My CES report
[tag]CES[/tag], oh how I love thee. A conference filled to the brim with hall after hall of people competing to be “it” amongst the gadgets, to be the de facto, to be the coolest thing the world has or ever will see. Its basically hall after hall of people trying to become Apple, which I found quite funny.
I took a late-afternoon flight out of Burbank, right after [tag]Paris Hilton[/tag] was photographed getting to our building, so the steps outside were covered in papparazi. A suitable beginning. Upon arriving, I boarded our limo bus that we rented for the ocassion and we proceeded to our hotel.
Queue hotel drama. End with a nice VIP room at the Hard Rock.
It is little secret that CES is not so much for the technology as it is for the parties around it. First party on the list was the Motorola party featuring the Foo Fighters, at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay. We went and got in using our Moto contracts, but the place was packed with people and we couldn’t find anyone we knew, so we left. After that, I was bailing to go to what was supposed to be the be all, end all party of all time.
My friend Maria was friends with the promoter who had told her that Perry Ferrel was going, the party cost a lot and it was only 300 people. I get there early and Maria shows, only for us to have to wait for Perry and her friend to arrive. In the end, we get there and it turns out that the party is for a porn company out of Boulder, CO. What the hell? Entering, the party consisted of two types of people: software engineers and porn-stars. Both had seemingly low self-esteem. There were things going on on the bandstand that I didn’t even want to look at, but the drinks were free.
[tag]Perry Ferrel[/tag] though…. I have been a fan for a long, long time. I lost so much respect for the man though after he started “DJing” (if you can call it that) by mixing Nirvanna’s “Come as You Are” with “Revolution No. 9.” Not cool. And then he brought it one step further by playing a sped up version of Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing” and singing along to it through a microphone.
We left, and went back to Hard Rock and met up with some friends. We ended up being out until four AM.
I still had not seen one piece of technology.
The next day, we headed to the Sands to check out the auxillary show-floor. That floor is reserved for smaller companies to get bigger booths, and mostly all we did was chat with people that did things to decorate other things. Basically manufactuerers of CD cases, iPod skins, etc. We print logos on them and sell them. It works well.
Deciding it was time to bite the bullet, we headed over to the convention center. I was excited because I had just read Microserfs last week. I told Maria to call me Bug BBQ and I’d call her Karla, but she didn’t get the reference. Anyhow, one cab ride later and we arrived into the land of Microsoft (out front) and Microsoft (inside). Holy christ did it hurt. So here’s the report from the floor:
House of the Future outside – it had a 30 minute line, and no air conditioning. Considering how bad people were smelling, we skipped it.
[tag]Microsoft[/tag] booth – Holy shit that’s a lot of blue! Microsoft needs to fire all their graphic designers and just start over. This Luna design scheme doesn’t do anything but give me a headache. They were demoing Vista at every turn, as well as their home entertainment systems. The problem I have with both is they look so clumsy, like a first-year graphic design students attempt at interface design. Horrible. We tried watching a Vista demo and got bored. The game demos were hot though, I’ll give them that.
[tag]Panasonic[/tag] I have a Panasonic plasma, so I was interested in this one. They had an amazing grid of Plasma’s, but my god, why did they have tap dancing people? On the other hand, their 103″ plasma rocked my world. I must digress a bit and remember Siggraph’s of year’s past when a plasma display was reserved only for Sony, Apple and SGI.
HD-DVD vs. BluRay BlueRay is the winner in my estimation, as their masters and demos looked much, much better than the HD-DVD ones. The HDDVD reminded me of how the first DVD masters of Twister looked when they did the DVD demos. Washed out, a bit noisy, aliased, etc. I vote for Blu-Ray. However, HD-DVD is getting better titles, so fuck it, I’ll have to get both and an HDMI splitter.
[tag]Sony[/tag] A mighty cool booth. The PS3 was the most popular thing there, but their large format plasmas were marred by bad color correction and tuning. Spiderman 3 looked awful on it. I did rather like their new high definition video cameras and some of their new digital cameras.
[tag]Motorola[/tag] My have they jumped the shark. The Motorola Q (the RazrBerry as we call it in the office) is awful. The user interface (MS Smartphone 2005) is slow as hell, the keyboard is very awkward and hard to type on and the form factor just doesn’t feel very good. The PEBL is stupid and overrated, the new RAZR still retains Moto’s slow UI performance. The only good thing that Motorola has is their new quarter-sized (the coin) Bluetooth headset that fits into your ear canal.
Otherwise, we looked at some of the Intel stuff, and some of the other consumer electronics goods, but nothing really jumped out at me and said “wow, I want that” (except for the 103 in plasma). It seemed everyone was neglecting some fundemental concepts and then not mention the dreaded three letters (DRM). It also seemed like a lot of nervous laughter regarding MacWorld.
Maria and I, for shits and giggles, went to the car audio floor. It was the most ridiculously stupid thing I’ve ever seen, especially the demo cars. However, we at WBR do have a promo partnership with DUB, so we went over there to make sure we were representin’. We weren’t, only some Lil’ Jon footage on a screen. However, who should walk in but Benji and Joel Madden, to sign autographs. No one showed to get them and it was kind of sad. I know from Trent that they are nice guys (and I don’t doubt that), but they try way too hard to look like thugs. It’s kind of sad.
That being said, we did accept invites to a party at Beach for DUB, which the Madden’s would be DJ’ing and Coolio would be hosting. Yes, Coolio.
It was as lame as it sounds, but saved by Grover, who is head of radio promotions at work. We had fun shouting “Mike Jones!” at the Madden’s periodically while reminding everyone that WBR is the number one record label of 2005.
Queue 2 hours sleep, plane flight, naps and sleeping and I’m back where I started.
So in summary: CES is fun, not so much for the event but for everything around it. CES is also where deals are made, things are demoed and meetings for later are arranged. I had fun, but I don’t think its necessary all the time. This week: MacWorld on Tuesday. I’m not going to the Keynote, but we’re going up for the exhibit. Anyone else who is going, hit me up and we’ll meet up.