Hundreds of vendors fly to Las Vegas each year. Some skip out on one year and others are regulars. It is impossible to visit each and every booth in four days, but the biggest names cannot be missed. Everyone needs to know what they will roll out later in the year and what new technology will revolutionize the way we live. Here is a look back on some of the biggest booths at CES 2015.
Remember the popular IBM commercial from back in 2000, where actor Avery Brooks acknowledges the pivotal year as the century turns and questions the availability and absence of flying cars, saying we were promised this futuristic invention, looking around the roadways and stating, “I don’t see any flying cars.”
The smart home may be angling for the mainstream, but right now it’s stuck swimming in a niche. Turning lights on automatically and setting thermostats from a smartphone is the stuff geeks revel in now, but for the smart home to reach flooding point, it must transform, not augment, the domestic realm — and it needs to start in the kitchen.
Usually, home appliances at a tech event as large as CES would be put into a corner, but not at Samsung. A huge portion was devoted to their new home appliance section. “Heck, Samsung even put a washer and a dryer as one of their main centerpieces on the floor!”
There’s a famous scene in Pirates of Silicon Valley (a movie that chronicled the origins of Microsoft and Apple) in which Bill Gates is meeting with IBM executives. The IBM executives agree to license software from Microsoft because “there’s no money in software anyways.”
The IBM executives weren’t stupid. They failed to recognize an inflection point in technological history in which profits would shift from hardware to software.
The Samsung Galaxy Mega is NOT a phone. It’s a mini-tablet that can also make and receive audio calls. Wow, what a huge thing in your hands! Whereas other phablets are just a bit too big to be a phone but too small to really be a tablet, the MEGA fits much more comfortably as a two-handed device.
You’ve seen the internet videos, maybe even spotted one in the wild, but outside of toothbrushes, inductive charging has been unusually absent from the US market. This year at CES, we chatted with a few representatives of the WPC, (Wireless Power Consortium) manufacturers that are adding wireless charging capabilities to their products, to lean exactly how the tech works, when it’s coming to market and how long will we have to wait to use it.
For the last 15 years, Netgear has been the leader in wireless home networking products. Being the first to release wireless devices supporting gigabit connectivity, Netgear is known for their innovation. In 2013, Netgear is continuing their trend by changing up their color scheme, moving into home entertainment and giving you the products you’ve been asking for.
Try to recall when it was the last time you looked at the SD or microSD card from your phone, camera, or tablet and thought to yourself: “Damn, these cards are kind of ugly. I wish they’d do something about it.” Probably not huh? So what’s the big deal with Samsung’s new line of “stylish branded memory cards?” Well..
