The 2012 CES is ready with Ultra HD, Ultrabooks and ultra viruses

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CES 2012

Some details about the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:

♦ By The Numbers: More than 140,000 people are expected to visit the 2,800 or so exhibitors. The show spans some 1.8 million square feet of booths and exhibits, which is equivalent to 31 football fields.

♦ Location: The Las Vegas Convention and World Trade Center and nearby hotels.

♦ Dates: The show floor is open Tuesday through Friday.

♦ Keynotes: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave the kickoff speech Monday. Other scheduled speakers include Intel Corp. CEO Paul Otellini, Qualcomm Inc. CEO Paul Jacobs and Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally.

♦ Visiting: CES is only open to those in the consumer electronics industry. A business card or other business ID is required. The general public cannot attend.

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Updated: January 11, 2012 10:57AM

If you’ve been meaning to get together with a friend and he or she works in any business related to consumer technology -- creating it, supporting it, promoting it, or writing about it -- I’m sorry to say that your three-day social window has closed. That’s how January works in the tech world. After the holidays, we all return to our offices and by January 5, we’re already so neck-deep in preparations for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that we won’t read any email whose subject line does not contain phrases like “NDA briefing Re: iPad 4” or “We have canceled your hotel reservation because your room is, unavoidably, currently on fire.”

A look at the expected highlights of the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show is a look at the year in tech. Or, given the extended development cycles that go into any complicated product, it’s a look at 2012 as it was imagined by engineers in 2010 and crafted by marketers in 2011.

The TVs

The Iowa State Fair has its annual Giant Butter Cow. CES has its Giant HDTV. This year, the early prize goes to LG with their 84-inch ultra-hi-def 3D TV. As with the cow, it’s certainly worth stopping by the booth and checking it out but would you want one in your home? Displays that quadruple the standard 1080 HD resolution of conventional sets look more like transdimensional portals, albeit portals that only connect to underwater reefs and beaches where it’s always sunset. There’s no standard for ultra-hi-def, however, and though the resolution and pixel density of HDTVs keeps going upward, the resolving power of the human eye remains fixed. The UDTV features of a set like the LG (and a 70-inch model expected from Samsung) will more likely be used to view multiple conventional HD sources simultaneously than for counting the number of cold sores on the lip of a Jets defensive tackle.

Forget UD TV. OLED will be the real HDTV debutante of CES 2012. OLED is the same screen technology that’s built into phones and tablets and Samsung and LG promise that the phone technology will brings the same major feature to large TVs: a wider range of color than conventional LED sets, and faster response times. We’ll just see about that, as well as promises that these will be the first OLED TVs that are priced competitively with LED sets.

One thing’s certain: these things will be unfathomably slim. LG has released shots of a 55-inch OLED set (intended for release around the summer) that’s just 5 millimeters thick. This specific set might just be a one-off that they built for promotional purposes (suspiciously, there’s no model number in the press release) but it still points to how very different OLED technology is.

The cameras

Will 2012 finally be the year when the camera industry settles on one name for a common next-generation style of camera? They’d better get hopping. These new cameras could kill off the consumer SLR by 2013. The idea is to combine the most desirable features of an SLR (a large image sensor for superior photos and low-light performance, interchangeable lenses) and a compact (slides easily into a jacket pocket). Sometimes they’re called “mirrorless compacts” and other times they’re “compact interchangeable-lens cameras.”

Whatever: it’s brilliant. Panasonic and Olympus were first out the gate a few years ago with their joint “Micro Four-Thirds” standard. Now every major player is moving towards mirrorless compact cameras. Sony and Nikon have already jumped in the pool and CES will see a new entry from Fuji. And according to a report posted by Wells Fargo Advisors, Canon (the sole major holdout in this category) is jumping in. Kind of. The $799 G1X will have an enormous (by compact standards) image sensor, if not the interchangeable lens system. (Tip of the hat to Electronista for posting the link.

The notebooks

The movement towards the Ultrabook revolution is still waffling. Intel, perhaps spurred on by the new success of Apple’s 2011 MacBook Airs, started promoting a hardware spec for a similar ultralight, ultraslim notebook that runs Windows.

“Ultrabooks” are defined more by goals than by specifications, however. An Ultrabook should should last almost a full workday on one charge, and linger for weeks in standby mode. It should be ungodly slim. It should boot up in less time than it takes to adjust your chair and it should wake from sleep moments after its screen is opened. And it should ideally be completely free of mechanical components. Meaning: a solid-state drive instead of hard drive, no optical drive, and it should generate so little heat that it won’t require a noisy fan. And it should have a comfortable full-sized screen and keyboard to avoid the cheap build quality and low user experience that consumers associate with netbooks.

A few Ultrabooks were released in 2011 but most makers seemed to have been waiting for Intel to ship their next-generation Ivy Bridge CPUs. They’re far better suited to an Ultrabook than Sandy Bridge technology: they can deliver higher performance while generating much less heat and consuming far less power. I tried to tote up the number of Ultrabooks that have been pre-announced or strongly suspected for announcement at CES and stopped at 18.

It’s a natural evolution for notebooks. The advantages of an Ultrabook aren’t subtle in the least. They’re barely larger and heavier than an iPad, and like a tablet, when you’re ready to take off you can just slap down the screen and throw it in your bag without worrying about hard drives spinning down.

But I wonder if any Ultrabook can have anywhere near the same success in 2012 as Apple had with the MacBook Air in 2011. The Air enjoys a unique advantage: Apple is the only game in town for mobile Macs. The $999 Air is currently the cheapest MacBook you can buy and Apple is making it clear that the decision “Which MacBook should I get?” starts with the 13” Air, not the conventional 13” MacBook Pro.

Whereas in the Windows world, the consumer has nigh-infinite options. Lenovo’s pre-announced a budget $850 model (the T430u). It’s competing against no shortage of superb midrange Windows notebooks that deliver way more features at that same price, and many compact notebooks that cost hundreds of dollars less and (thanks to their thicker forms) can run even longer on battery. The danger is that Ultrabooks will only appeal to people who have truly and fully bought into the concept . . . whereas Mac users buy Airs simply because they wanted a notebook.

The tablets

The year 2012 will also mark the third CES in a row in which Wile E. Coyote (in the guise of any tablet manufacturer whose logo does not resemble a piece of fruit) climbs to the top of a cliff with a heart filled with unchecked optimism, and a pair of roller skates with huge rocket tubes packed around the heels.

In 2010, those makers didn’t know what they would be up against. They knew Apple was releasing a tablet, but nobody had seen it. They returned to CES in 2011 with a second round of samples, but they didn’t know that they’d have to do far, far more than just make a tablet that looked 80 percent like an iPad and which they could sell for no more than 120 percent its cost.

Third time’s the charm? This time, tablet makers are armed with a version of Android that’s a little closer to the desired ideal (Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich). They’ve also learned through cruel trial and error that if you aren’t certain that you can sell a tablet that’s as good as the iPad, you need to at least sell one that costs a hell of a lot less.

Witness Acer’s new Iconia Tab A200, a 10-inch Android tablet that runs last year’s Tegra 2 dual-core mobile CPU. It ships with Android 3.2 but it’ll will receive the Ice Cream treatment by springtime. Price: just $329, albeit with just 8 gigabytes of storage. Will this approach work? Maybe, if Acer (and other companies trying to undercut the $499 iPad) tries harder to tempt away potential purchasers of netbooks instead of iPads.

Wait, who are the leading makers of netbooks? Right: the same companies making these discount tablets.

Oh, dear.

Other manufacturers are pinning their hopes on the new quad-core Tegra 3 processor. Its performance numbers are impressive . . . but is Android the OS and the app library that can properly exploit that kind of CPU power up to the task? I’m not sure. The most useful apps on my iPad aren’t exactly performance-hungry.

The iPad is two years old and yes, it’s annihilating everyone who tries to enter the ring. The Kindle Fire has done well (or so we think; as usual, Amazon’s boasts of record sales without furnishing raw numbers). But in form and in its stated function, it’s hard to define the Fire as a true iPad competitor.

In the end, we still lack an answer to a basic question about this market: has Apple created a true new market for tablet computers, or are consumers only interested in the iPad?

I shall ponder this and many more questions next week, from my usual CES Command Center. Many of my friends and colleagues are headed to Las Vegas to actual command centers with sets and lighting and hard plastic chairs that overlook the convention floor. My own Consumer Electronics Show Command Center consists of my comfy office chair and a desk with an extra two or three screens on it. I’ll be keeping close tabs on news, NDAs, and events from New England. Over the years I’ve found it to be much more productive to talk to engineers and executives after they’ve gotten over whatever strain of the Explosive Flaming Monkey Flu they picked up during the show. I’d also rather get my hands on hardware for more than the edgy three minutes that PR people will give you when you’re recording a video on the convention floor and desperately wiping down every surface of a priceless one-of-a-kind engineering sample with Purell.

The fact that I myself will not contract Flaming Monkey Flu and will have saved $2000 in personal travel expenses doesn’t enter into it at all.