CES 2008: Pictures At An Exhibition, Part Deux

As my existing camera’s last hurrah, and as follow-up to last year’s snapshots, I thought I’d share some of the images I snagged while wandering around the various Halls (North, Central and South) of the massive Las Vegas Convention Center yesterday and today. I’ll add links to full-res versions of the pictures once I get on a connection with faster upstream bandwidth. Followup: Thanks to municipal Wi-Fi of a sort (the slow-and-unreliable-but-free service here at Las Vegas McCarran Airport), I’ve got the high-res images loaded. Click away, and enjoy!

Sprint’s Xohm WiMAX efforts aren’t dead, or so the booth personnel strove to convince me, in spite of the recent collapse of the Clearwire partnership and layoff of the company’s CEO.

WiMAX-inclusive systems from companies such as Asus and OQO, along with WiMAX add-in card and USB adapters for generic system use, were showcased in Sprint’s booth.

WiMAX partner ZyXEL sure hopes Sprint’s Xohm resolve remains strong. The company also touts other WiMAX opportunities, such as WiBro in S. Korea.

WiMAX was front-and-center in Intel’s booth, too

An interesting proximity move by the CES logistics troops, particularly in light of Warner’s recent decision. Here’s the HD DVD Promotion Group’s booth:

And right next door, the booth for the Blu-ray gang.

Another view of the Blu-ray booth. Whaddya think; is the Pirates of the Caribbean series central to the format’s promotion push?

Another interesting proximity decision. Here’s DTS:

And here’s Dolby, right next door. Think maybe there’ll be a rumble in the intermediary hallway by end of day Thursday?

Powerline networking competitors DS2 and Intellon had typical humble-sized booth. The floor space consumed by the HD-PLC (aka Panasonic) group was, in contrast, surprisingly massive. Here’s one end:

Here’s the other end. I have a sneaking suspicion that Panasonic’s preparing to do a major HD-PLC promotional push, analogous to Sony’s re-embrace of its Memory Stick proprietary technology a few years ago.

In my longstanding powerline networking coverage, I’ve regularly made the point that whereas DS2 may have regional strength in Europe, counterbalanced by the HomePlug Association (aka Intellon) in North America, HD-PLC has regional strength of its own in Asia. This suite of companies and their products certainly reinforces that perspective.

Forging International, home of the incredibly weird-looking speakers, was back again this year

Prefer white, instead of black?

The company was running show specials on their various speaker designs. This set was as diminutive as its price tag, and looked and sounded pretty bad to boot.

"Tube Speak"?

That’s "Philip", not "Philips". I’m sure it wasn’t an intentional naming knock-off attempt…oh, no….

Now that I’ve tested several ISM band-based wireless audio systems, I hope to next turn my attention to UWB-based Radiient…we’ll have to see if the company comes through on its review hardware promise.

Once again, the sofas-for-zombies made an appearance. Check out the eyeshades on everyone’s heads

These shake-on-sound-capable seats were more lively, as were their inhabitants. I think the green-and-white one would look particularly nice in my living room (not)

Plenty of hucksters were hocking ridiculously overpriced speaker, HDMI and other cables. This guy’s pitch was so over-the-top that I wrote it down word-for-word so I could later share it with you:

1920×1080. That’s 2 million pixels per frame, folks. 6 million sub-pixels. And they all wiggle very, very fast…

"Wiggle". Gotta love that technical terminology, huh?

Sony’s 11" OLEDs were back this year. You’ll soon be able to buy one in the U.S. If you act fast, that is, as limited yields mean they’ll be available only in scant volumes. Limited yields also explain the $2500 price tag. All this for something with an abbreviated luminescence lifetime, and something that a LED backlight-based LCD will closely approximate from a thickness standpoint?

Sony also showed a (single) 27" OLED.

Here’s a side view. The thinness is impressive, I admit. No word on price or production availability on this model, for perhaps obvious reasons.

Another great technical description: "Blazing fast’ response time. Exactly how fast is that?

Sony wasn’t the only company flexing its OLED muscles, of course. In the spirit of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, here’s a shot from Samsung’s booth.

Speaking of LCDs, here’s Zalman’s 3-D display, which you view in conjunction with passive polarizer glasses. The effect was more pleasing than I would have suspected. The price tag, on the other hand….

DLP’s fading fortune at the hands of direct-view LCD and plasma competitors was pretty obvious, although TI’s troops strove to fix happy faces on their visages. Can anyone explain to me why virtually nonexistent 3-D content was a central tenant of the DLP pitch?

It’s gotta be kinda embarrassing, too, when not only my eyes but (judging from the chatter I heard around me) others’ eyeballs think that TI’s prior generation DarkChip3 (on the left) looks better than its DarkChip4 replacement (on the right).

Here’s a long-distance snapshot of Panasonic’s 150" plasma that I mentioned yesterday.

I finally saw the faces behind the email addresses at HomeSeer, who I worked closely with on a recent hands-on feature article. Rich Helmke is on the right, and that’s Mark Colegrove’s back on the left.

With Windows Vista a year old, and the next version of Windows CE for PDAs and cell phones not yet ready for public consumption, Windows Home Server got much of the spotlight from Microsoft this CES. The company’s Stay At Home Server promotion campaign is, I must admit, pretty cute.

Speaking of cute…look, it’s Danica Patrick!

Ahhh…Panasonic’s massage chair…

These are statues, not real people. At Harrah’s, the closest Monorail stop to the Venetian Hotel and Sands Convention Center.

As the picture above suggests, I also spent this morning at the Sands Convention Center. There wasn’t much memorable there, mostly just a lot of iPod knockoffs and other junk. Oh, and scantily clad folks getting ready for the other early-January Las Vegas convention (which, no, I’m not going to attend).

The only time I wished my camera’s battery wasn’t drained at the Sands was when I saw the iShoes display. Oh, and had my digicam been cognizent, I could have shared visual evidence of yet another Supacam sighting. "Only $299"….a bargain at 1/10th the price…