Each mid-January, while much of the country is struggling to get through wintery weather and get kids back on a school-day schedule, the brash, bold, and bright world of near-future technology is shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Not the back end of the financial crisis/Great Recession, not the fact that Apple has not attended in over a decade, or that Microsoft is attending this year for the ‘last’ time could stop the show from breaking attendance records at over 153,000.
Yet those 153,000 did not include the consumer, per se. The show is invitation-only and those are sent to hardware and software companies, to news agencies, to retail-chain buyers, and to tech reviewers. Alas, despite the strong numbers and expansive and loyal readership of the MKCREATIVEmedia blog, we did not seem to warrant an invitation this year. Or it got lost in the mail. Thankfully, the names we trust to write about technology were there to help.
The always informative-and-entertaining David Pogue of The New York Times tried to sum up the wares on display in this way:
If you just peek into the huge International Consumer Electronics Show, you might think that it’s mostly a deafening showcase for tablets, thin TV screens, superthin laptops and Android phones. But if you really take the time to look — if you walk all 15 miles of exhibit halls — you’ll discover that, in fact, you were right. C.E.S. really is primarily a deafening showcase for tablets, thin TV screens, superthin laptops and Android phones.
