Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Here’s a list of things I’m not interested in seeing at CES 2012 this year:

3D anything.  Geezus.  The consumers have spoken with their wallets.  No one cares.  Photos, cameras, displays, glasses, laptops.  You 3D advocates just won’t give up, will you?

Blu-ray.  Attention Sony:  The world has spoken.  Everyone is going streaming.  No one is interested in buying a new media format, new TVs, or rebuying their DVD library.  See you on Xbox Live Video Marketplace or Netflix.

Wireless power.  After 5 years, prototypes are just not interesting.  If it’s not consumer purchasable at a reasonable price, I don’t care any more.

Near-field Communications (NFC).  Here’s a simple observation:  I can buy things right now with very little effort & a very high successful transaction rate using magstrip credit cards.  Why does anyone want to spend a ton of money on an infrastructure to do exactly what we already do with cheap plastic & wallet sized cards?

TV-embedded Set-top Boxes.  Hey LG, Samsung, and all you other clowns?  No one cares about your proprietary, rarely updated, alien-UI-sporting, sluggish, obscure set-top box technology.  Nobody bought it last year – no one’s going to buy it this year.  You throw this crap against a wall and seriously believe someone’s going to us it over an Xbox 360 or Apple TV, or WDLive or Google TV.  Here’s a hint:  They’re not… or I should say, they DIDN’T.

Cheap, Useless, Piece-of-Junk Tablets.  These disposable, craptacular tablets that have been coming out with marginal utility (and lots of bugs) for the same price as an iPad are not worthy of CES.   A fully-powered Android tablet like the Kindle Fire at $199 is a device matched with an appropriate price.  But $500 for an Honeycomb-based tablet?  Go fish, loser.

iPhone Accessories.  I’m avoiding most of North Hall like the plague.  I don’t, don’t, don’t care about headphones for iOS, jackets for iOS, batteries of iOS.  I could buy all that junk on eBay… but I don’t own an iPhone so I don’t care.

Sony Playstation Move.  C’mon guys.  Now it’s just sad.  Move on.  No pun intended.

Microcell.  Did anyone ever buy into this?  It sounded like a good idea… until the carriers revealed their master strategy for getting consumers to implement them.

That 55” OLED TV.  Why?  Because you can’t buy it that’s why.  It’s a prototype.  It’s out of their research org.  It’s not for sale.  There’s no announced availability date.  So it could be sexier that Salma Hayek:  I don’t care about it.

Cameras with no innovation.  I keep going to Poloroid & Canon, etc. and I never see anything that jumps out at me.  Casio always shows something interesting because they actually demonstrate some new technology that promises to make picture taking easier & better.  Not so much from the others.

Digital Photo Frames.  $100 for 7” diagonal?  With WiFi?  And SD flash memory slot?  Yawn.

eReaders.  All of them.  Or almost all of them:  If it doesn’t say “Kindle” somewhere on it, I’m not interested.