I don’t think CES was really about the gadgets this year but rather all that invisible stuff floating around the show floor, namely wireless connectivity. Pick you flavor – CDMA, GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth – if your gadget didn’t have it, it probably will need it in the very near future to compete.
After listening to both the Qualcomm and Intel keynotes, I was convinced: my toothbrush will have an embedded wireless connection by the first half of next year. It’s no mystery that both Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, and Paul Olletini, CEO of Intel, highlighted the role wireless will play in consumer electronics. Both of these chipmaking giants has a vested interest in seeing that absolutely everything, and I mean everything, is wirelessly enabled.
Olletini told a story through demos, some of them conceptual, some of them market-ready. In the end, he and Intel imagine a world where consumers own multiple devices and each of those devices can talk amongst themselves, a kind of continuous cocktail party of technology. Imagine your baby’s stroller with GPS and a FLO TV display in the handlebars. Imagine your home theater system connected to your central heating and air conditioning.
The emerging device category continues to grow, as do existing devices that now feature connections. Netbooks, eReaders, tablets, smartbooks, smartphones, TVs, digital picture frames, cameras and gaming consoles, just to name a few, are already connecting with one another over the air. Have a listen to the evangelizing prophet, Tony Lewis, over at Verizon Wireless and you’ll be sold on where the emerging M2M market is headed. According to Lewis, you can ad your dishwasher, car, washer and dryer, as well as your coffee maker, to that list.
Some of these things have already happened. Some are the dreams of engineers just waiting to pounce on the opportunity represented by today’s cutting-edge wireless technologies. And while hardware developers everywhere are scrambling to enable their new devices, there’s still that little issue of the networks scaling to meet the needs of what is a tidal wave of new devices connecting to the network.
In their keynotes, both Jacobs and Otellini stressed the importance of 4G. How could they not? As chipmakers continue to ship millions of wireless-enabled chips, AT&T is still struggling to support the iPhone. Who knows, Verizon may very well begin feeling the pinch as more Android devices join its network, which is to say nothing about all the connecting gadgetry Lewis expects the network to support in the very near future.
A clearer picture of what all these devices will mean might be to imagine if every day were like trying to get a 3G connection at CES in Las Vegas, where the networks are flooded to the max by the arrival of every smartphone-toting tech geek in the country. During the show, I had the luxury of testing out one of Sprint’s new 4G hot spots, the Sprint Overdrive, and I have to say that while it was a good connection, it was far from the blazing speeds I’d expected.
In the end, I guess CES left me wondering whether even 4G will be enough to support the vast number of wireless devices headed our way. One thing’s for sure, the devices won’t be waiting for the carriers to get their networks up to speed.