What Happened to CES? Is the era ending?

Its been another year of insane coverage from CES. Weve seen some great things, but the number of great things were heavily diminished by the number of oh, me too products on the market.

In 2011, we saw so many companies doing the exact same thing (and many of them doing it poorly) that its hard to even view this years CES in a positive light. Is the innovation gone? Has the consumer electronics market become so single-minded that theres simply nothing left to do? I dont think so, but it sure looked that way.

Tablet Terror

Of course, in 2010, one of the biggest stories of the year was the iPad. It truly was the game-changer that showed the slate to be a viable format both for consumption and production. But what we saw at CES was that everybody seemed to be making one, yet very few were actually making anything wed use.

The notable exception? The Xoom. The Motorola project, while still in early stages, appears to be very promising. However, even though the hardware is important, the real story is in the Android 3.0 operating system. This OS change didnt require CES in order to be a big deal. The fact that we first saw it at CES just means that more people saw it at the same time, but it would have been a big deal even on any random Tuesday.

Whats worse? Some of the manufacturers who came to CES didnt even have a prototype. Apparently gone are the days when we could walk into the Las Vegas convention center and drool over things that may or may not appear while we at least got to see a physical representation of a final product. It seems that now its perfectl! y accept able to show up with just an idea or a drawing and talk about what could be rather than showing us. For those of us who have become addicted to the bleeding edge of gadgets, this is unacceptable.

Forget About Phones

photo 2010 John Karakatsanis | more info (via: Wylio)Lets face it the smartphone market is ruled by 2 names: iPhone and Android. Most Android phones are pretty similar, and theres only 1 iPhone. With all of the releases at CES, there was nothing that really excited us very much. Oh sure, we liked some of them. Some were very pretty and theyre easy to be excited about. But really, there was nothing that was entirely new. Bigger screens, better cameras and an operating system that weve seen every day simply dont bring excitement. Its CES. Show us something weve not seen.

The real story, and the one that took over CES without even being there, came from Apple with its iPhone release on Verizon. But even that isnt some technological change from the norm. Its simply a CDMA version of an already-released phone.

While this is neither the time nor place to talk about what the next big things in mobile might be, its certainly the place to expressdisappointmentin the fact that we didnt see any of them this year.

Robot Rhumba

Oh sure, there were robots. There are always robots. But why didnt we see anything that was truly new? Even the fabulous Courtney Boyd Myers, our robotaficionado, seemed a bit underwhelmed. While were not expecting 2011 to be the year that we all turn into The Jetsons, its always nice to walk a show floor and see the things that could eventually happen.

From everything that we saw this year, it was like a re-hash from years before. When the most exciting robot that weve seen thus far in 2011 actually got announced before CES, its like our childhood gadget dreams have just gone down the drain.

Window Washing

So Windows will eventually run on ARM processors. This actually is exciting, but only for a very small segment of the population. The rest of what we saw from the Microsoft camp, excluding the incredibly cool new Surface 2 table, was met with a pretty large amount of meh across the Internet.

Where is our completely connected house? Why are refrigerators suddenly a bigger deal that the things that we can actually play with? Lets face facts a second time technology and gadgets are supposed to be fun! Nobody actually needs these things in order to survive, we simply raise their necessity value in our own minds in order to justify our love for them. Microsoft, for years, has led the pack in providing us with eye candy that wed love to own but cant just yet. This year, aside from the Surface 2, that desire factor just wasnt there.

Remains of the Rest

Whats really unfortunate about how things went down this year is that there are some incredibly cool, useful products out there. Things such as the iHealth system seem, at this point, to need a show of their own in order to really stand out. Yes, theyre still consumer electronics, but theyre electronics that make a difference in peoples lives instead of just being fun.

It gets more and more difficult with each passing year for products such as the iHealth to gain air time. Why? Because were constantly being inundated with bigger and better versions of products that already exist and so its hard to get face to face with those ones that dont. So that makes me wonder is the era coming to an end? Are so many companies worried about keeping up with the proverbial Joneses that it has stifled true innovation? Lets hope thats not the case.

Maybe between now and CES 2012, the tablet wars and 3D mania will die down and companies will be forced to truly innovate in order to impress the gadget-worshipingmasses. For now, if you want to check out all of the things that we found cool at this years CES, make sure to take a browse through TNW Gadgets.CES Image, CBM Robot