@ CES: Notebook From The Show Floor

I finally had a chance to walk around the show floor at CES Wednesday and check out some of the stuff on display. Most of the eye-catching things weren’t mobile related (like the huge Transformer from the Dolby booth, pictured here), but I did find some cool things. Still, overall, as Staci commented on Monday, there didn’t seem to be a lot of “wow” this year. There were a few products that had some buzz, like Panasonic’s 150-inch plasma TV, but there weren’t many of them, and there was no one thing that everybody was talking about. For mobile products, things were pretty quiet, despite a number of handset launches; perhaps CES will soon fall back behind the Mobile World Congress (formerly called 3GSM) and CTIA on the product release schedule. Check out the extended entry for some things that did catch my eye…

– Pico projectors. Both TI and 3M were showing off prototype projectors that they say will make their way into mobile phones this year (See my Flickr stream for photos of these and other items). They were only in mockups, not working handsets, but they worked well, even with all the ambient light of the show floor. While these projectors won’t replace bigger, more powerful models in home theaters or boardrooms just yet, they could have some interesting use cases.

– Mobile TV everywhere. There was a lot of talk about mobile TV, but it wasn’t about streaming video, or technologies like DVB-H and MediaFLO, which were largely invisible. Talk this time around focused on technologies that operate in the sidebands of terrestrial digital TV broadcasts, meaning they can be delivered by local TV broadcasters, and potentially for free. Rival technologies from Korean companies LG (SEO: 066570) and Samsung will go into tech trials this year, ahead of the DTV transition next February. Having two competing standards isn’t an ideal situation, but it would seem that this free mobile TV market could be the one that takes off. It doesn’t seem likely that mobile operators will be particularly about subsidizing handsets that offer free mobile TV services that compete with their paid ones, but it’s important to remember that mobile TV is about more than just delivering video to mobile phones. The market for backseat and in-car entertainment and data services could establish the viability of this type of mobile TV, with operators coming around to support it after its popularity with consumers grows.

– Bettering Bluetooth. On the face of it, Bluetooth is a great short-range wireless technology — but the user experience and implementation isn’t the best. Pairing devices and establishing connections isn’t always easy, and some companies are looking to capitalize on this. Parrot, which makes a wide range of Bluetooth accessories, has integrated Near-Field Communications (NFC) technology with Bluetooth, and uses it to pair and connect two devices. For instance, on its stand, the company had an NFC- and Bluetooth-enabled digital photo frame. Instead of having to pair it to a phone before transmitting an image, users just snap a picture, then touch the phone to the frame, and they get a dialog asking if they want to send the photo. It’s a simple process, and a great deal easier than current Bluetooth set-up. Along similar lines was Sony’s (NYSE: SNE) TransferJet technology, which it was demonstrating to transfer photos from a digital camera to a home media server. When you put the camera on top of the server, it sent the photos at speeds around 375 Mbps, with no user interaction needed. It doesn’t have any pairing or other security measures; since it only works over a distance of a few inches, proximity is its security feature. As users’ appetite for creating and sharing their own media continues to grow, these sorts of technologies will play a crucial role.

– Attack of the MIDs. Get used to that acronym, you’re going to hear it a lot lately. Abbreviating Mobile Internet Device, a loosely-defined group of products that fall somewhere between laptops and mobile phones in terms of price, size and power. Some of them are souped-up media players with local- or wide-area internet connections; others are intended to be laptop replacements. Intel (NSDQ: INTC) had a number of different models on display in its booth, many of them running full versions of Windows. Other manufacturers have similar devices, such as Nokia’s (NYSE: NOK) internet tablets, but they’re all designed for roughly the same purposes. It would seem that manufacturers are going to pump out plenty of these devices — but the big question will be if consumers need something to squeeze in between their PC and their handsets, particularly as mobile phones grow more and more capable.