All the other crazy shit I saw at CES

CES was huge this year, probably due to COMDEX cancelling last fall, pushing more computer hardware and software into the show. What was once an event for small time electronics suppliers to show their wares has grown into a whole building devoted to TVs and home theaters, a similarly huge section devoted to car audio and car computers, tons of computer hardware and software, cellphone stuff, and the ever ubiquitous rash of companies selling small electronic handhelds.

I only had about 24 hours in Las Vegas so I only got to spend half a day rushing through the giant convention center compound. I was amazed by what I saw in that half the things I saw looked like the near future, while the other half looked like crazy inventions no one would ever use. What follows is a bunch of photos of interesting stuff worth mentioning.

TV stuff

A glorious tower of plasma

There was an amazing display showing reactive ambient light technology in plasmas. It was in a tower about room sized, but going up all the way to the ceiling with a couple dozen plasmas. They were playing HDTV loops of saturated colored landscapes and the entire room would change color every few seconds, from all the backlights. It looked incredible (here's what a red-orange scene looked like).

Battle of the mondo plasmas

This claimed to be the biggest HD plasma available for sale on earth, which I think was around 80 inches. It was incredible to look at and I swear when I first got home my new low-end EDTV plasma looked blurry. It's funny, I sweated over getting a new TV for over two years, but the vibe at CES was that manufacturers expect everyone to be on HD plasma screen soon. It was a foregone conclusion, and companies are rushing products for this emerging market. Of course now that I have a decent TV, it feels like TV itself is slow to change. I don't expect to be getting OTA HDTV broadcasts anytime soon.

HDTV over everything!

There were a million and one weird little HDTV things like this HDTV over electricity booth (whose demo would cut out every so often).

An incredible looking handheld from Apex

There seemed to be zillions of small handheld personal video players from all kinds of Asian companies I've never heard of, but the Apex handheld with the huge 7" screen stood out from all the rest for the screensize. It's about the form factor of a big iPod, but every bit of the box front is screen. Most other players featured 3-4" inch screens, so the Apex looked amazing.

Car Stuff

Mr. Subtle

The show area for car-related products was massive and around every corner was some giant crazy ass demo vehicle like this one. It was raised several feet off the ground, featured LCD TVs in the bumpers, doors, headrests, headliner, visors, and truck bed. It was probably a $250k rig, advertising some product or shop's work.

Scion mania at CES

Easily the most popular audio demo car was the Scion xB by Toyota. It makes perfect sense since it's huge inside and can fit tons of gear, and the original car price starts low so you can buy one, gut it out, and fill it with demo gear for a lot cheaper than a Hummer or SUV demo. There were easily 20 or 30 Scions like this one, loaded with speakers and monitors, playing movies and music videos at full volume.

Ye Olde School

I include this shot for no other reason than it was unique among all the new stuff. A classic Dodge A100 pickup loaded with stereo gear, this beast had a crowd around it every time I walked past it.

XM put to good use: traffic aware mapping

XM was showing off a new Pioneer powered navigation system that interacted with the XM satellite network to receive traffic reports and show those on the map. I suspect this is a killer app for Southern California and the Bay Area, since there are often two or three ways you can get from point A to point B, and it's good to know what the real-time traffic conditions are. The downside is that I suspect after spending $2k on the basic navigation system, adding XM into that will likely cost more.

Computer, Music, and Gaming stuff

That little yellow box held 1.6 Terabytes of data

There were loads of small computer hardware booths, mostly centering around small office networking. I must have seen a dozen companies showing off a magic box you plug into a network, and it would claim to handle all sorts of network file services and/or internet services. These yellow boxes caught my eye for being about the size of a shuttle PC case, but holding a metric assload of data (up to 1.6 Tb).

The wheels of steel

There wasn't a lot of music gear in the spaces I wandered but these digital music turntables were kickass. A rep was playing wav or mp3 files and when he grabbed the fake turntable, he could lay down some nice scratches in real time. It sounded just like wax on a real turntable.

Push! No, pull! Again!

There was a lot of gaming hardware that could be described as "huge weird thing that is supposed to make you exercise while gaming." Chalk it up to DDR taking the world by storm, but there were lots of booths showing stationary bikes, treadmills, and these weird standing interfaces to console games. Personally, I'm really intrigued by the idea of games helping folks exercise but all the demos I saw were cumbersome and strange.

Other weird stuff

Put a sock in it!

Golla looked like a weird European company selling stuff like those newish iPod socks, but for any handheld device. I didn't think this was a niche worth exploiting, but I swear this massive display had dozens of colors and sizes for folks that wanted an unconventional case to slip their device into. I suppose someone is buying these things, judging by the floor space they took up.

1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!

Some audio company knew that having a Delorean with a working Flux Capacitor loaded with audio gear would get any kid from the 1980s to stop and take a look.

Gizmondo?

I'm curious if this company was around before the Gizmodo blog, or if they copped the name and logo font from it.

Conclusions

Overall, the show was totally overstimulating and I could have spent another couple days going through it all. It was the highlight of my trip, though just about everything else about being in Vegas sucked. Having thousands and thousands of people show up for CES overwhelmed the airports, the surface streets, and the hotels. I had to hole up in a dingy, smoky, crappy place for almost $400 per night, since there was nothing else available, and getting anywhere in the city in a cab was difficult. I'm not sure if I'll go next year (maybe with some advanced planning it won't cost as much or suck as bad) but I finally understand what all the excitement is about CES.

Comments

[MegaZone]

I stayed downtown - even with cab fare it was less a day then trying to get something by the strip or convention center. Sorry we missed each other.

[Andy Baio]

Gizmondo was originally Gametrac, renamed in April 2004. Gizmodo wins, since they were around since June 2002.

[Adam]

I stayed at the Motel 6 across the street from the MGM Grand. It was just about $350 for 4 nights. Clean and within walking distance to MGM, Luxor, Tropicana, Excalibur and others. The monorail stops at the MGM and the Hilton and an unlimited 3 day pass is $25. It's not as glamorous as staying at one of the casinos, but my 4 day stay was as much as one night at the Luxor.

[Stefan]

Gizmodo and Gizmondo (mondo means world I think) is not exactly the same thing, you think?

/s.

[golla]

golla

[Jay]

Your classic Dodge A100 is actually a Ford Econo-line pickup.