CES Kicks off Q1 Event Season

CES - check, up next NRF, AppsWorld, and MWC!

The 2013 event season is officially underway, last week ~35K exhibitors and ~150K attendees gathered at the LVCC for the 46th annual (believe it or not) Consumer Electronics Show. While some are saying that the show is losing steam, I saw no evidence - in fact, the show seemed larger than in past years, with a crowded show floor and very long lines for taxi cabs when it was time to clear out each evening.

Keynotes included high-profile tech luminaries such as Qualcomm's CEO Paul Jacobs (who was joined by Microsoft's Steve Balmer), Samsung's Device Solutions President, Stephen Woo (joined by Bill Clinton), CEA President Garty Shapiro and Panasonic's President Kazuhiro Tsuga. Each showcased their latest innovations which ranged from Ultra HDTV, high speed energy efficient processors to new display technologies that enable bendable and foldable screens (sign me up for the folding 5" Smartphone). I didn't have the opportunity to see each of the keynotes live, but have watched them all online - while there was no category killer or visionary product launched, there certainly are some innovative and important advancements happening around System on Chip (Samsung's new Exynos processor features dual quad-core ARM-Cortex cores (that's a mouthful) that "load balance" processing tasks), solid state drives featuring higher densities (1TB), the connected home and car, and TV's boasting 4x the pixels of 1080p displays. Naturally, I was more inclined toward the mobile-oriented news from CES - there was some, but based on what was released, I think its safe to say that we can expect to see many more announcements out of MWC in a few weeks.

It was a relatively quiet CES for mobile this year, but even a quiet CES is a busy one. Several notable mobile-oriented announcements out of CES included Huawei, Lenovo, Sony, and ZTE each announcing new flagship Android-based Smartphones, (making it extremely likely that HTC, LG, Nokia, RIM (whose executives were in town to show off the near final version of the upcoming BlackBerry 10 OS), and Samsung will have something to announce in Barcelona). There was also news on the mobile OS front this past week, Linux-based Tizen (backed by Intel) and Unbuntu (from Canonical) are both likely to show up on devices later this year. Samsung revealed plans to release a Tizen-based device later this year (this was a hot topic at the company's analyst breakfast), Unbuntu who has yet to land a hardware partner demonstrated to me live and in person that their OS was ready for prime time (lots of interest at their booth).

While vendors focused on the enterprise didn't have a presence at CES, they were at the show. AT&T hosted it's 8th annual Developer Summit, with the company's always energetic President and CEO of Mobility Ralph de la Vega kicking off the event. Others had their enterprise-oriented executives on site - Nokia hosted analyst briefings, along with Samsung, and mobile-first vendors such as Good Technologies.

Stay tuned for VDC's Mobile & Wireless team's next event recap – NRF.