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Data, Music, Video:
Raising a
Curtain on Future Gadgetry
January 2, 2006
The New York Times
By DAMON DARLIN
The flat-panel televisions will be
getting bigger, the
MP3 players and cellphones
will be
getting smaller. And
almost everything will be
getting cheaper.
But the biggest trend expected at the International Consumer Electronics Show,
which begins this week in Las Vegas, is that these machines
will be
communicating with one another. The theme of this year's show
might best be described as Convergence: This Time We Mean It.
For more than a decade, manufacturers of consumer electronics like televisions
and audio gear have talked about blending their products with personal
computers, so that consumers can enjoy a seamless stream of data, video and
music anywhere. It has not happened, because the two industries do not have
compatible technology standards and the requisite high-speed Internet
connections have not been widespread enough.
This year all that changes, say executives who will be
introducing new products at the
show. They say that consumers will finally be able to sling images
and sound wirelessly around a room or an entire house. The major electronics
makers will be
showing TV's with computer
capabilities and phones that will play video and music, as well as the next
generation of digital recording and storage devices.
While technological convergence may now be possible, some fear the industries
have not yet made connecting all those devices simple enough for the average
user.
"There is still a lot of confusion around the connected home," said Van L.
Baker, a market analyst with Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm.
"Reducing it will be the challenge to keeping the momentum going."
Getting consumers past the confusion of how to
link, say, a PC to a TV will be
the next big hurdle.
The show comes after a very good year for consumer electronics. Plasma and
liquid-crystal display televisions, MP3 players and digital cameras with five or
more megapixels of resolution have been big sellers.
Data, Music,
Video: Raising a Curtain on Future Gadgetry, NYT, 2.1.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/technology/02electronics.html
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