone project a six-foot video image. Cingular unveiled Video Share, which lets you accompany a mobile call with a live video stream. Those who recently bought big hi-def screens might want to know about Evo, a company devoted to gorgeous mounting of those Cyclopean beasts.

You could hardly pull the lever of a slot machine without elbowing someone who had a scheme to move the Internet to the television set. Sony introduced the Bravia Internet Video System, which pipes AOL, Yahoo and Grouper (an Internet video aggregator) to your Bravia television. SanDisk announced USB TV, a sneaker-net approach where you move video content from your computer to a two-part iPod nano-size unit, then plug half the thing into a docking station hooked to your television; the other piece is a remote control. A company called Quartics was showing PC2TV that lets you stream Internet content directly on your television.

A variation on that theme was the proliferation of "media centers" and massive storage devices that let you store all your movies, photos and TV shows, and watch them around the house. Sony's weird-looking Vaio TP1—it resembles a toilet booster seat—has 300 gigs and all sorts of tuners and connectors. Microsoft, which plastered the convention center with banners touting its finally-about-to-arrive Vista operating system, has developed a Windows Home Server that promises to "simplify digital life for families."

The CES ghost man was in on this game, too: back in San Francisco, Jobs announced details of Apple TV (which he had earlier demo'ed as iTV), a scheme to wirelessly get the video, photos and music from your computer into your TV set (as well as movie trailers from the Internet): it's $299 and available in February. And not yet seen in Vegas.

Steven Levy
newsweek

Labels: gadget, news