Consumer Electronics Show 2010

Transparent Displays

Onward the march of 3D! Not content only to smash its way back into the big screen, 3D is infiltrating our homes and poking its finger right into your face. Sony was there with its pretty incredible 24.5” OLED 3D Bravia boasting incredible blacks and colour vibrancy, even if the 3Dness reduces the available colour gamut.

ESPN announced it would be showing World Cup games in 3D for all to behold. It won't just be football though with the Summer X games, NBA and of course NFL hitting America in the 3rd dimension. DirecTV also showed off its 3D wares at CES which the company is set to roll out in June this year. In this country BSkyB has already made its intentions clear about 3D with Sky1's Gladiators already being recorded in stereoscope. If you're a Sky subscriber and you happen to be packing a 3D HDTV, then look out for the roll out sometime this year. If you haven't got a nice big 3D HDTV just yet, you might want to consider an LG, who were on the scene at CES with two 3D LCDs, 55” and 47” models, which will be available around April this year.

Of course most of this 3D technology still requires the use of polarized glasses like those you have to wield whilst in the cinema for Avatar and alike. Intel however showed of its glasses-free 3D tech. Using a coating applied to the screen of the HDTV and specially recorded 3D video it's possible to create depth without resorting to wearing specs. The only problem with it is that there are only about eight specific places one can stand to experience the effect and the resolution the demo was running was sub 720p. I don't know about you, but for me no-glasses 3D trumps the spectacle requiring variety, so I hope content producers and providers take note.

Not to be muscled out, Panasonic was also on show at CES with some serious pieces of kit. How about the world's first integrated Full HD 3D camcorder. OK, it's not your average pocket shooter, but the 'Professional' camcorder packs everything you need to record 3D in one package. Up for order in April and carrying a price tag of $21,000, you better have a pretty good reason for wanting to record your kid brother running into a window in 3D.

3D TV

Onward the march of 3D! Not content only to smash its way back into the big screen, 3D is infiltrating our homes and poking its finger right into your face. Sony was there with its pretty incredible 24.5” OLED 3D Bravia boasting incredible blacks and colour vibrancy, even if the 3Dness reduces the available colour gamut.

ESPN announced it would be showing World Cup games in 3D for all to behold. It won't just be football though with the Summer X games, NBA and of course NFL hitting America in the 3rd dimension. DirecTV also showed off its 3D wares at CES which the company is set to roll out in June this year. In this country BSkyB has already made its intentions clear about 3D with Sky1's Gladiators already being recorded in stereoscope. If you're a Sky subscriber and you happen to be packing a 3D HDTV, then look out for the roll out sometime this year. If you haven't got a nice big 3D HDTV just yet, you might want to consider an LG, who were on the scene at CES with two 3D LCDs, 55” and 47” models, which will be available around April this year.

Of course most of this 3D technology still requires the use of polarized glasses like those you have to wield whilst in the cinema for Avatar and alike. Intel however showed of its glasses-free 3D tech. Using a coating applied to the screen of the HDTV and specially recorded 3D video it's possible to create depth without resorting to wearing specs. The only problem with it is that there are only about eight specific places one can stand to experience the effect and the resolution the demo was running was sub 720p. I don't know about you, but for me no-glasses 3D trumps the spectacle requiring variety, so I hope content producers and providers take note.

Not to be muscled out, Panasonic was also on show at CES with some serious pieces of kit. How about the world's first integrated Full HD 3D camcorder. OK, it's not your average pocket shooter, but the 'Professional' camcorder packs everything you need to record 3D in one package. Up for order in April and carrying a price tag of $21,000, you better have a pretty good reason for wanting to record your kid brother running into a window in 3D.

Tablets

CES might have been the year of 3D TV and eBook readers, but that didn't keep the tablet manufacturers from making an appearance. Of course now that Apple may or may not call their mythical iTablet the 'Slate' everything with a tablet form factor is getting labelled with the term. HP is no exception letting Microsoft kick off it's press conference with the unveiling of the HP Slate. Steve Ballmer was wielding the prototype stage, showing off Windows and the PC Kindle reader app. The tablet is multi-touch capable and can even play games of a sort with Ballmer taking great delight playing Frogger in front of the audience. Look for this one hitting the shelves later this year.

Lenovo made more of an impact with their IdeaPad U1 Hybrid. The clue's in the name but this seemingly ordinary laptop has a pretty slick party piece in the form of a detachable resistive multi-touch display. The laptop half of the combo device harbours an Intel CULV processor with a 128GB SSD holding Windows 7 Home Premium, pretty standard fare. The unusual thing about this little beauty is that the slate itself is powered by a separate Snapdragon CPU running a touch-screen version of the Skylight smartbook OS. Pull out the slate, switch over to Skylight and you're away.

T-Mobile also showed off something fancy at CES in the form of the ICD Vega 15-inch Android tablet. Powered by Nvidia's Tegra 250 chipset and running a heavily customised build of Android 2.0, the Vega is tailored towards the family market. In reality what that means is you've got an easy to use internet tablet with shared calendars, SMS/MMS messaging and a T-Mobile SIM pre-installed. The Vega also packs WiFi, an FM radio, on-demand TV and 1080p support built-in, although the Vega's 15” screen is only 1366x768. Pricing and availability have yet to be fleshed out but expect some sort of subscription to be involved.

Android

Talking of Android, the growing maturity of the platform as an operating system for low-end computers and smaller devices was quite obvious at CES, with a slew of new Android-packing devices announced. Aside from Google's own Nexus One 'superphone', announced just before the start of the exhibition, AT&T announced it would carry five new Android handsets this year, with LG and Motorola also announcing new smartphones running the Linux-based OS.

The Android story didn't stop there either, with HP, Dell and Lenovo announcing netbooks and tablet PCs running the system. The emergence of Android at what is traditionally a Microsoft stomping ground is very noteworthy. Android could prove to be what many die-hard Linux enthusiasts have been waiting for: a widely adopted, consumer targeted, open source OS promoted by a major company. With at least a dozen new Android products on the way (and more to be announced at the Mobile World Congress in February), the OS looks like it's on the way to be truly competing with Apple and Microsoft for market share across platforms.

USB 3.0

USB 3.0 finally seems to be making its way into consumer electronics, with the first officially certified USB 3.0 products set to hit shelves later this year. The specification, a fully backwards compatible successor to USB 2.0, makes use of a noticeably chunkier cable to offer data transfer rates of up to 3.2 Gbits (even with other overheads taken into account), an order of magnitude faster than the speeds USB 2.0 was supposed to provide.

While your standard USB 2.0 cables will still work on these newer ports, you'll be unable to take advantage of the speed boost - and your new USB 3.0 cables will not work on older ports. Is investing in the new standard worth it? Sony, Apple and Intel would like you to think otherwise - they have been working on a completely different technology, dubbed “Light Peak”, that promises to offer faster speeds than USB 3.0 while connecting a much larger range of devices. Whether this will be enough to convince consumers to pay for the complete wiring overhaul that Light Peak requires is yet to be seen; there are no Light Peak devices due in the near future while USB 3.0 ready laptops from HP will be hitting shelves in the coming months.

eReaders

The quest to make the humble sheet of paper obsolete continues with vigour this year at CES with the launch of yet more e-readers. The main focus for designers this year seems to not be on actually reading books but instead on what else they can do, with many new offerings able to play HD video, synchronise calendars and emails and even browse Twitter. Plastic Logic's QUE proReader pushes the envelope with its broad feature set which also includes opening most Microsoft Office documents, but unfortunately like most e-ink devices on show it suffers from really sluggish response and loading times. One company with the answer to that is display designer Pixel Qi, who comes to CES this year in Notion Ink's impressive ADAM tablet flaunting a new dual unit that sports a unique LCD that can be either full-colour and backlit or standard monochrome. Oh, and it actually gets easier to read in sunlight. The huge advantage of this is the ability to switch between the two at will, making it easy to view colour images or video and then switch to black and white for text reading that is just as crisp as Amazon's Kindle e-reader, which by now is looking rather long in the tooth.