CES 2012 Preview - What to Expect -

CES 2012 Preview – What to Expect

Posted by: Paul Newcomb Posted date: December 31, 2011 | comment : 0

The latest and greatest in the tech industry will be showcased in the annual International CES 2012 event in Las Vegas. It will run from January 9-13 and is shaping up to be one of the biggest yet.

Industry leaders in home entertainment, computing, mobile phones, tablets, and cameras will be announcing new technologies throughout several keynote speeches and also a multitude of informational booths.

CES is expecting around 140,000 people to show up. They are more than prepared for the crowd with a total of 1.8 million square feet of space.

Televisions:

In the past few years, televisions have made some huge leaps not only in 3D technologies and picture quality in general, but also in size and efficiency. Samsung has been leading the way in TV design the past few years, but other brands like Panasonic and Sony are fully expected to catch up and create some buzz this year.

From TechRadar.com:

We’re also expecting to see improved crosstalk-free flagship 3D TV models, universal active 3D glasses, and maybe even the appearance of some glasses-free active 3D prototypes which do the shuttering inside the screen.

I’m especially interested in seeing how the glasses-free TVs will look. My guess is that it will have a horrible picture quality and initially only serve as a novelty.

Gaming:

It’s still unclear whether or not we’ll see any new developments on the Wii U – the highly anticipated new gaming console from Nintendo.

Microsoft is also rumored to have an announcement about it’s new system, the Xbox 720.

It’s fairly obvious that Microsoft would want to get the next Xbox out before the PlayStation 4 – doing so with the 360 saw it gain a huge head start, but whether it’s anywhere near showing its hand seems a bit far-fetched. But who knows?

Computing:

Now that Microsoft has decided that this will be their last year at CES, all eyes will be on them to see what’s up their sleeve and also hoping for more information about the upcoming release of Windows 8 beta – set to release in February.

Another thing we’ll be looking for is how Microsoft is going to be handling it’s support for ARM processors.

At last year’s CES we were invited to a briefing with Microsoft at which it announced ARM support for Windows 8 – and we’re really hoping we’ll get more clarity on this at the show. How will Microsoft differentiate ARM and Intel-based tablets and PCs, for example?

This will become an even bigger issue as traditional x86-based software will not be backwards compatible on ARM-based installs of Windows 8.

We’ll also be watching for Intel to offer some sort of competitive edge against ARM now that they finally have some hearty competition that could potentially change the world of computing. The ARM processor is said to be more efficient, smaller, require less cooling, and more robust in general. Intel’s new processor to be showcased is the Ivy Bridge.

Ivy Bridge itself won’t be with us until later in 2012. However, the new chipsets around the new processor will likely be adorning every motherboard manufacturer’s stand. Intel’s Z77, the high-end chipset companion to Ivy Bridge will be very much in evidence, though we would expect to also see some Z75 and H71 boards at least in the prototype stage.

Mobile:

New mobile products usually don’t get revealed until February at the Mobile World Congress, but lately the competition has been so fierce that we’re expecting to see a lot more mobile action at CES this year.

Tablets will most definitely be at the forefront since there still isn’t a clear-cut champion yet like there is in the phone department (Mainly Android & iPhone). It seems like there are too many new tablets to count as every major tech company is trying to get their name on top of consumers lists.

New and improved chipsets are likely to be showcased:

Most high-end models will have moved on from the Tegra 2 chipset that’s inside many popular Android models today, so we ought to see plenty of quad-core Tegra 3 tablets at the show.

Read more about CES 2012 at TechRadar.com

We’ll continue to cover CES before, during, and after the event and bring you all the latest high-tech goodness, so tay tuned!