talkingDigital

photo credit: wili_hybrid

We head off to Las Vegas a week from today – attending our first press event later that same day. We look forward to all of the great new tech.

Here are a few things that we hope we don’t see at CES:

Digital Picture frames – They were great five years ago, they were getting old two years ago. If they show up this year, we are going to ask very pointed questions to the exhibitor as to why they wasted the money for booth space.

Bluetooth headsets – Unless it’s the size of a grain of sand, it’s not worth showing us. We don’t care about what kind of noise reduction it has or how stylish it is. We will only talk to you about it if you give us a free one.

Netbooks – We love netbooks but they are all 50 different brands of the same device. 10.1″ screen, the latest Intel Atom (or whatever the netbook processor will be), 1-2GB RAM, 160-320GB hard drive, 4-8hrs battery… If you surprise us with one that has a projector built in, that might be cool, but probably not.

Any iPhone app – Save it for CeBIT or Macworld (if there is still such a thing), we love the iPhone, but don’t want to listen to a 15 minute pitch for a product we need to speed at least a week with before we decide how we feel about it.

Cell phones that will never be released in the US – The Koreans always dazzle us with their booths full of fancy phones, but all they do is waste our precious time that we need to spend looking for gadgets and gear that our listeners and readers have no hope of ever getting their hands on.

The world’s largest flat panel TV – Even if it’s 500 inches, there is no way of communicating how massive a massive TV is via photos. We are no longer impressed by bigger, faster or prettier.

A new $300 ebook reader – Before we can get excited about ebook readers they will have to fall well below $100 and  view PDFs, doc and every other ebook format natively. We might consider paying $150 if it offers Kindle-like EVDO downloads for free.

Essentially, we want to see something new. It is time for something that will revolutionize the way we all live. This will take something affordable that fulfills a need that everyone has.

photo credit: AZAdam

Over the past few years there really haven’t been may new trends. Rather than announcing new kinds of devices, the trend seems to have been in making existing trends less expensive converged devices.

As we head into CES 2010 there are a number of trends we expect to see in 2010.

Year of the ebook – The long promised day of the ebook has come. While the Kindle is taking the US by storm, the rest of the world is wide open for the taking. Even the US is a potential market for a no.2 device. Sprint is planning on making an announcement for Skiff Newsstand – an e-reader technology. We aren’t sure what it is, but we will be at the press conference on January 7 to find out.

CES also announced in September that they had run out of exhibit space in their ebook TechZone.

Social media mayhem – Facebook has brought the social media into the mainstream. Now everybody wants a piece of the market. Keep an eye on talkingDigital.org during CES week (January 4-10) and we will be posting the best and the worst implementations of social media offerings.

Android (we hope) – The Motorola Droid campaign for Verizon has alerted geeks everywhere that the iPhone has a serious potential competitor. We are hoping to see a number of new Android phones and features announced at CES. While many of these announcements will happen in the months following CES at other technology expos.

Flip-like camcorders – Flip camcorders are to the home video industry what the iPhone is to the smartphone industry. Everyone from Sony to Sanyo has a competing product to the Flip video camera. We expect a barrage of new products that demonstrate how every other company just doesn’t get it. The simplicity, durability and video quality have made Flip a success. We expect to see companies announcing Flip-style cameras loaded with overly complex menus and layers of features. Flip is expected to add new HD products as well as wireless video transmission.

Keep an eye on talkingDigital.org for more CES trends leading up to our coverage in early January.

Podcast: Play in new window

On the third Wednesday of every month we join forces with HelpMeRick.com to do a little public affairs show on KAFM 88.1 in Grand Junction, CO. We always discuss tech and pretend to have a topic.