Tech Talk News: Five Focal Points For This Year’s CES

Las Vegas is turning up the glitz for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2012). The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has hired Hollywood actress Eliza Dushku to serve as the ambassador for the trade show, which runs January 9 through 13. Celebrities like will.i.am, 50 Cent, Justin Bieber and LL Cool J will be in Sin City to showcase new technology and check out the latest gadgets.

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Videogame analyst PJ McNealy, CEO of Digital World Research, believes there will be five big trends to follow this week. Gaming will play an important role in the trade show, as usual.

1. What will Sony and Microsoft likely feature? Look for Sony to roll out its usual suite of news; something from their music division, new 3D TVs, more connected home devices, a dash of robots, a sprinkle of movie studio news, mix it all together, and then top it off with something from the mobile division with Sony Ericsson now under their control. The PlayStation Vita will likely be the headliner for Sony ahead of a February 22, 2012 launch.

Microsoft is quietly putting some of their news out ahead of the show about new content flowing through their Xbox Live platform. There continues to be rumors about a new version of the Xbox 360 hardware news coming at the show, but our position remains unchanged: Microsoft has been announcing “new” versions of the Xbox 360 console for a while now, including bundling TV tuner cards in with a version of the Xbox 360, and they will continue down this path. At some point, Microsoft will likely announce versions of a new box, either combined with a) a satellite TV service partner, b) a cable service provider partner, c) more over-the-top content solution partners, or d) some combination of a, b, and c. Will news come in January on this front? We remain healthy skeptics on that timing (recap of news from December is our position), but CES becomes more relevant to Microsoft and Xbox Live as it includes more mainstream media options beyond gaming.

2. Is 2012 the year for 3D technology? Sure, in phones, because what consumers really need are glasses to wear to watch content on a phone. Sarcasm aside, sometimes technology enables combinations that can be done, but should not necessarily be made. Think of the old Casio MP3-player watch, that enabled you to listen on ear buds tethered to…your wrist. To be fair to 3D technology, a marketing sentence at CES this year that includes both “3D” and “phone” will also like be centered around “capturing” and “images in 3-D,” rather than playback.

On the TV front, given the perceived advantage in 3D TV sets by the Japanese manufacturers such as Panasonic and Sony over the Korean manufacturers such as LG and Samsung, expect to hear more about 3D in January. That said, until prices come down further, a single 3D TV standard is agreed to, and more content in 3D becomes available, in our opinion, 3D TV is still more of a 2013-2015 CES theme rather than 2012.

For the sake of being thorough on the topic of 3D, Nintendo continues to make its push for 3D gaming technology via its 3D DS (3DS) handheld, and is one of the rare exceptions where glasses are not required for game play. Nintendo just recently announced another string of games in 3-D that will be available for the 3DS in the first few months of 2012, which will help support any 3DS gifts under the tree this holiday.

3. Is OLED technology any closer to reality? OLED technology was announced a few years ago, with great fanfare, about how super, super thin TVs could be, led by the 11-inch Sony OLED TV XEL-1 for $2,500 in 2007. Since then, we’ve heard more about LED LCD TVs and 3D LED LCD TVs, but OLED will likely have a presence not only in TVs in 2012, but also in some tablet news and in some phone screens. Panasonic just recently announced a new OLED-screen phone for Europe will likely be featured at the show. And Sony’s PS Vita features an OLED display.

4. What’s new with Blu-Ray (BD) disc players this year? Disks? While it’s easy to expect more partnerships about how a BD player connected to the Internet can now offer services such as Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, etc., the bigger push will probably be around bigger and bigger hard-disk drives (HDDs) being built into the boxes. This will enable more content to be stored in the living room as another way to a) control the living room and connection to the consumer and b) provide another way to get content to consumers other than through a satellite TV or cable service provider. Disc storage capabilities are increasing as well, and there will likely be some news around 1 TB optical discs from vendors such as TDK, which will incorporate some BD technology.

5. Pico projectors remain a hot topic as the sizes get smaller and screen resolutions get better. The next wave of news will likely be around pico projectors embedded into smart phones, with plenty of examples of a Powerpoint presentation being projected onto a wall. The news here is likely incremental from last year, but as prices come down on the hardware, it means more media being played back from your phone…onto your wall.