Year of the app signals CES shift from hardware

INTERNATIONAL CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW:Once a showcase for the hardware of the industry giants, CES has seen a new breed of firms emerge

This is the year of the app. So said the Consumer Electronics Association as it prepared for the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

It was a shift in thinking for a show that has traditionally focused on hardware. It’s not entirely unexpected.

This year’s CES showcased just how much the technology landscape has changed over the past few years. Where the Las Vegas show once played host to industry giants, this year saw a new breed of firms rise to the fore.

It wasn’t that long ago that CES was the place for major tech firms to announce their hardware plans for the coming year. Microsoft announced its Xbox at the event in 2011; Palm’s Pre was announced there in 2009, along with its Web OS.

Going back further, CES was the platform for the announcement of important developments such as the plasma TV, the DVD, the CD player and even the video cassette recorder. There were still plenty of hardware announcements to be found, but the impact wasn’t as significant as it might have been in the past.

From new chips to smart TVs, and audio miniature speakers to high-end car products, there was much to see.

Big names absent

TV manufacturers tried to generate enthusiasm for big screens with ultra-high-definition and smart interfaces. Bigger smartphones and better mobile chips were unveiled.

Some of the big names in tech were absent from this year’s expo. Last year was Microsoft’s last big appearance at the electronics show; Apple hasn’t taken part in CES for several years and doesn’t look likely to change that in the short term. HP, meanwhile, had a smaller presence, preferring to have meeting rooms rather than be on the expo floor, while Dell continued to pare down its commitment.

It was a similar trend for some of the Irish attendees at CES. Although few were present on the show floor – PCH International was on the Iolite stand – others, including Digisoft, Openet, Decawave and S3 were in attendance. There were some Irish divisions of multinationals at the event too, including Zagg and Allsop Europe.

It was Qualcomm, the mobile chipmaker that powers smartphones made by HTC, Samsung, LG and Nokia, that delivered the opening speech of the event instead of Microsoft.

Qualcomm chief executive Paul Jacobs kicked off the conference on Tuesday with a speech on the theme of “Born mobile” and announced a new Snapdragon chip that would power a new generation of smartphones and bring ultra-HD video to phones.

Makers of TV sets were also keen to emphasise how high definition would develop on their platforms. The big news from the major TV manufacturers was so-called 4K TVs, boasting four times the number of pixels as the current HD TVs, giving them crisper images. Sony even promised to launch a 4K video service to help spur adoption of the new technology.

It had echoes of recent years, when 3D TVs were the big story, but a mixture of high prices and a lack of easily accessible content has meant they failed to live up to the initial hopes of the industry. In 2011, Sony even launched a 3D video content service to provide content to customers.

Despite the scepticism from some quarters, not everyone was convinced 4K TVs would go the same way as their 3D predecessors. “With 4K TVs, it’s easy to upscale from HD content, and it looks beautiful,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.

Sony unveiled a prototype of a 4K OLED TV, while LG demonstrated a curved display, and Panasonic showed off a 4K tablet computer and a 56-inch OLED panel with 4k2k resolution.

Phablets

This was also the year big-screen mobile phones got a boost. While we once dismissed the larger-screened devices, it seems so-called “phablets” are here to stay. Joining Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 are offerings from ZTE and Huawei.

ZTE unveiled a five-inch phone dubbed the Grand S, while Huawei added the Ascend Mate with a 6.1-inch screen to its line-up.

“We expect 2013 to be the year of the phablet,” said Neil Mawston, UK-based executive director of Strategy Analytics’ global wireless practice.

While many of the products shown at the expo will make it to consumers somewhere in the world, it’s inevitable that some will fall by the wayside.

There were plenty of weird and wonderful things around the show. The Brain Wave TV from Haier, which demonstrates how you could use your thoughts to interact with electronics – in this case through a game that involved raising and lowering a ball on screen simply by thinking about it – through a band that translates your thoughts into movement isn’t going to be in your living room any time soon. But it showed how TV manufacturers are turning to ever-quirkier ways of interacting with TVs to keep consumers interested.

One of the more bizarre yet potentially useful items that the exhibition turned up were Nano Nails, which attempt to get around the problem of using touch screens while having long nails. It’s a fingernail stylus, so you’ll always have it right there when you need it.

In among the iPhone cases – including customised, 3D printed ones from Sculpteo – was the Canopy Sensus iPhone case, which turns the back of your iPhone and the right side of it into a touch-sensitive surface.

It wasn’t all about weird and wonderful gadgets. There was a growing emphasis on functional technology too.

Fitness gadgets made an appearance, from Bodymedia’s monitoring band to Fitbug’s latest add-on, the Fitbug Wow scales and the Orb, which also works as a sleep tracker.

Withings updated its wifi scale to a Body Analyser and added a Smart Activity Tracker to its product portfolio. It seemed as if everyone was getting in on the act.

Connected appliances

Your home is about to get more high tech too, with a range of connected appliances that help you manage your home more smartly also in evidence.

Everything from smarter fridges to connected ovens could be found around the show hall. It’s an area that well-known names such as LG and Samsung have been pushing for some time.

LG’s smart fridge links up with your smartphone so you can access the fridge’s contents while you’re off doing the weekly shopping, and get an idea of what food is about to expire. Of course this requires some manual intervention, uploading the contents as you stock it. And for certain areas – Korea, for example – the fridge will automatically reorder the food for you.

LG’s smart appliances don’t end there. Smart Adapt means you can download new washing programmes for your washing machine via smartphone, and the oven also allows you to monitor it via smartphone. Samsung’s smart fridge includes a touch screen that you can use to interact with software such as a weather app and a link to Evernote so you can share recipes.

And if you want to take the smart home even further, a new sensor from Parrot allows you to interact with your plant; simply put it into the soil, pair it with your iOS smartphone or tablet over bluetooth, and you have the ability to monitor your plant’s wellbeing. Sunlight, temperature, water content of the soil – there will be no excuses for withering plants, because the device even prompts you to water them when needed.

Such devices are driving the shift towards apps and services seen at CES this year, leading the Consumer Electronics Association’s chief economist and research director Shawn DuBravac to dub it the largest app event in the world.