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January 8, 2008

CES 2008 day 2 (, )

by fluffy at 12:22 PM
I made the mistake of taking my laptop to the show floor with me, which has made my backpack very heavy. On the plus side, it's made it so I can post this post.

I came with our product manager and our build engineer. The PM had to run off to a lunch meeting with someone, so the build engineer and I continued to wander around. Then I had to use the bathroom, and during the whole 2 minutes that I was in there, he wandered off and I couldn't find him. I sent him a text message asking where he was but decided that unless he got back in touch I'd just look around on my own, since it'd be easier to see what I was interested in anyway.

So far I haven't been that interested in anything here. I mean okay there's bigger/slimmer/brighter/more contrasty TVs, but there's not much stuff in the product group I was sent here to look at (or at least none of the offerings are at all compelling). The swag is pretty slim pickings, too; so far all I've gotten is a 2GB thumb drive loaded up with DRMed video content which expires in two weeks (hooray). Well, the thumb drive is erasable at least. Other than that there's been a bunch of "chance to win free stuff" in exchange for a bunch of personal information (which I know better now; I still get spam from some of the shadier vendors at SIGGRAPH from 5 years ago, which is about all that manages to make it through my spam filter).

I headed over to the blogger lounge figuring, hey, a place to blog, right? Well, no, by "blogger" they mean "someone who works for Gawker media" basically (well, that or Ars Technica or whatever). i.e. you need a press card, only it's the BLOGGING press. So much for the new democratic media.

I generally dislike Las Vegas and during CES there's even less to like. I'm not sure why I even agreed to come. I hate trade shows. Oh well.

Also, this trade show in particular seems a lot worse than others I've been to. People are VERY pushy when they want to move, and VERY hall-cloggy when they don't. So it's sort of like the world's biggest mosh pit right now.

2:51 PM I managed to find some actual interesting stuff. So I at least have something to report back to work, mostly that there's a "pro-quality" Rock Band drum kit by Alesis. (It didn't feel as responsive as the toylike POS that comes with the game though, sadly.)

Comments

#10325 01/08/2008 06:17 pm
Also finally found an example of the sort of thing I was supposed to be looking for. The concept is interesting but the execution is WAAAAY off from anything even remotely approaching "what consumers want" (and yet they're billing it as "the next step in simplifying home entertainment" - sure, I guess it simplifies things if you already have fiber run through your house for some retarded reason). Plus, while it does a few specific cases better than our product, it's way too specific solution for what users actually want to do. I don't see it catching on.
#10326 01/08/2008 07:37 pm
I barely notice my Eee in my man-purse. You should get one.

Eee I mean. Not man-purse. Though that's useful too.
#10327 01/08/2008 07:43 pm
I'll wait to see what Apple releases next week.
#10331 01/09/2008 12:26 am
It would be interesting if Apple did a Macbook Midget or something to compete with the Eee, but I don't think they have a product like that (with that level of versatility and moddability) in them. And if they do, it'll be at integer N > 1 times the price.
#10332 01/09/2008 08:20 am
I think the modability of the Eee is just incidental, seeing as how most of them require soldering to the motherboard, which is a step further than most people would want to take modding a Mac.

It would definitely be more expensive but I don't see why Apple would want to put out a system with as low specs as the Eee in order to make something that's as cost-competitive (and useless for running OSX in all its current glory).