Showstopper in the palm of your hand
27 January 2009
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is the dry ice and fanfare end of the industry.
While the show, which took place earlier this month in Las Vegas, might seem distant both geographically and in terms of reality (a wet winter’s day in the UK designing a power supply is never really going to compare with the gadget fest in America’s adult playground), it probably is no bad thing that much of the industry is focusing on what is fun and what is, as they say, on the bleeding edge.
Superficially, when it comes to consumer electronics, people can dismiss the trends for 2009 as being the same as for 2008 (and 2007, 2006….) – smaller, faster, lower power and, most importantly, better connected. Sony’s latest Cybershot camera, for example, comes web and Wi-Fi enabled for those who can’t wait to get in front of their computers to download their pictures. Personally, I can wait, but maybe it will be useful for people on long trips who don’t want to juggle around with spare memory cards.
It also became clear why so many laptops now cost the same as an average toaster – nobody wants one anymore. What everyone wants, if you took the offerings at CES as typical of customer demand, is netbooks. Sony and Asus led the way here with finger-fumbling equipment that I could never use at speed because the keyboards are too small for fingers of my generation, but at least if I had one I could move around at speed without having to cart around some of the giant and antiquated computing gear I use today.
However the showstopper turned out to be Palm’s ‘Pre’ – a smartphone that became the most talked about and acclaimed item on show. Like the iPhone (and everyone shudders when the two are compared for some reason) it has very efficient touchscreen and like the Blackberry it also has a qwerty keyboard which slides down. Best of both worlds you might argue. I suspect the real joy of the Pre will come from Palm’s new operating system, WebOS, in tandem with TI's new OMAP CPU – which will offer applications of speed and depth. On the downside it has no options for increasing storage beyond the inbuilt 8GB, but users are unlikely to be separated from a computer for long enough for this to be a big problem. The Palm Pre will be released to the North American market shortly but there is no release date for the UK yet and it seems we may have to wait until the summer.
Being blunt I am not sure whether the differences between the Palm Pre and the smartphone/pocket PC offerings of its competitors are big enough to warrant quite the amount of attention it got at the show, but like so many of the other products that broke the surface at CES, it certainly has one important factor. Desirability.
It might be a camera with web access that I would never access, a netbook that was too small for me to use productively, or a phone that would have umpteen applications that I would never apply – but they are all things I would love to own. The playthings of the electronics industry are truly wonderous and that is what makes CES such a special event.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a UK version of the show? Although us Brits do tend to get a bit sheepish when it comes to the dry ice and fanfares!
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