CES Unveiled 2008
The International Consumer Electronics Show (un)officially kicks off each year with CES Unveiled, a pre-show press preview and tiny teaser of some of the new products attendees can expect to see on the showroom floor. Pocketables was there when the doors opened at 4 p.m. today and ended up leaving the scene within about 45 minutes. It was actually a bit of a bust.
My hopes were high while we stood in line to get in, but they didn’t stay that way for very long. That’s because in terms of "pocketables" and other devices within the scope of this site, there was very little to see.
I should’ve expected it really, as the list of exhibitors wasn’t very promising. Robotics seemed to be a pretty common theme, as I had to step over RC coolers and duck from little flying things while looking for anything UMPC- or handtop-like that wasn’t actually a digital frame or GPS unit.
Even though I came up empty, there were some pocket-friendly items that caught my eye.
Mobile phone blogs must have been pleased with the selection. I don’t keep up with phone news too much, but I don’t think anyone was showing anything new.
I finally got to paw the Samsung i760 (which made its debut at last year’s Unveiled), though, so that made me happy. If I didn’t have my Tilt, I’d definitely be trying to get out of my contract with AT&T to switch over to Verizon Wireless.
Other than that, the only table I stopped to visit was SanDisk’s. They didn’t have anything new on display, but their flash drive selection, which I think was velcroed to the back of a three-ring binder, was eye-catching in a flea market sort of way.
Yeah, nothing too thrilling. Here are some ambiance shots to drive that point home.
Oh well.
They were handing out drawstring Moxi bags and Unveiled spiral notebooks at the door, and I think all of the exhibitors had piles of small stuff to pass out too. We grabbed only a cute little screen cleaner in the shape of a phone (and bearing the Beijing 2008 Olympics logo for some reason) from the Samsung area.
On our way out of the Venetian, we stopped by the press room to pick up our press bags. You can see some of the Unveiled folk wearing them in the pictures, but here are some isolated shots.
The bag isn’t something I would wear, but it’s really nicely made.
The front of it even detaches from the main backpack and turns into a separate bag. The embroidery ends up sideways, but I guess that’s not the point.
Inside each bag is a T-shirt with the CEA logo printed on the front and "Cool Tech + Free Trade = Strong Economy" on the back. Hmm. The official CES Store is still on my list of places to go during the week.
And that’s it for Day 1 (or Day -1, depending on how you look at it) at CES 2008. I hope tomorrow is a lot more exciting. We’ve got seats at the Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony press conferences in the afternoon and then Digital Experience and an Asus event at night, so it should be. Stay tuned!
