CES: 2002 Show Report

Although we arrived early for Monday's Press Day and meetings with Microsoft and other companies, the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) didn't officially kick off until Tuesday morning. Unlike COMDEX, CES has grown dramatically in recent years, and the types of consumer electronics products seen here are far more interesting and relevant than most of what COMDEX has to offer. We expect the attendance and importance of CES to soon surpass that of COMDEX, if it hasn't already.

Monday night, we attended the keynote address from Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, which wasn't as boring as many of his recent speeches. Gates demonstrated Microsoft's Freestyle and Mira technologies, which are genuinely exciting although probably a year from fruition. The Microsoft employees we spoke with at the post-keynote reception were even more conservative, stating that they expected these technologies to require many iterations and several years before they go mainstream. We're not so sure about that estimate: Freestyle, especially, seems to be mature and in the same state that Windows Media Player (WMP) 8 was when we first previewed it 6 months before Microsoft completed it.

In a Tuesday morning meeting with Microsoft, we briefly discussed Freestyle and Mira with Dave Fester, general manager of the Windows Digital Media Division. Fester reiterated that the company designed Freestyle specifically for what it calls "the 10' experience," and said that Freesyle is just the first generation of this technology. He noted that his group provides the underlying plumbing for the work the eHome Division is doing. "Freestyle is just another UI for accessing the digital-media features in Windows XP," he said.

Most of our Tuesday morning Microsoft meeting, however, concerned Corona, the next generation of Windows Media technologies. Corona encompasses several components, including WMP, Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) codecs, Windows Media Encoder, and the Windows Media software development kit (SDK). The Corona timeframe is somewhat vague, but we expect that Microsoft will finalize all these products before the end of the year. Note that the Corona version of WMP will run on "several Windows versions," according to the company, although the XP version will be more full-featured because of that platform's richer feature set.

Microsoft Group Product Manager Jonathan Usher provided a tour of Corona's capabilities and noted the momentum that Windows Media formats have experienced during the past year. A range of devices, including portable, car-audio, home-stereo, and PC-based products, now supports WMA and WMV formats. The company has distributed 350 million copies of WMP, and with 11 million unique visitors, windowsmedia.com is the most popular audio/video guide on the Web. This figure was less than 7.5 million before XP shipped.

At the show, Microsoft made a key digital-media announcement that concerned major DVD makers' plans to support the WMA format in their consumer DVD players. APEX, Panasonic, Toshiba, and other companies will support the playback of WMA audio files on data CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, providing 22 hours and 160 hours, respectively, of playback per disk. Panasonic, in particular, is offering WMA support on a range of devices; the company will issue 10 DVD players, a range of portable audio players, and other products that support Microsoft's format. Aiwa, Blaupunkt, Kenwood, and Pioneer are also supporting WMA data CDs in car stereo systems.

The Corona player and server products support six discrete sound channels for blistering, theatre-quality playback. A particularly effective demonstration during the Gates keynote featured a THX-style sound promo and a WMV clip from the Disney movie Dinosaur, which rocked the house and elicited a lot of applause. Usher said that users will be able to use Corona's 3Mpbs near-DVD-quality encoding process to fit two feature-length films on single-sided data DVDs.

Windows .NET Server will support two interesting Windows Media technologies that will benefit content providers and consumers alike. The Instant On feature will effectively eliminate buffering for broadband users, ending the annoying wait when loading streaming video. The Fast Stream feature silently saturates your data pipe as you stream video, loading the player's cache with as much of the movie as possible; this feature prevents network degradation from disrupting the movie playback and ruining your experience.

After the Windows Media meeting, we hit the show floor, which spread far and wide throughout the recently expanded Las Vegas Convention Center. Zenith dominated the entrance to the main hall with its XP-themed "Digitize the Experience" products. We spent some time with SONICblue, which now owns several key digital-media products and technologies, including the Rio line of digital-audio products, the ReplayTV Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), and GoVideo. In February, SONICblue will ship a 20GB hard-disk-based portable audio player called the Riot. This jukebox device includes a beautiful screen and interface, USB connection, and 10-hour battery life; it will retail for about $400, giving the Apple iPod a serious run for its money. SONICblue is also shipping a home-entertainment device called the Rio Advanced Digital Audio Center, which features a 40GB hard disk, a CD-RW, USB connectors for connecting Rio portable devices, and a whopping $1499 price tag.

We stopped by Pinnacle's booth to check out the company's movie-maker and DVD-creation packages. Pinnacle makes several video-oriented hardware and software products that we'll cover more extensively in Connected Home EXPRESS.

Unfortunately, Belkin had a poor booth location, but the company made up for it by winning several design awards for its USB hubs, wireless products, keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) switches, and game controllers. We still use a keyboard/mouse combo on most first-person games but came away impressed with Belkin's Nostromo game controllers, which are amazingly inexpensive and easy to configure.

Microsoft had a suitably huge booth, although it was buried in the back half of the north hall. As with last year's show, the company used a connected-home theme to show how its products work in each room in a typical home. The booth also featured large displays for Freestyle and Mira, Pocket PC, Windows CE for Automotive, Windows Media, Xbox, and XP.

We then headed into Compaq's meeting rooms, where we used the company's free wireless connection to check email on our 802.11b-equipped iPaqs. Compaq was showing off its new line of Presario PCs, which include a smart card-based keyboard; you can use these smart cards to store Web passwords and credit card information so you don't need to enter the information every time you visit secure sites. Although Compaq didn't agree with the comparison, this system competes with Passport, which the company's biggest partner, Microsoft, makes. We also checked out Compaq's new Evo laptop products and iPaq accessories.

Then it was time for meetings about Windows CE .NET, which Microsoft recently released, and Mira, the upcoming networking technology based on XP. CE .NET is aimed squarely at the embedded market; the product is a sister product of sorts to Windows XP Embedded (XPe) that targets small, mobile, intelligent devices. This latest iteration adds better realtime features, low-level XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) support, and support for the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework, a subset of the full .NET Framework. Developer support for CE .NET is in transition right now because the Visual Studio .NET environment, which will target CE .NET, won't ship until mid-February. But Microsoft has some interim tools available, including a free emulation edition and an embedded C++ compiler.

Mira is another story. Designed in tandem with Freestyle, Mira is a standalone technology that will let users "remote" their PCs' displays to screens other than the standard CRT. One typical example is a dockable flat-panel display that you use sitting in front of the PC. But you could pick up the display and carry it to other parts of the house, connected wirelessly, and access all your applications and data using a stylus. The connection technology is based on 802.11b and Windows Terminal Services. Other remote-screen possibilities include a new generation of television sets and kitchen-cabinet-mounted displays.

Mira makes for a good demo, but it's slow. Clicking on icons or the Start button requires patience because the response time lags by a second or two, which feels slower than it reads. The idea that every screen in your home could be connected is a good one, however. We'll be interested to see how Mira pans out.

Finally, we sat down with some people from the XP team to discuss some of the upcoming products Microsoft is building on the new platform. Third-party developers are just starting to ship XP-specific products, a few of which are worth mentioning.

The first is a Digital Persona fingerprint reader that makes it easy to log on to an XP PC. It works amazingly fast and interacts with Fast User Switching to provide instant logons: Just walk up to the PC, press your thumb onto the USB-connected pad, and you're in.

We also looked at an upcoming Sonic Foundry product called Super Duper Music Looper. Aimed at kids and the young at heart, this application lets you create music using a variety of instruments and a simple "painting" interface. But most interestingly, it builds on XP's Messenger service and lets you contact your online buddies from within the program and share your music or collaborate on songs, assuming the other person also owns the program. Super Duper Music Looper also works natively with the WMA format.

Lastly, we asked about some of the upcoming .NET Alerts we saw at the XP launch, some of which we're still waiting for, and found out about another interesting alert that will ship soon. Microsoft is working with the Weather Channel to provide location-based weather alerts through Windows Messenger, and you'll be able to configure the service to provide a variety of weather-related notifications, such as severe weather alerts. If you're going to travel, you can set up the service to feed you weather updates from any destination.