By any reasonable measure, 2013 International CES was a huge success. More than 3,200 companies were present, displaying over 20,000 new products in 1.9 million square feet of display space — the equivalent of about 40 football fields. More stories and product reviews will follow in the next few months, but here are ten thoughts from this year’s CES.
1) Unlike in some years past, there was no single dominant technology at CES 2013. There were a few important, relevant, and hyped technologies (and we’ll talk about them) but there was no one topic driving the overall conversation.
2) Bluetooth 4.0 devices were everywhere. It looks like Bluetooth 4.0’s combination of extremely low power consumption and respectable speed will really open up new markets to a standard that looked like it was fading only a couple of years ago. Many devices in the fitness, monitoring, and audio areas are using Bluetooth 4.0, but there also the not so easily characterized such as the StickNFind location stickers (shown next to a quarter to the right).
3) Intel has substantially closed the low power processor gap. A year ago, they were only a theoretical participant in the tablet market and somewhat of a joke for smartphones. In early 2013, they are relevant for tablets and a participant in the smartphone discussion. This certainly doesn’t put the folks in the ARM alliance out of business, but it does change the landscape.
4) 4K televisions are (of course) gorgeous, but there is very little full 4K source material to display on them. The hype at CES was all around 4K, indicating that manufacturers have largely given up on the “Smart TV” concept to drive sales – something that makes sense when many Smart TV features can be delivered by a Roku or an Apple TV. The question on many folks’ lips: is 4K the new 3D or is it something more?
5) New Windows 8 hardware at CES was often far more interesting than the first generation hardware that debuted back in October. Lenovo probably had the biggest push — their “rip and flip” ThinkPad Helix was cool and their IdeaCentre Horizon 27-inch tabletop PC (shown on its Multimode Table to the right) drew crowds everywhere it was shown.
6) As always, there were many strange products at CES. This year, New Potato Technologies (yes, that’s their name) was showing a kit that turns your iPad into a high tech foosball table. SmallWorks introduced the BrickCase — Lego-compatible cases for your iPhone or iPad Touch (one of their iPhone 5 cases is shown to the right). Mimoco displayed their Star Trek-themed USB flash drives, with your choice of Kirk, Spock, Picard, or Data.
7) “Phablets”, the weirdly sized smartphone and tablet combination, look like they’ve got at least some market interest — enough for multiple vendors to chase Samsung’s Galaxy Note II. It appears that the cost of developing multiple sizes of similar products is going down, so we may see more variations in sizes over the next year or so.
8) Faster USB 3.0 is coming. The USB 3.0 Promoter Group announced at CES that USB 3.0 will be doubling its speed from 5 Gbps to 10 Gbps. I’m one of many who thought that 5 Gbps was pretty fast, but more speed is almost never bad. Expect this new version of USB 3.0 to hit the market in late 2013 or early 2014.
9) Speaking of connectors, after a slow initial response it looks Lightning is taking off. Many different peripherals for Apple’s new iPhone/iPad/iPod connector were being shown, from various different kinds of car adaptors to (of course) speaker docks. Other products included Griffin’s MIDI adaptor and an assortment of Lightning connected battery cases for the iPhone 5.
10) Finally, open source for automobiles got really interesting at CES 2013. After many years of trying to integrate all applications and intelligence into the car systems themselves, it looks like the manufacturers have finally figured out that the average age of a car in the United States is about 11 years, while the average age a smartphone is closer to 2 years. Within eight hours of each other, both Ford and General Motors introduced new schemes for allowing your smartphone to work through the your car’s telematics system.
John Mulhern III, posted 2/29/13
For more information on the International CES visit: www.cesweb.org
