CES 2012 Preview: 3DTV Football, Ultramobile PCs, Wireless, and Some Gadget Sneak Peeks Discussion

With CES 2012 now entering the near horizon, what will we ultimately see at the annual trade show extravaganza in January? Despite the ongoing recession, you can expect a bigger product exhibition area in Las Vegas this year, along with live boxing, 3DTV football broadcasts, a concert by the band Chicago, and product rollouts that will include tons of new ultramobile PCs and tablets, a camera that lets you adjust the focus after you've taken a photo, and hordes of other intriguing gadgets.

Read the full content of this Article: CES 2012 Preview: 3DTV Football, Ultramobile PCs, Wireless, and Some Gadget Sneak Peeks

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Man I love CES, always wanted to go. Any of the NBR crew going to attend?
Seems like UltraBooks are going have a big showing.

 

There will be a large number of editors from NotebookReview, DesktopReview, TabletPCReview, Brighthand, DigitalCameraReview, and PrinterComparison attending CES in January.

We'll have numerous hands-on reports, videos and maybe even a few surprise product reviews once CES gets underway.

Intel has invested a lot of money into making Ultrabooks big at CES, so there will certainly be some new Ultrabooks showing up at CES ... but I suspect the big news will be manufacturers pushing for hybrid tablet/notebooks and several other developments that are more or less related to Windows 8 in 2012.

 

I really want to see what's become of the Razer Switchblade, one of the highlights of last year's CES. A representative said it would release within 6-12 months, so hopefully there is a revamped version as well as launch details awaiting.

 

The availability of Razer's Switchblade depends entirely on OEMs buying into Razer's reference design and making the product (or products) available to consumers. I get the feeling there is a lot of uncertainty in the cloud gaming market right now ... the two largest factors being uncertainty in the unstable global economy (meaning fewer people are going to buy into a completely new gaming solution) and uncertainty in the future of cloud gaming tech.

For example, so far the closest thing to a cloud gaming "success" has been OnLive but even OnLive hasn't taken off as well as initially anticipated. Microsoft is also throwing a HUGE curve ball into the cloud/mobile gaming market with Windows 8. Early demos and rumors about Windows/Xbox Live integration in Windows 8 suggests that gamers are going to have some interesting options for PC and Xbox gaming on Windows 8 desktops, notebook, tablets AND smartphones/handhelds ... which might make a dedicated cloud gaming device like the Razer Switchblade less appealing.

That said, I really like the Razer Switchblade reference design (particularly the keyboard) and I hope there is something new to see at CES in January.

 

At this point, the Switchblade has never been described as a cloud gaming device. All of the games demoed at CES were played locally. Although, that would be a very smart way to keep prices reasonable and for it to be able to play much more than the Atom would allow. Then that comes with its own issues, with the biggest for Razer being game selection and distribution. Gamers will not want to be bound to a limited library of available titles so either significant content licensing will have to bet set in place unless Razer lets users install their own programs to the servers utilized (unlikely, but they could start users off with a certain amount of disk space then have them charge for extra.) For myself, I feel that visual quality is significantly degraded to the point that it is distracting on OnLive even on a 20mbp/s connection.

I wish they would play around with the form factor more, perhaps expanding to 10" so that ULV processors and a superior video card can be the muscle behind it.