CES 2012 Preview: What To Watch For
It’s that time of the year when geeks and gadget lovers around the world gather together to witness the largest ever tech extravaganza. Yup, the 45th edition of Consumer Electronics Show (CES), CES 2012 is here with lots of gizmos and technology product offerings.
The 2012 CES officially gets underway tonight with Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer taking the center stage for Keynote address. 2012 marks Microsoft's last year at CES so this keynote should be worth checking out. The keynote is scheduled to happen on Monday, January 09, 2012 at 6:30 p.m in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ballmer will deliver a pre-show keynote address that can be watched live online. The live video streams can be watched on Microsoft’s official channels including their Facebook page and webcast page.
This years CES should provide us with lots of new items in the mobile space. We can expect to see lots of companies showing off LTE capable phones as well as new versions with Ice Cream Sandwich and Windows Phone Mango. Also expect to see the new class of SuperPhone, those with the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor allowing for up to quad-core processing and enhanced 3D graphics.
We should expect to see new tablets as well with Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. Look for most new tablets to come in a various amount of sizes with most running Honeycomb and being upgradable to Ice Cream Sandwich later this year. We could also see some new hybrid tablets similar to the Galaxy Note and the Asus Transformer Prime.
Even though Microsoft's Keynote is scheduled for tonight I do not expect to see much in way of a Windows 8 preview as they will be holding that off for their own developer conference later this year. But we might be able to see Nokia's Windows 8 Tablet that they have been rumored to be putting a lot of time and money into.
The big feature at this years CES is the Ultrabook.. These notebooks that are a step above the failed netbooks yet not as powerful as a full fledged laptop are poised to steel the show. We can expect anywhere from 30-50 different models with most trying to take a page from Apple's Macbook Air. The main question will be if retailers can find the right price point.
Vehicles will also have a large part with the automobile retailers looking to gain some of the tech buzz that has made owning a phone or tablet more important than a car to most. Look for new advances with in-dash media and navigation and general technological enhancements to be shown off.
While TV's were the large elephant in the room at CES last year look for them still to make a splash with even larger screens at a fraction of last years prices. OLED TV with their large screens and thin sizes should take a large share of the buzz. We might also get to see a revised Google TV to try to take back some of their bad press from last years launch and to compete with the likes of Boxee and Roku.
Of course there will be cameras and video recorders on display with 12MP and full 1080P video being the hot button spec wise.
Stay tunes to DayOldStubble.com for daily updates on the days best announcements and watch for our inaugural Best of CES 2012 Show where we will run down the best to come from this years show.
