While overwhelming at times, the Consumer Electronics Show this year has a number of interesting automotive sessions.
As a tech journalist, I have attended the Consumer Electronics Show a number of times over the past two decades, but do I miss it? If you haven’t been, it can be quite overwhelming given that it is aimed at consumers, so imagine loud music, flashing lights, and booth babes.
It is also fun for us geeks from a technology perspective. Actually, it is interesting for anyone that likes to see cool and new technology.
Had I attended this year, I would have been on the lookout for all things automotive because there is so much happening there. NXP, Imagination, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Marvell, ARM, Rambus, among the many automotive suppliers. The CES exhibit list includes 494(!) exhibitors in the automotive electronics category alone, not to mention at least the five automotive-focused conference sessions.
One auto-focused show I do plan to attend this year is the SAE 2016 World Congress, which also blogs about what’s been happening at CES from an automotive perspective.
And as we here at Semiconductor Engineering ramp up our coverage of automotive electronics and security, 2016 is already shaping up to be a very interesting year…and I have a feeling I will find myself not missing CES next year.
Are you attending CES this week? Comment below and let me know what you are seeing of interest.
Special thanks to Phil Steffora for submitting the following photo from the show floor at the Ford booth:
Photo credit: Phil Steffora
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Not there but the fact that auto dominates shows you how little excitement is in everything else.
PC makers are trying to label convertible laptops as tablets, Android Wear is not ready to offer sanely priced products although Casio adopting it is a big deal.
Only one interesting phone launched, the second most interesting phone launched during CES wasn’t at CES but in India ( Lenovo K4 Note).
Tablets are just not there. It’s either sub 100$ Android tablets or over 700$ Windows and Core M tabs. In between it’s just tragic.
IoT does seem to be starting to offer some products that would be useful to some buyers , nothing huge but maybe it’s starting to take off in consumer.
802.11ad is starting to be relevant but nobody seems to have any interesting peripherals and accessories using it just yet and that would be the fun part here.
Too many drones,not enough robots, Lots of cars , too few electric scooters, bikes and bellow.
VR and AR seem a bit lost , VR in greed . AR is poor product design and lack of a software ecosystem. AR had Garmin’s Varia Vision that is actually marketable to some extent.
And ofc lots of appliances targeted at the top 0.5% of global consumers – unavoidable flaw of the system. It does seem to be harder and harder for people earning more than they need to design products for the great unwashed.Very different lifestyle, different needs, different values and that’s bound to be a problem.
All in all less boring than last year but not nearly as exciting as 2-3 years ago.
That is a very interesting observation, thank you. It does appear that a number of consumer technologies are in flux at the moment.