By PETER SVENSSON
AP Technology Writer
LAS VEGAS (AP) - The world's largest gadget show
wrapped up on Friday, and the organizers said it was the biggest ever,
beating last year's record in terms of the floor space companies
purchased to display their wares.
What was it that drew more than 3,500 companies and
150,000 people to Las Vegas for this mega-event? Here are four gadgets
that exemplified the top trends at this year's International CES.
- Sony's 55-inch ultra-high-definition TV
The introduction of high-definition and flat-panel
TVs sent U.S. shoppers on a half-decade buying spree as they tossed out
old tube sets. Now that the old sets are mostly gone, sales of new TVs
are falling. To lure buyers back, Asian TV makers are trying to pull the
same trick again. They're making the sets sharper. This fall, Sony and
LG introduced 84-inch sets with four times the resolution of regular
high-definition sets. They provide stunning sharpness, but they're too
big for most homes, and at more than $20,000, too expensive. At the
show, the companies unveiled smaller "ultra-high-definition" sets,
measuring 55 inches and 65 inches on the diagonal. They will go on sale
this spring. Prices were not announced, but will presumably be a lot
lower than for the 84-inch sets, perhaps under $10,000.
Both the size and price of these smaller ultra-HD
TVs should make them easier buys, but the higher resolution will be a
lot less noticeable on a smaller screen, unless viewers sit very close.
Analysts expect ultra-HD to remain an exclusive niche product for some
years. There's no easy way to get ultra-HD video content to the sets, so
they will mostly be showing regular HD movies. However, the sets can
"upscale" the video to make it look better than it does on a regular HD
set.
Analyst James McQuivey of Forrester Research
believes the TV makers are focusing on the wrong thing. He doesn't think
consumers really care that much about picture quality.
"What matters most is not the number of pixels or
the quality of the pixels themselves ... but the increasing convenience
of the content's discovery and delivery. This is why TV makers should be
investing in a better experience rather than a bigger one," McQuivey
wrote in a blog post.
- LG's 55-inch OLED TV
Organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, make for
thin, extremely colorful screens. They're already established in
smartphone screens, and they have a lot of promise for other
applications as well. For years, a promise is all they've represented.
OLED screens are very hard to make in larger sizes. Now, LG is shipping a
55-inch OLED TV set in Korea, and is expected to bring it to the U.S.
this spring for about $12,000.
Beyond being thin, power-thrifty and capable of
extremely high color saturation, OLEDs are interesting for another
reason: they can bend. LCDs have to be laid down on flat glass
substrates, but OLEDs can be laid down on flexible glass or plastic. The
major obstacle here is that flexible substrates tend to let through
air, which destroys OLEDs, but manufacturers seem to have tackled the
problem. Samsung showed off a phone that can bend into a tube. It
consisted of a rigid plastic box with electronics and an attached
display that is as thin as a piece of paper. The company suggested that
in the future, it could make displays that fold up like maps - big
screens that fit in a pocket.
We're likely to see the benefits of bendy OLEDs
sooner in a less eyebrow-raising but more practical implementation. It
may never have occurred to you, but all electronic screens, except for
cathode-ray tubes, are flat. With OLEDs, they don't have to be. LG and
Sony showed TV sets with concave screens at the show - not very useful,
but an interesting demonstration. In the future, you could have a phone
with a screen that laps over onto the edges, providing you with "smart"
buttons with labels that change depending on whether you're in camera
mode or music mode. You could have a coffee mug with a wrap-around news
and weather ticker. A revolution in design awaits.
By the way, you won't have to choose between
ultra-HD and OLED screens - Sony, Panasonic and LG showed prototype TVs
that combine the technologies.
- The Pebble Watch
The Pebble is a "smart" timepiece that can be
programmed to do various things, including showing text messages sent to
your phone. The high-resolution display is all digital, so it can be
programmed with various cool "watch faces." But what's really
interesting about the Pebble is how it came to be -and that it exists at
all.
Young Canadian inventor Eric Migicovsky couldn't
find conventional funding to make the watch, so he asked for money on
Kickstarter, the biggest "crowdfunding" website. In essence, he asked
people to buy watches before he actually had any to sell. The
fundraising was a blowout success. Migicovsky raised $10.3 million by
pre-selling 85,000 Pebbles. At CES, he announced that the watches were
ready to ship.
Kickstarter's goal is to bring things and events
into fruition that otherwise wouldn't happen, by creating a shortcut
between the people who want to create something and the people willing
to pay for it. The effect is starting to become apparent at CES. At
least two other "smart" watches funded through Kickstarter were on
display. Some startups were at the show to drum up interest in ongoing
Kickstarter campaigns, including a Swedish company that wants to make a
speaker with a transparent body, and a California outfit that wants to
produce a swiveling, remote-controlled platform for cameras.
- Creative Technology Ltd.'s Interactive Gesture Camera
This $150 camera, promoted by Intel, attaches to a
computer much like a Webcam. From a single lens, it shoots the world in
3-D, using technology similar to radar. The idea is that you can perform
hand gestures in the air in front of the camera, and it lets the
computer interpret them. Why would you want this? That's not really
clear yet, but a lot of effort is going into finding an answer. CES was
boiling with gadgets attempting to break new ground when it comes to how
we interact with computers and appliances like TV sets. The Nintendo
Wii game console, with its innovative motion-sensing controllers, and
the Microsoft Kinect add-on for the Xbox 360 console, which has its own
3-D-sensing camera, have inspired engineers to pursue ways to ditch -or
at least complement- the keyboard, mouse, remote control and even the
touchscreen.
Samsung's high-end TVs already let viewers use hand
gestures to control volume, and it expanded the range of recognized
gestures with this year's models. Startup Leap Motion was at the show
with another depth-sensing camera kit, this one designed to mount next
to a laptop's touch pad, looking upward.
So far, though, the "new interaction" field hasn't
had a real hit since the Kinect. Consumers may be eager to lose the TV
remote, but there's a holdup caused by the nature of the setup: to
effectively control the TV, you need to take command not just of the TV,
but of the cable or satellite set-top box. TV makers and the cable
companies don't really talk to each other, and there's no sign of them
uniting on a common approach. Only when both devices can be controlled
by hand-waving can we permanently let the remote get lost between the
couch cushions.
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