A day spent on the floor was certainly worthwhile.
Today the blog team spent time at some of the hotspots at the Consumer Electronics Show. We started at the Sands Expo Center, where the wearables and 3D printers are. I think this picture sums it up — keep in mind this was in the middle of the day:
OK, there was a little more going on than that, although not everywhere. The wearables scene is pretty played and there seems to be no interest in 3D printers. The market there is pretty thin and the truth is that this hall was not well attended compared to previous years.
What about the Convention Center?
We spent some time in the convention center and it certainly was busy. Maybe it wasn’t as busy as past years, but it sure was busy. LG and Samsung showed TVs that absolutely were mindblowing. LG’s TV was so thin it barely existed at all:
While Samsung’s new “Q” quantum dot TVs were so superior to anything we’ve seen before that even I was impressed. I usually see past the calibration tricks that these manufacturers use, but this was pretty darn good.
Overall, though, there weren’t a lot of TVs. I mean, there were tons of TVs, especially in lesser-known manufacturer booths like TCL and Hisense, but the big guys just weren’t interested in showing TVs. What were they interested in?
Cars.
I wasn’t even in the car-heavy North Hall and there were cars everywhere.
These are just a few of the dozens of cars that I saw in what used to be a totally non-car space. Cars seem to be the thing that everyone wanted in this show. I can’t wait until I see the North Hall tomorrow.
For me, the hit of the show was this little device from Ubiquiti:
This little doodad will plug into any outlet, talk to any router, and turns any home wi-fi system into an intelligent “mesh” system. Pricing has yet to be determined but we know we’ll have it as soon as it’s available.
Overall, the CES show seems to be moving toward right-sizing… it was untenable back two years ago when 140,000 people attended. I don’t know what the attendance was today but I’m sure it was far lower, and that’s a good thing. The “real” CES show takes place in the back rooms, and that’s where I spent a good chunk of time today too, in boring meetings that I’ll never report on… but you’ll enjoy the results of when you see them at SolidSignal.com.
