Tom Conrad

Microsoft was showing off a future version of their Microsoft TV product at CES. Here in the US, the closest thing we have to this at the moment is Microsoft TV – Foundation Edition which Comcast has deployed in some cities. This version has been covered elsewhere quite a bit, and strikes me as a pretty basic system. Basic PVR, basic program guide, and so on.

The version on display at the show was the new MSTV – IPTV Edition designed to allow folks like SBC and BellSouth to enter the television market over their IP networks. The idea is to deliver HD-quality streams at 3-6Mbps into the home in both unicast (video on demand) and multicast variants. The system has a much sexier user interface than its Foundation Edition cousin. It looks almost exactly like the Media Center UI (alpha-channel transparency effects and all). I was pretty impressed. The system apparently puts most of the smarts in the network and is designed to work within a very small footprint on the client device.

An early version of Microsoft TV – IPTV Edition has already been deployed in pilots in Canada and Europe. SBC and BellSouth will start trials in the US later this year.

Pentax used CES to show off a prototype of their new Optio WP. This tiny camera, which will ship in April, features a 5MP CCD, 3X optical zoom, a big display (2″), and is waterproof to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes. This looks to be a great small camera. No price has been announced.

I was pretty surprised that Sony didn’t have a booth on the main show floor. It seems they decided to show their wares behind closed doors; I was really hoping to get a chance to play with the PSP at the show. Happily there was a company called Marvel in the South Hall that makes embedded technology. Their Wi-Fi chip is in the PSP and they had a few PSP’s on hand in their booth.

I was very impressed with the device; if they’re able to launch these in the US for $199 there is no question that they’re going to sell millions of them. It’s a great design, with lots of beautiful details. Sure it will scratch easily; yes it shows fingerprints like glass, but you will want one. It’s gorgeous. Oh yeah, the games look pretty impressive too. This isn’t an iPod killer — it’s way too big for that, but it’s not going to be pretty for Nintendo. As with the N64 and Gamecube (two great products), I’m sure there will continue to be an appetite for Nintendo’s unique spin on gaming, but the PSP is going to be the 1,000 lb gorilla.

There’s nothing terribly new about the Samsung YH-999 Portable Media Center. It was released late last year. It’s not terribly distinguished on the features (20G drive, USB 2.0, 3 hour battery life for video, etc.) but I was really surprised at how much I liked the form factor. It’s a pretty thin unit and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. The other units, which are more the shape of the Sony PSP, are much more cumbersome to hold onto. Samsung did a nice job with this one.

Shuttle had a nice booth with all their latest offerings. I thought this new model (SB86i) was quite stunning; great simple lines. Sitting off in a corner in their booth was an XPC with a stereo component form factor. It appeared to be a prototype. Here’s a picture.

One of the really big (both literally and figuratively) items at CES this year were 1080p televisions. Every major manufacturer was featuring these in their booth. They’re pretty impressive. With 1080p you get a progressive scan (non-interlaced) display with a full 1080 lines of resolution. A side-by-side comparison against either 1080i or 780p shows very clearly that 1080p is the winner. These displays are beautiful.

Epson was showing off a technology called 3LCD that is designed to compete with DLP in the projection HDTV market. A 1080p 3LCD TV is shown at left. In a side by side demonstration, the 3LCD products were dramatically clearer with much better color fidelity. Of course, this was all in the Epson booth with products supposedly set to “out of the box” settings, so your mileage may vary. I was pretty impressed with how much progress has been made on the viewing angle problem with these rear-projection systems. Still, it’s just not cool to have a TV that’s 12 inches deep these days, so the market will probably continue to skew towards plasmas and LCD’s.

Speaking of LCD, great progress has been made this year with respect to size and response time. Many manufactures where showing displays in excess of 50 inches with 8ms response times. Given the burn in and brightness problems with plasma, it is great to see LCD technology advancing. I’m hoping for a sub-$2000 HD unit by years end.

On the plasma front, Samsung (who gets the award for the most ginormous booth at the show) was showing off a stunning 102″ model. This thing is really huge and was constantly surrounded by a sizeable crowd of admirers.

Shades of 1964: it’s been 40 years since the first video phone was shown at the World’s Fair in New York City. At CES this week Motorola became the most recent company to try to make this idea work. The Ojo is a “Personal Video Phone” designed to connect to both your home LAN and your telephone line. The former is used for video and the latter for voice. A built-in portrait monitor shows the video while a wireless handset is used for voice. It’s a pretty great industrial design (if a little large) and the video quality is quite impressive. It will retail for $799 and is being targeted at home users. That’s a lot of money for a solution that I’m not sure most consumers are clamoring for.

Yes, this is a network-connected oven. Because, you know, you want to be able to spontaneously decide it’s time to clean your oven from anywhere in the world that is serviced by an internet connection. The future is now. If nothing else, this is a nice way for Martha Stewart to still cook the turkey at Thanksgiving from the comfort of the prison library.

One of the most interesting things I saw at the show was the new DirectTV DVR’s. I think TiVo is going to have a pretty hard time fighting these. Right now over half of the TiVo subscribers are DirectTiVo users. DirectTV looks poised to release a family of DVR’s that don’t use the TiVo platform. I’ve owned both a ReplayTV and a TiVo over the years and have come to expect a fair bit of polish from these kind of products. To this point everything I’d seen from the satellite and cable folks was a pretty terrible approximation of the name-brand solutions. I can’t say that’s the case any longer. These DirectTV DVR’s seem every bit as polished as the TiVo solution. DirectTV is even offering a version (“Home Media Center“) with four tuners, HD support, and seamless in-home content sharing.

It’s a shame to see a future where a great company like TiVo — who, along with ReplayTV, defined this product space — might not be able to survive, let along thrive. Timing is everything in technology; you just can’t afford to have the market give your competitors time to build a copy of your product before mass adoption begins.

The product I went to the show most excited to see has to be the BenQ P50. This PocketPC 2003 phone looks to be the industry’s best bet at a direct compete for the Treo 650 (which I own and like a lot, but is a bit rough around the edges).

I was really hoping that the P50 would be a home run. It’s not.

On the plus side, the phone is very solid. It feels really great in your hand. Nice heft… it feels like a much more durable device than the 650. Beyond that, I was pretty disappointed. This is a phone that will ship in February or March in Taiwan, but the units on display were routinely locking up. The “one hand” navigation is terrible on the phone; you’re going to be using the stylus a lot. The keyboard is decent, but is not as good as the revised keyboard on the 650.

Marcus Adolphsson from TreoCentral has written up a much more detailed side by side comparison. If you’re interested in such things, I recommend taking a look. On a related note, one of the cool things that happened at the show was that Marcus walked right up me to in the DirectTV booth and said “Hey I see you’ve got a Treo, you should stop by my site TreoCentral.com.” He seems like a very nice guy and it was cool to bump into him at the show.