2008 CES Photo Album
2008 CES Photo Album
2008 CES Photo Album

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    A full 10 days later, and I still haven’t fully recovered from the 2008 CES. While I agree with folks like David Pogue that there weren’t many brand new innovations that would knock your socks off, there were a lot of improvements on old ones. TVs and computers got thinner, storage capacity got bigger and the telephone became just one application in multi-use devices that play music, broadcast over-the-air TV, provide GPS services and more. Equally as important, CES is a time to have fun and get to know better the government, industry, artists and public interest folks with which PK works. Here are some snapshots from the show:

    This was my “best in show.” This Sony 11 inch O.L.E.D. High Definition TV set completely changed my expectations for Digital TV. For the past 10 years I’ve been saying that a viewer cannot tell the difference between HD and Standard Definition TV on anything less than a 36 inch screen. I was wrong. The ultra thin 27 inch prototype (below, after the jump), was also amazing.

    I was also impressed by Seagate’s 1 Terabyte hard drive (above). When I told him about it, the RIAA’s Cary Sherman could only shake his head and say something along the lines of “my worst nightmare.”

    Both LG and Samsung have come out with phones that will be able to receive digital television signals. The LG “Mobile Pedestrian Handheld” is shown above. When I asked the LG rep what Verizon thinks of a service on its phone that would compete with its V-Cast service, he basically conceded that they did not know about it yet.

    Seamless Internet’s 11 ounce SX-GEN Ultra Mobile PC (above) is the world’s smallest personal computer with a full-size keyboard. Oh, and it has GPS and a phone in it too. As Alex says, the phone is becoming “just another application.”

    Sony had the best in show and the worst. Here is the “Rolly,” an egg-like thing that plays MP3 and rolls and opens to the music. Just plain dumb.

    Finally, here is an album of some of the folks that made the event great for me. My main man Alex; me, Sherwin and his friend Rakesh Agarwal, CEO of Snapstream Media (which allows you to search for TV shows and record them); the fabulous singer/songwriter and Digital Freedom Campaign artist Samantha Murphy (along with her wonderful beau Brian DeWitt); and Sling Media’s Krikorian brothers, planting a big one on me. I’ll be writing about their revamped “Clip and Sling” service, which permits viewers to email clips of their favorite TV shows in a future post.

    I can’t wait until next January!