Every year, I look forward to two events. CES and MWC. The Consumer Electronics Show, at Las Vegas is a showcase of the evolution of mankind, although this doesn’t make a good case for the “evolution of mankind” part. Let’s see the “WOW” of CES 2012.
1) LG launched its first full OLED TV, the 55 inch LG 55EM9600. Being a completely OLED display( unlike the LED backlit LCD’s available in the market), it shows deeper blacks, richer colors and consumes lesser power. Full specs for this 4mm thin beauty can be found here.
2) It’s finally here. Intel joins the smartphone chipset bandwagon and ties up with Lenovo to produce its first Intel Medfield running phone. The Lenovo Racer-A has a 4.5 inch 720p HD display with a 1.6GHz dual core Intel Medfield SoC. Other specs include 8MP camera, HD recording and the standard connectivity package. Here’s a look at the phone.
On the windows phone side, we had two new announcements. Nokia Lumia 900 and the HTC titanII. Both of them are fit to be the titans of the windows phone game. Lumia 900 has a beefed up 4.3” display and LTE but retains most of the Lumia 800 internals. Whilst the Titan II is a behemoth of a phone at 4.7” and a 16MP (yes, 16 MegaPixels) camera. With the fluid WP7.5, operating these phones will sure be a breeze.
4) Coming to tablets, we had a lot of tablets announed and launched by various companies. As far as the specs go, Asus transformer prime TF700 and Acer Iconia tab 2012 are Full HD screen monsters with an equally jawdropping quad core processor. However, the best tablet of CES 2012 goes to Asus MeMO 370T. At $249, you get a 7-inch HD screen, quad core processor, 8MP snapper with HD recording and other bells and whistles. I can already see Kindle Fire’s and the Nook Tablets running for cover.
But the real star for me would be the philanthropic OLPC XO-3 tablet. (Hit this link to know more about the One Laptop Per Child project)Its a rugged tablet running a Fedora core. It can be charged with a hand crank or the solar panel which doubles up as a cover for the tablet. Lets hope this takes learning well beyond our reverend universities and into the hands of the poor. Learning just received a shot in the arm. We wish them well.
OLPC XO-3 Gallery by TheVerge.com
These are the “wow” worthy moments of CES 2012. Faster-better-cheaper ultrabooks were present dime a dozen at CES 2012, so were the DSLR’s (I liked the Nikon D4 but it should be priced aggresively.) and there were almost no netbooks this year. This year’s CES had very little to show for innovation. Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX crammed a 3300 mAH battery in an eight mm body, but that was about it.
CES showed an incremental trend in technology. Apple pulled out and so did many others. Technology firms probably want their own space to control everything that they can to put up a big show. Just like Vegas, maybe, CES is too noisy for them. Come on CES, get them back. Give us more consumer, less electronics.
