CES 2008 and the parallel show run from January 7-10th, with a special press day on the 6th (Day Zero, we call it). Click to visit each of UHF's live reports. The report will appear early the next day, if not before.
Day 0 (Jan.6th)
Day 1 (Jan.7th)
Day 2 (Jan.8th)
Day 3 (Jan.9th)
Day 4 (Jan.10th)
UHF has been attending the Consumer Electronics Show for a long time, and we noticed way back that four days was scarcely enough to do what is one of the largest trade shows in the world...and certainly the largest in North America. We slipped a suggestion to a member of the CEA board of directors that a fifth day would be terrific. Of course, by the fourth day a lot of exhibitors are dying on their feet, so what were the odds?
But several years back a compromise was reached. A fifth day (actually a "zeroth" day) was added, dubbed a press day. It's meant for malcontents like us to start work early. It also allows some exhibitors to meet with reporters before their booths actually open.Even so, CES actually schedules a major event the day before press day. Called CES Unveiled, it's a bash for reporters, with upscale food and drink plus tables with exhibitors hoping we'll write about them. As you can see in the picture above left, there's a big crowd arond the free food (there was an open bar, too, featuring good beer plus California wine likely to cheer up the French competition). But lest we leave you with the wrong idea, a lot of the jostling came about because of TV crews moving in on likely stories, as in the picture below right.
Were there actually good stories at CES Unveiled? We were wildly disappointed. The tables were those of companies that had paid for the advantage of being at this international press bash, not necessarily those that had won innovations awards. There seemed to be countless companies offering ways of streaming "HDTV" (note the quotation marks) wirelessly around the house...but with lossy compression -- because the bandwidth ain't there yet. We saw just one high end company, Bel Canto, which was showing a device whose purpose is frankly a mystery. That's it below, with an Apple dock and an iPod Nano sitting atop it.
It is billed as a link between iPod and a stereo system, but it doesn't do what one would hope: get a pristine digital signal out of the iPod. Instead, it gets the analog signal, or what's left of it, and "enhances" it by psycho-acoustic processing to make it sound good. And we thought that if the source was corrupted, that nothing could clean it up!Actually we still think so, but here's the mystery. You cannot, at the moment, put music into an iPod without first having the same music onto your computer hard disc. There are some well-known ways of getting a clean digital signal off a computer, so who needs this device?
CES has two press centres, respectively at the LVCC and at the Sands. This year neither one has wireless access, just a lot of Ethernet cables for Net access. Thank heaven for the (fairly nearby) Apple store, which has WiFi access, and which we have made extensive use of in earlier years.
Tonight the HD DVD group had scheduled a press con and party, but we hear it's off. Late yesterday Warner announced that it would no longer release films on HD DVD, favoring Blu-ray instead. Our guess is that the HD DVD people are in emergency meetings all day (they aren't taking interviews). And there was a huge crowd hoping to get into the press con of Toshiba, developer of HD DVD. We couldn't get in, but we hear there was some of Olympic-level skating going on.
On the press day itself, Netgear was showing what looked like uncompressed wireless HDTV, though in fact there was almost certainly some loss. The key was a new dual-band router, operating on both the overstressed 2.4 GHz band (along with your phon, your microwave oven and your neighbors) and the less populated 5 GHz band. It has multiple antennas, too, though 
none of them actually show. Netgear claims 15-times greater speed than other routers.Last year Philips showed a one-off TV screen surrounded by Swarowski crystals. This year? A new line intended to appeal to women, with subtle curved edges: this is an example at left.
It's attractive enough, but is this, as claimed, another instance of Philips reinventing itself? Perhaps the journalists present are just too hard-bitten, but there were doubts expressed, shall we say.
More doubtful was the Samsung demo. The slogan this year is "Life Made Simple," and it features TV sets that are, like those of Philips, redesigned, as well as products that all connect together wirelessly. Except that they didn't. Lots of laughter, inc luding by the Samsung people, until someone showed the boss how to run his own stuff.
At the Monster press con, "head monster" Noel Lee entered on a Segway Human Trnsporter (and stayed on it during the whole session). Lee declared ig loudspeakers dead ("how many people here remember hi-fi stores with speakers?"), and launched a $400 pair of headphones developed with the aid of rapper Dr Dre. Interesting, but we haven't heard them.A number of journalists were using iPhones...no surprise there. What CES accomplished this year was to get Macworld not to run at the same time as the Vegas show. We recall that, when Steve Jobs showed the iPhone last year, it pushed CES right out of the tech pages, and journalists in Vegas were muttering that they had chosen the wrong show to cover. This year's Macworld opens on the 15th.
Tomorrow is Day One of the show. We'll be covering the high end exhibits at the Venetian hotel, and you can expect an on-line report early Tuesday morning..
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