We got back from CES this morning after about 12 hours of sitting in airports, planes, and racing through the Memphis airport to make a last minute connection. I'm still a bit knackered from the trip so expect updates on Games for Windows, Guitar Hero 2 for the 360 (hint, it's awesome), and the new Xbox 360 IP TV news tomorrow afternoon.
I had a pretty good time at CES. This was my first time covering the show and like most experiences I learned a lot. The first thing is that the show is ginormous, it's easily three times as large as E3, the only other trade show I've covered, so it was a daunting to try and see everything in only two days. That said we did see a lot of really cool things at the show. Here's my quick list of stuff I thought was really cool
- Sony's OLED TV's - it's next gen HDTV with picture quality that is just amazing. Looking forward to seeing bigger models at next year's show
- Ultimate Game Chair - sure there are a lot of gaming chairs out there but this one is a relationship saver as you can only hear the audio while you are sitting in the chair. Also serves as a massage chair which should help get it through household financial committee's.
- LG's Hybrid HD DVD/Blu Ray player - I haven't seen pricing on this yet (not sure it's been announced) but if it's priced right this could be a nice solution for those who don't want to try and guess at who is going to win the next gen High Definition DVD war
- Windows Vista - I'll get into more details tomorrow but Microsoft has done a good job of making this into a much better gaming platform and the OS looks good. I know people thing it's a copy of Mac OS X but then again there are still a lot of bitter people at Xerox PARC.
- Guitar Hero 2 was everywhere, from the new 360 version to the new wireless controllers from Nyko I spent most of Tuesday night shredding tunes to it. The 360 version plays great and with downloadable tracks a near certainty this is going to be a great title for Activision/Red Octane when it comes out in March
- IPTV is hot, with announcements from Sony, Microsoft, and Apple this week IPTV is a big technology to watch right now.
- Nyko has an outstanding product line coming out over the next couple of months. From the recharable Wii station to the Zero controllers Nyko is redefining the image of a third party peripheral company. Dan will have more on this tomorrow.
Look for more CES reports from John, Ben, Dan, and I over the next day or so as we digest everything we saw and recuperate from the trip.Next year we are definitely going for at least three days to try catch more of everything out there.
