Other observations about this year's CES:

I expected Sony's new 11-inch OLED TV to be a big hit, but I underestimated how big. This was the biggest "new" news at the show, and Sony's booth was always crammed with people ogling this 3mm-thick TV screen.

According to Sony's president and COO Stan Glasgow, Sony brought 450 of these TVs into the U.S. to sell during the week, and all of them were gone within a few hours. Two of them went to the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who wandered into the Sony booth and talked Sony's CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, into selling them. Sony also showed a prototype of a 27-inch OLED screen. The company says it has already committed to producing 11- and 27-inch OLED TVs, and it could expand the sizes of these screens over time. However, when I asked Glasgow if he thought OLEDs would someday overtake LCDs in popularity, he said he didn't think that would happen anytime soon. He sees LCD as the mainstream flat-panel TV technology and OLED as the premier- or luxury-branded TVs of the future. However, he did not discount the possibility that this could change ten years out.

Speaking of ultrathin televisions, many were surprised to see Pioneer's new 50-inch plasma TV at the show: It's only 9mm thick! It's strictly a prototype, but still, getting a plasma screen this thin is a major engineering feat. And you have to give kudos to Panasonic for being atop the large-screen totem poll with its 150-inch LCD, which was just stunning. Clearly, flat-panel TVs of all sizes, shapes, and dimensions were the big stars of this show.

I picked up one other interesting tidbit at CES. It concerns digital photo frames. Market researchers believe that about 6 million were sold this year and that 9 million will be sold in 2008. But the vendors making these photo frames say that this estimate is too low. They say they've seen incredible demand and would not be surprised if we see sales at least double in 2008 over this year. The most interesting twist on these frames is that they could end up being display extensions of a home server. One company shared with me a concept in which one of these photo frames could have a touch screen and a Wi-Fi connection and even include some OS code that allowed it to connect and share content with a home server. Imagine, then, being able to put that touch screen display on the fridge or on a wall in the den and using it to share information and images within a home's digital ecosystem. The takeaway for me was the idea that we may have underestimated what seems to be a very simple gadget.

One last item pertains to CES's future in Las Vegas. The show's current agreement with the city of Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Convention Center expires in 2011, and there were multiple reports that the show's organizers are seriously considering taking the show out of Las Vegas due to skyrocketing costs. One good example of this is the price gouging at hotels: A pretty nice room on the strip that went for $130 on the Friday night before the show jumped to $400 the first night of CES. Apparently, CES has gotten a lot of complaints about these costs and is therefore investigating its alternatives. The problem is that there is no other city that could house as many as 140,000 attendees each year. While I do think CES management may actually go through the exercise of trying to find a new location, it's likely that this is a negotiating ploy to pressure the city and the hotels to lower costs to CES partners and attendees.

While I would love to see the show move out of Sin City, it is a pretty safe bet that CES is going nowhere and that Vegas will be its home even after the current agreement runs out.



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