CES 2015 is just a few days away and GAMbIT will once again be making the trip out to Las Vegas to see what the world of tech has in store for us in the new year, as well as partake in copious amounts of shenanigans. We will have expanded coverage this year as our onsite staff has increased thanks in part to all our wonderful readers here, and our growing presence online and in print. But just what does CES have in store for us? What are the big trends that will take the world by storm and what are the ones that will become nothing more than vaporware?
While we don’t have dozens of analysts trolling the deep webs for the latest numbers (we are just your humble indie mag/blog) we do have a magical thing called email! I know, it may sound like something your grandparents use to send you the same cute animated GIF of that kitten motivational poster they they found through AskJeeves, but our inboxes have become inundated with press requests from companies and PR people wanting to talk with us.
CES 2014 was our first venture to the show and we were very much small fish in a big pond, but we did see a lot of big things. Google Glass seemed to be worn by everyone and their mother (we literally saw a group of teens wearing the device along with their parents/chaperones/handlers) and we saw and heard the pitch that curved televisions were the future of the home cinema experience.
Funnily enough, both of these advances in technology seemed to fade into obscurity faster than a new series debuting on Fox. While Glass was cool, it offered little to the general public in the form of convenience or even basic use. Great, I have this stupid looking thing on my head, now what do I do with it? Once the novelty of seeing the world with a first-person shooter HUD on ended, Glass offered very little for a very high price.
Curved television didn’t fare much better in 2014. While some sets quietly made it to market via sections at Best Buy and other large retailers, people essentially ignored the technology in favor of cheaper LED televisions that the entire family could enjoy. Things got so silly that Vizio put out a commercial mocking curved television makers. Just as 3D television were a flash in the pan in 2013, curved televisions faltered in 1014.
What about wearable? Samsung had a large presence at CES 2014 with their smart-watch displays, and getting to play with them was quite a bit of fun. Unfortunately, like Google Glass these watches didn’t offer much outside the way of pretending to be Dick Tracy or from that one Star Trek movie that used wrist watch communicators. Devices did come to market with a lot of interest and coverage by large media outlets, but the watches didn’t have consumers running out to buy them. I have yet to see anyone out in the wild actually wearing/using a unit outside of someone I know that works in the Best Buy tech department and him squinting at a tiny screen has yet to sell me on the technology. You know what I can do with a smart-watch watch that I can’t do with my phone? Absolutely nothing! And if there was something a smart-watch does better, it can’t justify the price point, especially when I can spend all of one-second pulling my phone out from my pocket, or even less by looking at it as it sits on my desk.
Enough about the trials and tribulations of tech in 2014, what can we look forward to at CES 2015. Well, from out extensive calculations (quickly opens email and counts PR requests) wearables will have an even larger presence this year. People still seem to think that strapping a computer on our wrists is the future even though it’s not, it’s just our 1970s -80s idea of what the future is. These devices that do 800 million things at once usually end up being masters of none, and thus users quickly pass them up. But it seems that the tech world is slowly figuring this out as we are seeing a great many wearables that only do a single thing, or very similar tasks. The tech world seems very interested in fitness trackers including heart rate monitors, sleep trackers, life monitors, and more. We are even seeing a lot of companies jumping into the market with monitors stuffed inside very expensive jewelry. Seriously, my inbox altered me of two new monitoring products as I typed this paragraph and I didn’t even need a smart-watch to be notified of them!
Smartphones will once again be on display by all sorts of manufactures at this years convention. All the big names will be there pedaling new advancements in bluetooth everything and fancy displays with Samsung said to be showing off their bendable screens. What makes this year interesting is the plethora of foreign smartphones that will be on display, attempting to break into the US market. Snail Games (yes a games maker) will bi debuting a 3D capable phone that is said to be heavily tailored to the gaming market using the catchy name, W 3D.
Another company that’s closer to home (out of Utah) will be showing off their very robust smartphone at the show. Saygus will be giving hands on demos of their V2 (pronounced V-Squared and not like the rocket from WWII) which is said to boast a 320GB storage capacity and, “Mind blowing wireless HD gaming and movie beaming technology!” Sure, that’s nothing more than PR speak, but if my mind is blown you readers will sure as heck hear about it.
What if you are the kind of dicerning consumer that loves to throw away money like it was going out of style? Again, CES is the place for you and the smartphone market is rife with all sorts of gaudy phones. The team at Lamborghini, probably during a long week long lunch on the island of Ibiza, have come up with the ultimate smartphone in the form of the 88 Tauri. Keeping with the Lamborghini tradition each phone will be made by hand, coded with a unique device number, and finished in high end leather.
Stay tuned to GAMbIT here for all the latest news from the show and if you really want to be kept in the loop then feel free to follow us on Facebook and Twitter where will be be posting throughout the show days. Remember, CES is a showcase for all things tech, but it also features a lot of oddball things and we hope to find as much of that as we can. The big sites can have their in-depth coverage and paid on-air time, but we are most excited about covering the cool things we find off the beaten path. CES 2015 takes place in Las Vegas from January 6-9.
About Author
