I’m currently 10762 metres above the Hudson Bay, halfway between London and San Francisco. We left at 3pm and will arrive, 10 hours later, at 5pm – which means we’re scudding along in perpetual dusk. There’s a Speed-meets-Snakes-On-A-Plane vampire flick in there somewhere.
Anyway, I’m failing to sleep, failing to avoid the red wine and thus failing to prepare myself for the oncoming tsunami of technology. It all begins with a brief visit to the (last ever?) Macworld San Francisco before the main event: CES in Las Vegas.
The Consumer Electronics Show is a massive, sprawling show that takes over the Las Vegas Convention centre and most of the hotels nearby, with tech brands big and small shouting about their wares. And that means a whole lot of noise.
It’s hard work to get around the vast show, let alone discern the hits from the hype - but you pretty quickly get a feeling for what the trends for the coming year will be. Nevertheless, it’s always struck me as a little odd that Sony unveils a year’s worth of gadgets at the same time as Panasonic, LG and Samsung. Wouldn’t they rather have the tech press and blogosphere all to themselves by announcing things in, say, August?
Clearly this is one of the reasons that Apple has decided to pull out of Macworld and other shows – it doesn’t want to be forced into announcing products just because a show is on – it wants to do it in its own time.
Back in 2007, Macworld managed to eclipse CES when Apple announced the iPhone – but in the absence of any strong Apple rumours (not to mention Steve Jobs) it seems unlikely that the same thing will happen again. And with the major manufacturers scaling back their presence at CES to deal with the economic downturn, that leaves the way open for some smaller companies to make a real impact.
Check out my CES predictions to see what I think we’ll all be talking about in a week’s time.
