2006 Consumer Electronics Show Spotlights New Hi-Tech Products

By Gary Orlando

The Consumer Electronics Show is one of the largest and most eagerly anticipated industry shows in Las Vegas. This year’s show took place between January 5th and January 8th at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with Bill Gates as the keynote speaker. The show was attended by over 130,000 people, who spent days milling about through 1.5 million square feet of exhibitions to get a glimpse of thousands of new products.

HDTV played a central role in many speeches given by Gates and other manufacturers, with the competition between HD-DVD and Blu-ray the most conspicuous. The first HD players and HD movie releases were announced at the show, and Philips unveiled a prototype of a rollable display with a screen that can retain an image for several months without electricity. High-definition DVD players were in abundance, offering consumers the last brick in building their own system for replicating the movie theater experience in their own living room. The Consumer Electronics Association trade group estimates that 25 million American homes will have at least one high-definition TV set by the end of the year.

There were plenty of smaller screens on display, including handheld units that can play live or stored programs, music videos, and even NBA games. Companies such as Starz Entertainment Group, Sony, and DirecTV displayed their efforts toward trying to make it easier for consumers to watch recorded Hollywood movies, home video, and even live streaming video on various types of devices in just about any location. The Gigabeat from Toshiba comes with either a 30G or 60G hard drive to store hours of music, videos, TV shows, and other video content, which can be played on the 2.5-inch color screen. Digital radios were also on display, since digital radio service is enjoying a growing listenership, with a wider national rollout planned for this year. The I-Sonic from Polk Audio, in addition to playing CDs and DVDs, is XM Radio-ready and has an auxiliary input for an iPod or other portable music player.

There was no shortage of handheld portable entertainment devices on display. The Inno from Pioneer Electronics, a combination satellite radio receiver/MP3 player with 1G of internal memory, allows users to store and play songs taken from their own CD collections as well as 50 hours of XM programming. Samsung Electronics announced their competing product, the Helix XM2Go player, and both the Inno and the Helix will go on sale in March and retail for $399. An even smaller Samsung player, the Nexus, works in concert with a portable XM antenna/receiver to record XM programs and play them back later.

Trendy new devices weren’t limited to just audio and video entertainment; GPS devices were another hot item at the show. Although the unit designs are expanding to include DVD players and music files, their primary purpose is still to get drivers from one place to another on unfamiliar roads, and designs to accomplish that are continually improving. The AVIC-Z1 from Pioneer has a 30G hard drive, with 2/3 of that space dedicated to storing navigation information. The system includes voice recognition, so that a user can simply say, "Go to JFK" and a detailed map of New York will appear showing directions to the airport.

Technological advances are also affecting a centuries-old type of entertainment—reading. Sony introduced its electronic book reader, a slim device that can store hundreds of books in its internal memory. The company claims that the device’s long battery life will allow a person to read War and Peace without a recharge. The screen is backlit, and the brightness, contrast, and size of the text can be adjusted to accommodate the viewing preferences of users. Sony will be selling books for download, and users can also display their own documents, making it an efficient tool for storing files to read on long business trips.

TiVo Inc., the pioneer of digital video, caused a flurry of excitement at last year’s show when the company promised to take TV to the next level with support for high-definition video and a plan to pipe movies over the Internet. Despite TiVo’s success in helping to start the shift in how TV is distributed and watched, the company was unusually quiet at this year’s show. Rival set-top boxes have appeared that cost less but offer the same features, so the competition is heating up for TiVo. "The standalone TiVo boxes now are facing a real challenge from the DVRs offered by cable and satellite operators," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. "As a result, they have to pull back and look at who it is they are and who it is they're going after."

But Jim Denney, TiVo’s vice president of product marketing, said that consumers shouldn’t read anything into the company’s low-key presence at the Consumer Electronics Show, because their management team opted to make major announcements about new products late last year, in advance of the show. Some of those services include a deal with Live365 for radio and the ability to browse and order movie tickets online on a TiVo unit through Fandango. Another of the announcements late last year was TiVo’s plans to launch a service that lets customers search for TV ads and view them on demand. TiVo’s plans for a movie download service with Netflix are still in negotiations, but Denney said that the company is "looking for content that more complements broadcast television or provides things you can get through the regular channels."

Apple Computer Inc. didn’t have a booth at the Consumer Electronics Show, but it didn’t really need one—Apple’s iPods were everywhere. Besides, the company was too busy getting ready for its own show, the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Speculation about Apple’s new offerings include a possible more powerful Macintosh laptop or a Mac mini, but they don’t really need anything innovative and splashy to stay on top because their fourth-quarter income reported for last year more than quadrupled on the phenomenal sales of its existing computer models and iPods.

Several innovative and exciting new products were on display for consumers to drool over, most of which are basically improvements on existing technology. LG announced a 50-inch plasma TV that has a wireless transmitter box. Cables are plugged into the transmitter, not the television—so you don’t have to worry about a tangle of wires hanging down the wall from the monitor, just the one cable to power the monitor. The largest plasma prototype on display was Panasonic’s 103-inch model, closely followed by LG’s 102-inch model. Those are just prototypes, though—the largest plasma TV that’s actually available for purchase is LG’s 71-inch HDTV plasma, boasting 1080p resolution. It will be available in spring 2006, but with a price tag of nearly $70,000, there probably won’t be a line of folks waiting outside Circuit City the day it first goes on sale.

Cell phones are continuing to improve, with newer smart-phone technology taking center stage at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Motorola announced its new Moto-Q cell phone, which does e-mail and text-messaging, and also takes pictures, browses the Internet, and more. It looks like a BlackBerry, but is much thinner, less than a half inch thick. The Palm Treo 650, a wildly popular smart phone that can be used for e-mail, text messaging, and Web browsing, has been updated to the 700 series, which runs the Windows Mobile operating system on the Palm hardware.

For consumers more concerned with fun and flash than with the inner technology of things, there were plenty of gadgets to amaze and enthrall. The Fun stuff Guitar Hero for PS2 provides a plastic guitar that wires into the PS2 gaming console. As a rock song plays, you have to hit the correct buttons on the guitar’s neck while strumming and staying on beat. And teenagers who want to create their own sense of cell phone style will undoubtedly welcome the unveiling of Bling, which is basically a jewelry kit for cell phones. The kits include a variety of colored and sparkling crystals to stick to a cell phone. Some come with preset designs and others give you everything you need to create your own unique customized look.

The Consumer Electronics Show is highly anticipated each year because it gives consumers a chance to peek into the design studios of technology giants around the world. But it’s more than that—it gives people a look at devices that may well evolve into being fixtures of everyday life. The first VCR was introduced at the 1970 Consumer Electronics Show; the first camcorders and CD players debuted in 1981, and the first DVD players in 1996. The future of electronics is always changing with the development of each new product, and the Consumer Electronics Show gives consumers a chance to watch the future develop.