CES attendees view LG's 84-inch Ultra Definition 3D TV The Orange County Register/ZUMA Press
By the end of last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, attendees seemed to share a collective lethargy. Was there really anything new?, they asked each other on the crowded and claustrophobic exhibition floor. In an onstage interview hosted by the technology blog AllThingsD, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo exemplified the jadedness, calling CES a "quantum conference"—with progress that occurs on a subatomic scale. "This seems like an incremental year," he said.
Perhaps high tech's most celebrated annual gathering, which concluded on Jan. 9, simply wears its participants down. More than 140,000 people crammed in, up 17 percent from last year. At times it seemed like most of those attendees were waiting in the same cab line—or trying to make a phone call on the same overtaxed cellular network. But for someone who had stepped into a time machine a few years ago and emerged in Las Vegas earlier this month, the conference would have felt momentous, perhaps magical. The technology on display at CES was more diverse, more interconnected, and in some cases just plain more weird than ever.
The most dramatic evidence of innovation could be found, as in past years, with trophy TVs—those cutting-edge displays meant not to appeal to regular folks but to win bragging rights. There were impossibly large screens (Panasonic's (PC) 152-inch plasma, which sells for about $500,000, cost of new house not included) and incredibly thin ones (LG Electronics' 2.9-millimeter-thick OLED TV, which is not yet on sale and was enshrined in protective plastic). Toshiba (TOSYY) and Sony (SNE) showed prototypes of 3D televisions that dispense with the dorky glasses but oblige viewers to sit directly in front of the screen. It's an early glimpse of a technology that the companies say is still several years away, though one wonders whether it will undermine the present prospects for 3D TV as people wait for a goggle-free future.
While tablets of almost every size and shape dominated the media coverage, consumer-electronics makers also showed off the next generation of handsets, which will be smarter, faster, and more versatile than those in our pockets now. Motorola Mobility's (MMI) Atrix 4G phone, for example, has an Nvidia (NVDA) dual-core microchip—that's more processing power than the laptop you owned four years ago—and can obviate the need to carry a separate computer by plugging it into a lightweight laptop with no processor of its own. Manufacturers of just about everything promised that their new devices will connect to each other and to the Web. "It's inescapable now," says Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research (FORR). "If the device in your hand or in front of you doesn't connect to the Internet, it seems almost deficient."
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