Tech Shows, and Writers, Uninspired

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Hey, boss — sorry for this really superlong e-mail message. But since you’re my editor, I figure you should be the first person to hear the bad news: I’ve got no column for this week.

I mean, for years, it’s been the same thing every January: I go to the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, then bounce over to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Between the two, there’s always been one standout product, one killer item to write about.

This year, not so much. Without Steve Jobs giving Apple’s traditional high-octane keynote speech, Macworld was low key. The marketing executive, Phil Schiller, gave the talk instead. He unveiled a few advances that, in any other company’s hands, might have seemed revolutionary, but coming from a company whose track record includes the iPod and the iPhone, seemed more like, “Well, of course!”

There was iPhoto ’09, a photo-management program that can not only recognize faces, but know whose faces they are; it can round up all pictures of, say, your daughter into a single folder automatically.

There was iMovie ’09, whose many new features include sophisticated image stabilization; the program can make hand-held videos look steady, even if you were jogging during an earthquake.

And there was a new MacBook laptop — a spectacular 17-inch model. Its chief breakthrough is what Apple claims is an eight-hour battery that can be recharged 1,000 times (three times more than most laptops). Which is good, since that battery is not removable. It’s sealed inside, à la iPod, iPhone and MacBook Air.

Apple also announced that it’s removing the copy protection from all 10 million songs on its iTunes store, which is fantastic; that business about “authorizing” five computers — to play the songs you’ve legitimately bought — was getting old.

The record companies were willing to agree to that twist, however, only if Apple would agree to “variable pricing”: $1.30 for popular songs, $1 for medium-popular ones and 70 cents for the old or obscure tunes. You win some, you lose some.

It’s harder to sum up the Consumer Electronics Show. I’m sorry, boss, but how do I encapsulate North America’s largest trade show in 1,300 words? I mean, there were 2,700 electronics companies with displays. (I’d hate to see the carbon footprint of that show.)

Maybe I could just write up something about the major trends. As usual, there were enough flat-panel TVs to pave the earth three times over. The push to create the thinnest TV continued with Samsung’s Luxia LCD screen, only a quarter of an inch thick. (Who cares how thin a TV is, anyway? If you can see how thin it is, you’re sitting in the wrong place. Oh well; at least FedEx can deliver your TV by slipping it under the door.)

Some pretty dazzling images were on those screens. Lots more LCD TV makers are abandoning the fluorescent bulbs behind those screens — which never get darker than dark gray — and replacing them with LED lights. These can turn off independently, creating spots of complete blackness. They also use a lot less power. (Green was also hot at C.E.S. this year, thank goodness.)

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Current DateTime: 11:01:06 09 Nov 2009
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Now that the ridiculous hi-def DVD format war is completely over, the winner — Blu-ray — made great progress. Panasonic showed its DMP-BD15, the world’s first portable, battery-powered Blu-ray player, and Samsung exhibited its BD4600, the world’s thinnest Blu-ray player (and, with its sculptured, glossy, wall-mountable, Bang & Olufsen-ish design, the best looking). Both are coming later this year.

I guess I could write about the convergence of TV and the home network. But honestly — this is, what, the seventh consecutive C.E.S. where that was supposed to be the hot new trend?

These C.E.S. companies also still seem to think people want the Internet on our TV sets. Yahoo , for example, announced deals with TV makers to build in Yahoo widgets — minimodules that show weather, stock prices, sports scores and other kinds of canned Internet data. As though we don’t already have 85,000 sources of those info-bits.

When will these companies realize that people don’t want the TV to be another computer? When we turn on the TV, we just want to sit back and be entertained. That’s why the only Internet-to-TV feature with any prayer of popularity is on-demand movies. And sure enough, Netflix and Amazon were at C.E.S., announcing deals to implant their movie-download services into other companies’ new TV sets, Blu-ray players and other home theater components.

CONTINUED : The smash of C.E.S...

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