A Wider Net

Last January, Apple deflated the giant CES press juggernaut by launching the iPhone a few hundreds of miles away at Macworld Expo. This year, a year after it’s unveiling, CES suffered the same scene-stealing effect, and Macworld hasn’t even happened yet! Dozens, and it felt like hundreds, of new cell phones were unveiled at CES and almost everyone one of them was compared to the iPhone. Surprisingly, the general consensus seems to indicate that not one of them beat, or even matched, the iPhone.

You have to admire Apple’s brand strength and the game-changing ability to shake up an industry that Apple had no prior experience in, and according to some technical analysts, no business being in at all. If you perform a Google search for “compared to iphone CES” you will find pages of search results showing a sample of the comparisons being made between the products at CES 2008 and the iPhone from Macworld 2007 (which, I seem to recall, had more features than the version that ultimately hit the streets).

Perhaps the most astonishing thing is how crappy the phone really is as a phone. Similar to the iPod, it falls short compared to its competitors in many ways. No support for Exhange or Lotus Notes makes it terrible for enterprise users. The browser can’t play flash movies so they conned YouTube into making special versions of their most popular videos just for iPhone users. The memory is very limited and it has no expansion capability. It has zero physical buttons - a mistake that pretty much every wanna-be at CES was not willing to make. And most importantly, it’s stuck on AT&T which, according to most users and Consumer Reports, is in a dead heat with Sprint for the bottom of the barrel for quality and service. Not to mislead - it’s a marvelous product in many ways, too. Its combination of small combined with easily the most intuitive user interface and robust media capabilities make it a delight to play with.

I am particularly grateful that Apple entered this market, even though I will never get one as long as they are stuck with AT&T. The changes in the phones that have already resulted form their entry are remarkable, even though a little short of being truly competitive from a gadget sexiness perspective.

What can we, as marketers, learn from this? Two rather obvious things:
1. Customer loyalty can too easily be undervalued. Oddly, Apple built that loyalty with great products and great marketing but to my knowledge, they didn’t do it by publicly listening to them. You may find it easier and better to do it in plain sight.
2. Recognizing a market that is completely saturated with second-rate products like the previous generation of cell phones is good business. It’s easier to stand out when everyone else is wearing the same shade of gray.

Photo from All About Symbian

Gizmodo has a nice top 10 booths of CES roundup. I would bet this is the only gallery of its kind in which Peter Frampton is depicted as a “top booth”.

EDIT - And Engadget added something of a booth gallery, too.

Or you can just check out the rapidly growing Flickr pool tagged CES2008.

The bloggers from Gizmodo ran amok at CES with a tiny portable IR transmitter that shuts down almost any TV screen in sight. The fact that CES, with 1.85million square feet of TELEVISIONS wasn’t prepared for this even though the devices have been around for years, is fairly surprising.

This sort of prank isn’t unique to CES, so exhibitors at any show will want to heed this vivid warning and block their IR ports. In the meantime, I have to work on not laughing every time I see this video of the prank in action.

EDIT - The blogger has been officially banned from CES, and additional actions against Gizmodo may also be taken.

Reactrix, a gesture-based interactive signage company who is best known for their permanent interactive floor installations in malls all over the USA, partnered with Samsung at CES to showcase a new product called WAVEscape. Clearly a competitive offering to Gesturetek’s Gestpoint, the WAVEscape appears to be considerably easier to stage. You simply hang a 3D Infrared sensor bar above the screen and you’re ready to go (I think). The sensor can detect hands and fingers in 3D so it can react to motion such as a horizontal sweep or a forward point, which it would probably interpret as a mouse click. It appears to work with several people at once.

The video at Gizmodo makes it look fairly decent, although it suffers from the same awkward lag that Gesturetek’s products can have when the application isn’t well-tuned. They demonstrate the device being used in a “box the panda game” (has PETA seen this?), a traditional point-and-click application, and virtual volleyball.

As a method for creating a compelling interactive experience, with one or more participants, this looks like another promising offering. Is it as intuitive and slick as Microsoft Surface? Not even close - but it can service a larger crowd, will probably work through storefront windows, and is much easier to hang on a wall. It is also much easier to keep clean!

CNET has a nice article about it, too.

It’s magic, and I want one for presentations. It’s a motorized screen that you carry into a room, plop it down on the floor, and an 84 or 100″ screen rises out of it like a charmed snake. See the video at Gizmodo.

Before:

After:

UMPC Portal published a nice roundup of the Ultra Mobile PC and Mobile Internet Devices at CES 2008.

You may be asking “what do I do with these little things?”. Most people ask that question. That’s why you can’t find them in stores. At least… not in this country.

The rest of the world gets it. They’re great because they’re small, light, easy, and cool. They run familiar things like Vista and Word and Firefox and PowerPoint. And because they can’t quite squeeze all that into your phone. Yet…

This 52″ Multitouch screen that LG/Philips showcased at CES appears at first to trump the Microsoft Surface product, at least in terms of a multitouch interactive display device. Surface is a coffee table, whereas this is a wall-mount display. Surface is, again, a coffee table, and this is a flat panel display. They both offer multi-touch. But when you watch the video below you notice several big differences. The surface interface demos have been optimized for intuitive behavior. If you place your hand on an image and drag your hand it moves the image with your hand. In the LG/Philips demo, the hand movements of the presenter and the google earth images on display are not intuitively connected. Also, he regularly struggles with the interface which is the exact opposite experience of Surface. Frankly, I could have brought up the images he requested far faster with a traditional mouse and keyboard, so what’s the point?

The Surface team has been very careful to make sure they design applications that use the technology effectively and appropriately. They step back and ask themselves “could I do this as well or better with a mouse and keyboard or a traditional touch screen?” and “Am I adding value or adding to the experience with this technology”.

The best part of seeing this video is the fact that other companies are getting inspired to join the party. Multi-touch interfaces are a big part of our man-machine interface future, and like the iPhone, Surface is creative very positive activity in the research labs of their competitors. Now I think they need to pick up the pace!

Thanks again, Engadget.

Engadget published a terrific video of the Optimus Maximus keyboard at CES. You may recall that this keyboard has tiny full-color displays inside each key cap that allows they keyboard to change its appearance for different applications, user preferences, languages, etc.

In this video, the inventor Art Lebedev describes much of the functionality, and makes it really appealing to anyone working with macro-intensive applications (Photoshop, edit software, etc), gamers, etc. As I mentioned a year ago, there must be a way for a company to buy the rights to display their logo on one of those keys and drive traffic to their website, in return for subsidizing the cost of the device. That sponsor could even change that logo remotely to reflect special promotions (Woot! - are you listening? I need a woot-off key!).

I’m assuming that the key labels can change when you depress the ctrl, shift, and alt keys - making the process of finding those obscure macro keys and shortcuts far easier.

Now… if only Mr. Lebedev would send me one to review extensively…

What do these devices have in common?

via multiple sources including Engadget and Ubergizmo

Another gadget from CES - this one makes it easy for you to record podcasts on your iPod with “professional” results.
You probably should be thinking about podcasting. You probably need to think about the quality of the content far more than you need to think about cool (but kinda cornball) devices like this:

via Engadget