It has taken me a week to recover from the surreality of going to CES and MacWorld. Over the course of the next few blog posts, I plan to write about ideas and products that I saw at both. For those who have not attended either, let me say, if you are a geek/a geek wannabe, or someone that has an interest in this space, you need to go at least once to both.
This year was my fourth trip to CES, and I can almost argue that you need to go every other year to get some sense of change. By going every year there are new products and subtle changes, but rarely ever sea changes that cause you to go “WOW”!
Las Vegas is not my favorite place, but I am not sure there is a city in America that would work for CES. The City really caters to the event, and there is plenty of gloss to match the gloss of the products and promotions that CES delivers.
CES also attracts an ocean of people. I heard and saw numbers that suggested that there were something North of 175,000 attendees. The show halls that contain the exhibits are “cavernous”. I have no idea how many square feet of space is used, but the area goes on and on and on. By way of comparison, MacWorld is at the Moscone Center in S.F., and really seemed to be about 1/8 to 1/10 as big. In two days of walking, I felt like I had seen about 1/2 of CES, and saw all of MacWorld in about 3 hours of walking.
That said, the star of MacWorld, i.e. the iPhone, really seemed to steal the thunder of CES. Everyone was talking about it. When I got to MacWorld and saw the iPhone, I was impressed by the design. First class, very attractive, but I was disappointed in a number of things:
1. Locked down to Cingular
2. No 3rd party applications
3. Virtual keyboard
4. No replaceable battery
But, I really liked the converged idea and the Voice-Mail solution that allows you to pick and choose which Voice-Mails to listen to. For me, this is a dynamite idea, and one that after about 5 seconds of thinking is something that all voice mail should allow.
I think that the iPhone when it ships is going to force all of the other cell phone OEM’s to elevate their games which will make the world better for all of us. I am amazed at how many people have abandoned their land lines and now only have a cell phone. This coupled with the sale of “naked” DSL lines and cable modems, truly argues for another era in telephone use.
I haven’t had a land line for 3 years, and can’t say that it has impacted me at all. I also can’t imagine not traveling with a computer, so the idea that a phone would have to do it all, is just not important to me. Different tools do different things in different ways. One analysis I saw suggested that having and iPod and a phone was still a $200 cheaper than buying an iPhone, but we will have to see what the shipping version looks like and how it works.
I find more and more often that as interested as I am in technology, that when I can be a “fast follower” as compared to an “early adopter”, I am much better off.
Good points Buzz. And phones aren't the same as music, even though music isn't the same as personal computers.
Apple certainly has momentum though.
Posted by: Mick Liubinskas | February 04, 2007 at 06:23 PM