Introduction

We put up a bunch of articles in our news section last week for our coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week but we decided to go ahead and consolidate all those news posts into one big article along with some concluding remarks.

Saturday, January 6

Even while workers were busy at the Las Vegas Convention Center putting up the exhibits for the coming week's Consumer Electronics Show, the event's organizers held a press preview event at the nearby Sands/Venetian Convention Center on Saturday. The rather small meeting room was crammed with journalists checking out small table sized displays from nearly 60 of CES's exhibitors. "Press Preview" is actually a little bit of a misnomer since many of the products shown have already been released with more than one exhibitor saying that when CES really begins on Monday they will show off and announce all new products.

However in all of the free food, the giveaway pens and the Cher and Little Richard impersonators passing out magazines there were a bunch of interesting and flat out weird products. Hotseat Chassis showed off a PC flight simulator set up that puts you in a chair and harness while you play the sim games. Super Micro Computer showed off a dual PC server rack set up. AMD was there showing off some unique notebook and PDA like devices that run on their chips. ASUS showed off their notebook lineup including one that had a special small screen on top of its case to check things like email before you open up the laptop. Hitachi proudly showed off a prototype unit of its first 1 TB PC hard drive (which they told us would definitely be out by the end of March). The oddest device we saw was for a massive robot vacuum that can also sweep and mop floors as well. The device costs $1,000 but isn't out in the US yet (No we didn't see it working). While the event was small in size it certainly did its job as a quick preview of was to come later.

Sunday, January 7

Sunday was the day with a ton of press conferences, mostly with companies like Toshiba, Panasonic, LG and other talking about their upcoming HDTVs. LG did create a stir with the announcement of their new HD-DVD/Blu-Ray combo player that's due out later this year.

Sony held their pre-CES press conference on Sunday as well. Following a performance by violinist Joshua Bell, Sony began its press conference by starting with their PS3 presentation. Playstation exec Peter Dille told the audience that the company has now shipped more than 1 million PS3 consoles to the US by the end of the year and Sony still plans to ship 6 million PS3 consoles worldwide by the end of March (of course, "shipped" is not the same thing as "sold"; Sony did not announce how many consoles that have actually been purchased by consumers). After talking about the PS3's Blu-Ray movie player and a brief note about the PSP, Dille talked about the Playstation Network. With mentions of the fact that the PS3 online network is free and chatting about the downloadable games like Gran Turismo HD and the upcoming flOw, Dille said that there will be more in the way of user-created content for the console. In Dille's own words, sometime in the future Sony will allow people to "explore, create and share user-created content." There were no specifics mentioned on how this will work or when this support will launch.

After the brief PS3 section of the conference the company switched gears to talk about its HD and flat planet TVs and its Handycam line of camcorders along with portable devices like Vaio notebooks and more. Then the press conference switched gears yet again by introducing a prototype of their the Bravia Internet Video Link. Basically it’s a new TV with an integrated streaming Internet link that can bring Internet video directly to the TV without the need for a separate PC. Sony announced partnerships with companies like AOL and Yahoo to stream video from their web sites as well as high def video. The cross media bar, which is familiar to users of the PSP and PS3, will be used in this new Bravia as the TV's user interface. Sony will release Bravia TVs that will support the Internet Video Link module this spring.