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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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CES 2006: Bill Gates Keynote
The satellite broadcast of the keynote began with a video clip of the history of Microsoft and their "digital vision" of the future. Unfortunately the audio was badly mixed and the background music was much louder than the audio feed of people speaking, so I caught almost nothing of what was said. This is going to be a largely stream-of-consciousness report, so please forgive any errors on my part.In 1982 the personal computer was Time's "Man of the Year", and Gates talked about how the growth of the PC has revolutionized the world as we know it. He launched into a demo that he believes will be made possible by the end of "The Digital Decade" (the next four years). There was a large touch screen and he used his fingers to drag and drop photos of the kids and art that they had created. He then sat down at a desk with a massive three-panel LCD display, with huge icons and an active video conferencing session. Bill picked up a thin Tablet PC and was able to take content from the Tablet PC and drag it into the conferencing window. The remainder of the demo was done at an imaginary airport, and was quite cool. He put a Smartphone onto a public kiosk and using Bluetooth it identified the phone and the owner, and asked him to authenticate via biometrics. After authenticating he was presented with a full-sized version of his desktop projected onto the workspace table. He took out a business card, put it on the table, and a camera recognized the information. When he dragged the card onto his projected desktop, it added the contact information to the contact list on the phone. When he picked up the phone, it logged him out. Cool!The next segment of the keynote focused on getting all your data any time you need it. This is the kind of stuff that I've been thinking about for a long time - Gates even mentioned a specific scenario that I've imagined for years. Being able to pick up someone else's device, and once you're authenticated through biometics, you'd have access to all your data. For all intents and purposes, it is your device because it has everything you care about it on it. It sounds great, but really, are our data networks up to the task? I'd say we're at least 5-10 years away from having the affordable bandwidth required to do all that. It's definitely the future, but I'm a bit more pessimistic about when it will be here.A demo of Windows Vista came next. The presenter whipped through a whole bunch of new Vista features: task switching, the Aero Glass interface, the sidebar with gadgets, and several others. IE7 has a new feature that's very cool - you can see thumbnailed versions of all the tabs that you've opened. Parental controls were mentioned next - you'll be able to specify ESRB ratings for each profile, so if you don't want little Timmy playing games he shouldn't.They showed a quick demo of the new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. The graphics were very impressive, though it looked quite choppy (there's still a year of development work left). Excellent reflections and bump mapping.Memories in Vista are a priority - they have a photo browser that looks similar to Picasa, though not as smooth. Basic image editing is included - cropping, adjusting contrast and brightness, red eye reduction, etc. The original images is always saved, so if you want to undo a crop down the road, you can. Windows Slideshow is another function - it looks fantastic! It combines photos and videos, wraps them in frames, and puts them on a background. It looked great.Windows Media Player 11 was highlighted next - when you click on artist you get the album art rather than a text list. It looks like it's much, much faster. They used a collection of 10,000 songs for the demo and it blasted through it like there were only 100 songs. Stacked albums give you a visual indication of how many albums match the search criteria.MTV came up next - there was some of the usual blah-blah, then they talked about Urge, MTV's new product. It sounds like a iTunes competitor - although as Jake Ludington pointed out sitting next to me, maybe eventually it will be all reality TV and will contain no music. ;-) According to the MTV spokesperson, Urge will have 2 million tracks, 100+ CD quality radio stations, hand-build playlists, and a subscription plan. The demo left me with one impression: it was fast. Considering the festering hell of slowness that is Napster, this is a big breath of fresh air. The search results from within Urge looked a lot like MSN Music: fast, clean, great user interface. Then Justin Timberlake came out and gave an Urge endorsement. Overall, Urge looks really cool, but it's likely going to be USA-only, so I don't want to let myself get too excited. And hopefully they'll be using 160 kbps or higher WMA files.Bill Gates took over the presentation again and discussed the Tablet PC and Windows Mobile. It's nice to hear him mention Windows Mobile in the same breath as the Tablet PC, which has traditionally been his pet favourite project. He gave a demo of the Treo 700w, and it will be on sale from Verizon tomorrow. EVDO and the Treo - that's one tasty combination. I got some hands-on time with the Treo earlier today, and it was quite impressive. The 240 x 240 resolution isn't too bad, and it's really fast considering it's 312 mhz CPU. He demoed a cordless Philips phone that uses MSN Messenger VOIP calls, though I don't think it's a Windows Mobile phone because he didn't mention Exchange sync. ;-)IPTV came next, and Bill had a quick smile as he said that if you were presented with ads that were targetted to your interests you wouldn't wan to skip over them...as much. Yeah, right. ;-) AT&T and Verizon are rolling out deployments of IPTV, and in the words of Gates, it "blows away" traditional TV. The ability to pick up any wirelessly connected device and get any TV show, at any time, is a very compelling scenario. I don't know much about IPTV being from the Great White North, but I'm interested to see how it will play out. My local phone company, Telus, has started to offer an IPTV solution, though I don't think it's based on the Microsoft product.Windows Media Center continues to grow, and 2006 is shaping up to be a banner year. Gates discussed Intel's Viiv platform, though he didn't go into much detail about how it intersected with Windows Media Center. Video content providers are a key component to consumer adoption - he announced a partnership today with DirectTV, saying that you'd get able to get both high-definition and standard-definition content on Media Centers and Portable Media Centers. Joe Belfiore <sp?> came out to talk more about Windows Media Center and their new video partners. They announced five new partners, including the Comedy Central "Daily Load". Being a big John Stewart fan (his comedy, not always his politics), this is a cool new addition. Next he talked about an Averatec PC that is quite small - smaller than a DVD player. With a tuner it will cost under $1000 USD, and without a tuner will be $499. One would hope that there's more of a difference between the two than just a TV tuner - likely a much bigger hard drive, more RAM, etc.The Toshiba Gigabeat Portable Media Center was shown next. 30 GB hard drive, $299 USD price point, QVGA screen, and four hours of video playback (I was told six hours). The hardware design is killer - I got to spend some time with this unit today (I'll publish photos later) and it was very impressive.Stars Vongo Service was announced next - and this is a very big deal. Vongo offers unlimited downloads of videos for $9.99 a month - they have 1000 movies right now and are ramping up with more content. The movies are also available for individual purchase as well. Next he showed the LG PMC - 16:9 screen QVGA screen, bigger in size, longer battery life, built-in stereo speakers.Live.com offers some compelling ways to delve into video content - you can look up TV shows based on genres, then click on a link to set up a recording on your Media Center PC. He then demonstrated a chat with an IM bot that shows the TV shows that buddies on his IM list watch. He also asked it what's on tonight, and it gave him a listing of all the TV shows on this evening. He then asked for it to filter down to sci-fi content, and it showed him the sci-fi that was on that evening. It recommended Toshiba's HD-DVD player looks huge! It will be available in March for $499. It had better be a multi-disc unit, because it's simply massive in size. He showed a clip from the Bourne Identity, and the interactive viewing experience. It was definitely a jump beyond what normal DVDs can do - in fact, they showed a feature that blew me away. I'm constantly looking up actors that I see in movies, and on the HD-DVD they showed a feature where you could bring up biographical data of the actors in a scene.They also showed a feature that can only be described as...creepy. Rather than a simple voiceover commentary, it had a floating torso of the commentator as he spoke. Not something I'd ever use, though the potential is interesting.Managed copy was the big deal though - the demo he showed offered three options, one for getting a high-definition version of the video, one for a standard definition, and one for Portable Media Centers.A digital cable box from Dell was shown next - it had the ability to work with a Cable Card. This is the missing link in terms of getting the most-wanted content onto Media Center PCs. There wasn't a real demo, likely because it's not really working yet. This morphed into a Windows Vista Media Center demo, which showed the new user interface that is now optimized for widescreen displays. More content is visible on the screen at once now - the album art in particular looks great crammed together because if you recognize your albums you can process a great deal of visual data at once. Sorting album data by year is also very cool - it groups the album art together based on the art metadata. Very powerful stuff.Peter Moore, Corporate Vice President, came on stage to discuss the Xbox 360. Xbox Live has more than 2 million members, and Halo 2 racked up $120 million in sales in a single day. It was the single biggest opening day entertainment event in history. In the first 90 days the Xbox 360 launched in 30 countries, and is on track to ship between 4.5 to 5.5 million units worldwide by June 2006. They're bringing on a third manufacturer to help meet consumer demand - about time is what I say! He talked about Xbox Marketplace for a while, which I think is a fantastic, if a rather disorganized, server. More than 4 million Xbox Live marketplace downloads have happened since it's launch only a few weeks ago. I can contest to this - I consume every scrap of HD content I can get from Xbox Live marketplace. Future Xbox Live Arcade games include Street Fighter 2, and a Texas Hold 'Em poker game (which will also be the first sponsored game). He announced that they'd be launching an external HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360. External? Well, that's better than nothing, but I was hoping for a scenario where I'd send back my Xbox 360 and get a unit with a new HD-DVD drive. I wonder what the price will be for the external drive?It broke into some comedy when they started to demo EA Sports Fight Night - Bill Gates and Steve Balmer came bounding out to fight each other on Xbox 360. It was hilarious to watch them play the game! The graphics on the game are impressive, though it was hard to se exactly how good they are over the satellite feed. Bill Gates kicked the crap out of Balmer in the game, and the game had a great "kill cam" where it would replay the last few punches that took the other fighter down. Very cool!And that's that - the keynote is over, and I'm publishing this in a rush. Off it goes!
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