CES Afterthoughts
So CES is over and after looking at what came out there are some pretty strong themes at this year’s CES. For those who don’t realize, but CES is pretty much the precursor of this year’s trends in products and tech. What happens at CES usually, though not all the time, comes to full fruition in the upcoming year.
Let’s start with the what stole the entire show away, Palm. Palm’s press event was by and the large the runaway hit of the show. Weeks ago, Palm queitly invited some of the top tech heads to a conference they were holding at CES with a teaser ad for the “newness” of Palm. Not many people knew what it was going to be, but many people expected that this was going to be the make or break for Palm; if they didn’t do something amazing here, they would never have the chance to do it again EVER. There was much speculation of what they were going to do, but it was for sure that this was going to be their big reveal of their five year in the making redo of their dated Garnet OS. Low and behold, Palm pulled it off. They not only pulled it off by stunning people with a marvelously slick OS, but an equally slick device to complement the very polished, though still in alpha, OS. I am definitely looking forward to the Palm pre come June and may jump away from crappy AT&T and back into the arms of Sprint.
It seems as if companies are finally embracing the cloud with Apple putting their iLife suite into the cloud, Microsoft realizing that having all your information in a common place does matter to people and Palm having their entire platform revolve around premonition and the notion that your information does not only live on your phone. The year 2009 will definitely be the year of the cloud.
What was decidedly absent at the show was the number of android phones. Although CES was never known for great phone releases, I was surprised to not see even one phone from any manufacturer. The lone android phone that was supposed to be roaming the show floor, the Kogan Agora. Apparently Google went to the man behind the effort to push this phone out and asked him to not release the phone as there were features that the phone lacked that would gimp compatibility of applications. We did see one android device, the Giinii Movit, which is essentially the Nokia N800 with android instead of Maemo. From what I saw, it seems like a sweet little MID that I would gladly trade my N800 for. Hopefully, now that Google released the full source code of android to the masses, we’ll start seeing more android devices start to trickle down.
--written by Peter To--
