Hello MethodShop Fans. I’m live blogging at the NBCU/Sharp multimedia lounge at CES 2011. Right now Maria Bartiromo is broadcasting live on CNBC, and SyFy is center stage with a real live version of the character Telara from the video game of the same name.
Ok, so I’ve had a day and a half in Las Vega$ to walk around and look and talk, and here are my initial impressions of CES (not the city!)
- Asus came out swinging with a bunch of tablets to take on the iPad (I guess to see which one sticks best with the consumer).
- Mitsubishi shows-off the worlds biggest TV for you and me to buy (it’s taller than a person). Everyone has an Internet connected display, and Microsoft re-introduced “Web-TV,” sort of!
- It’s clear one of the biggest trends is tablets. The BBC has called it “the Tablet wars!” And CES is the first skirmish. The Panasonic “connected” Viera tablet was particularly cool.
- In car media is all about “convergence.” There are all kinds of cool ways to connect on the road (although I imagine some may get distracted..so how good can that be?)
- The other big stories… LTE 40 and Android vs. Apple.
- But one piece of Apple news NOT from Vegas today: As we reported on MethodShop earlier this morning, the Mac App store is now open for business. (I can’t wait to give that a shot.)
- And word from press day yesterday is that LG wants to connect everything, including it’s washing machines, to other devices through the cloud. LG is also all over 3D. In fact they have designed some ew glasses that are lightweight, cool to wear and 1/5th the cost of other glasses (but it may be Betamax v VHS because they wont work on anyone elses 3D tech.)
- There are some incredibly thin new cell phones, super thin new TV’s, and glasses free 3D from Toshiba (pretty cool). And speaking of 3D, SONY has put most of their eggs for this year in that basket.
- And mainstream media has finally caught up with the trend of content players and marketers attending (started by NBCU four years ago) and they are all over the place today.
One embarrassing thing did happen… AT&T’s entire 3G network went down this afternoon. Guess there are a lot of iPhone users in town. Not a good thing in any case, but even worse for this convention. I hope to get some photos out sometime later today, but it’s spotty AT&T service here at the LVCC at best.
Tonight, the Mashable Awards at one of the many Cirque de Soliel venues in town and Tomorrow, more panels, gadgets and the big Monster party with Earth, Wind and Fire, and the nightcap will be the big party for the AVA’s (The Adult Video Awards always coincide with CES.) Hey, porn is the number 2 Internet pastime behind Social Media!
Please post comments below if you want me to check out something specific at CES and report on it.
That’s all for me today. I will report again from CES 2011 tomorrow afternoon. But you can follow me on Twitter for more frequent updates here: @fradice
Apple Launches Their Long-Awaited Mac App Store