I just got back from CES this year, and while everyone is probably quite tired of CES news, I figured I would put a little different spin on it. No huge LCD stories, blacker blacks, BluRay/HDDVD, or any of that stuff. Just the CES as a whole and little gems of the good, the bad and the very ugly. I’ll be covering this in a number of posts, so choose whichever topics are of interest
CES 2008 was really about 4 things:
- Being green and having it shoved down your throat everywhere.
- Cheap knockoffs of big technology
- Bloggers generally being the scum of the show
- The few interesting products that did show themselves
Now, I was quite excited to see what kind of amazing new things would be showing themselves at CES, being a huge gadget guy myself, but there was not a whole lot that just made me step back and say ‘wow’. I like to think I covered the majority of all the halls (excepting the north hall in the convention center that was mostly focused on car audio), but nothing really just stood out as groundbreaking. I’ll get to the more interesting stuff at the end, but let’s go through the above list.
Green CES
Most companies at CES loved to spout how environmentally friendly they were. I realize that it is a good thing for companies to move towards being more eco friendly, but there was a lot of annoyances. Some companies spouted off that they were going green, but had no clue what I was talking about when I mentioned being carbon neutral, and many of the computers there still spouted like 1KW power supplies, not to mention the 150″ LCD that must make the meter spin like there’s no tomorrow. There were some charming little companies pushing solar power. I was a fan of a little company that did some nice looking solar laptop bags (can’t charge laptop, but can keep your phone/ipod up and good). But, for the most part, companies seemed to say they were going green because everyone else was saying it as well. 
It did get a bit old. I went to see new innovations, not how they cut such and such a metal from their chipset.
Look out for part 2, where we cover the fantastic cheap knockoffs of CES
