Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

I’m at CES now and did most every floor today in one swoop, after an exciting morning briefing at the Engadget HQ. Let me tell you: Peter and Ryan are like soldiers commanding an army. Pretty insane.

CES is like walking into Los Angeles circa Bladerunner. Except its a bit lighter and no acid rain. Still, the experience of walking by booth after booth, all people competing for your attention using the most cringe inducing, cheesiest methods possible is painful. Casio, I kid you not, had dancers. Pioneer had a Video DJ. It was just too much.

The thing about this years CES is it looks exactly like last years CES, which looked a lot like Siggraph in 1998 minus the SGI’s. The thing is: all these HD demos, I’ve been seeing for almost ten years now. The same flowers, lady bugs, NY city streets, etc. The same shit. The screens are better, not CRT’s anymore and bigger, but its the same. Whereas at Siggraph 1997 or so, you had a huge film recorder or SGI Onyx pumping video or 3D out, now its a disc or a Mac or a Dell. Great, but the promise of “HD” is still over-stated. Focus on integration, experience, consumer expectations and simplicity please.

CES was a lot of noise. Very little compelling product, and a lot of people competing for attention they already had. Its just that that attention is now located in blogs, Apache logs and fleeting moments on Google News and techmeme. MacWorld, for me, was 10x better.

I will be over at the Sands tomorrow though to see the innovation stuff.

Best Booth: Nokia. Simple, elegant and the devices rock, which is pretty nice.

Deja Vu: Microsoft’s booth was EXACTLY the same as last years, but with more confusing spread of content and product. What the hell are they trying to be? Vista sucks, the IPTV stuff is “eh,” XBox is OK, the new products are eh. Its just this huge massive mess of confusion without any central point or focus. I left with a headache.

Don’t tout “worlds biggest” if the display looks like shit: This goes out to LG, who had a 120″ LCD or some sort, until you looked and realized they had stuck a few LCD’s together, and the lines were visible. And the display was crap.

Do tout it if you’ve got it: Sharp had a 108″ LCD out that blew away Panasonics 103″ Plasma. I also noticed that in a booth touting Plasma over LCD (forget who’s it was, I think Panasonic), the LCD looked better. Someone else pointed this out to the spokesperson. It was funny.

Best comment of the day: This was at the Logitech booth. I tried out their scroll wheel mouse (with tactile feedback) as it was hooked to a Vista machine. It did the lame Vista 3D task switcher (which is lame because you can only select the frontmost app, not any arbitrary one). The Logitech flak said “Well, Vista sucks, but it does work on Macs!” I agree on that one my friend.

Loudest hall: North hall. I felt physically ill after all the car stereos.

Most shameless and saddest booth-babe attempt: Vonage. Why? Why did people take photos with them? To prove they were there?

Weirdest moment: Ojo had a video phone out and when you pressed “Talk” it dialed someone in a far away office whom I did not know or really want to talk to. Awkward.

Most talked about device: overheard many, many, many people talking the iPhone. As always, Apple was present by their own absence. Netgears device by the way, for HD content streaming to the television, looks painfully dull compared to Apple TV.

Bluray or HD? blu-ray looks to have won this one, although the hybrid player from LG is awfully nice.

Cool Home Automation shit: I got to talk to people in the Insteon Alliance about upcoming devices. Looks like they WILL have a motion detector soon. I also inadvertently, while playing with the remote control device, opened and closed a sliding glass door behind me that was closing off their conference room. Oops. Label the remote guys!