CES 2011 Results

    The editor-in-chief of NOMOBILE.RU - Nikolay Turubar - talks about Android, two cores, bows and why CES 2011 resembled a pharmacy:

    After the enchanting September IFA in Berlin, a no less vivid CES exhibition in Las Vegas followed, which finally convinced me that the time of the technology fairs has returned. And this is despite the fact that top brands refuse to participate in “hodgepodge”, increasingly organizing exhibitions named after themselves. Kim Korshunov and I just got off our feet trying to get around all the bright gadgets, but a couple of years ago I had to find them in the afternoon with fire!

    Tablet redistribution


    If a year agoThe main leitmotif of the CES exhibition was 3D television, then in 2011 tablet computers were the main and indisputable trend. However, the enthusiasm for their number passed quite quickly: there were so many “pills” that on the second day of the exhibition I felt like in a pharmacy, and from endless rows of identical tablets I was already starting to get nauseous - everything looked the same! And - a rare case - when in the "Chinatown", the Chinese stands of the exhibition, it was not interesting to wander, because everything there was on tablets too. He sadly recalled the time when the phones had many different formats - you walk between the Chinese ranks and guess: yeah, this phone was “licked” by Nokia, and this one looks like Motorola ... But the trends of the time are (thanks, Apple!) That the main format A gadget is a screen with one hardware or four touch buttons and minor differences in the internal filling. Therefore, each tablet, at least slightly different from the standard, attracted increased attention. This was announced last year, but first shown to the publicBlackberry Playbook is, in my opinion, the main prima of the exhibition.

    Blackberry playbook
    Blackberry playbook

    Although outwardly the tablet itself did not go far from its counterparts - a 7-inch display, a case made of black and, unfortunately, glossy plastic ... the general features end there. No buttons at all - all control is carried out by touching the edges of the screen, which upon closer examination turned out to be both convenient and spectacular. But the most important thing is that Android is not stuck in the teeth inside, and not even Blakkberry OS, but QNX, a unique stability system, which is used almost everywhere: from cars to airplanes. All running programs work in real time, which is very impressive. In addition, thanks to the Blackberry Bridge function, the tablet communicates via Bluetooth with the Blackberry smartphone and gets access to its messages and calendar: on the big screen, you can do all the actions with letters and applications,

    Blackberry bridge
    Blackberry Bridge

    It seems that with proper marketing this tablet has a great future, especially in the USA, where Blackberry is a cult product. The vast majority of other tablets worked exclusively on Android with some “glimpses” (quotation marks are yes) of Windows 7 tablets - thus, the brands “escorted” the “seven” from the tablet market, all such products are designed to show off and express loyalty to a large Microsoft partner.



    Are cores a pure emerald?



    The exhibition was marked by a loud entry into the market of mobile platforms by Nvidia, which introduced its dual-core processor for mobile devices Tegra 2 , optimized just for tablets and smartphones. It seems that the two cores are the next trend: several brands presented products on Tegra 2, Acer got interesting tablets - it's a 10-inch Picasso, and Dell - a 7-inch Streak , and smartphones also appeared, which are described below.

    Dell Streak 7
    Dell Streak 7 was

    silent only by Samsung, which itself manufactures processors, but its dual-core Orion processor, apparently, is completely raw, so the Koreans will use the Tegra 2 solution in their gadgets for now. But at Samsung Tabended up in the lagging camp, although this gadget managed to collect its cream last year. We are waiting for a Korean response at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona or a little later in Budapest at the Samsung CIS Forum.



    Android Third



    As usual, the competition of marketing companies was held under the sign "who has more," but recently the products are measured not by the number of megapixels, rpm or gigabytes of internal memory, but by Android versions - who is older? According to this indicator, Motorola was the undisputed leader of the exhibition - this is XOOM , formerly known as MotoPAD and “leaked” to the Network in December thanks to the Google draining.

    Motorola xoom
    Motorola xoom

    However, the working system on Android 3.0 was not shown to the public: the OS was a set of videos uploaded to XOOM, each of which showed the features of various interface elements of the new version of the OS. But Motorola was chosen by Google as a locomotive - other brands did not get such happiness, because the oldest version of Android they had 2.3. The third version, codenamed Honeycomb, is designed specifically for large devices - tablets, among other things, multitasking has been improved, an effective 3D menu and a new Homescreen have appeared, the notification system has been changed, and the browser has been improved.



    After the word "shovel"



    All the main smartphones of the exhibition are “small tablets”, all the same non-button Android backgrounds, they all have an HDMI output and the photo module has improved. Motorola again excelled, showing the world's most powerful Atrix 4G smartphone , which was also the first to receive a unique qHD screen resolution (960x540 pixels).

    Motorola Atrix 4G
    Motorola Atrix 4G

    In general, the display sizes of smartphones exceeded the dangerous border of 4 inches and again erased the line between computers and phones, and again it became unclear what to call such devices - Nvidia proposed a superphone option that is unlikely to take root. The most balanced and attractive superphone of the exhibition, I consider Sony Ericsson Arc- The new flagship of the Xperia line, which turned out to be very thin and elegant. Perhaps this is the most beautiful gadget ever made on Android, I liked both the design and the material from which it is made - I even confused it with metal, although the back cover of the device is painted with metallized paint using vacuum technology. The phone has a 4.2-inch screen, runs on Android 2.3 and has the most powerful camera among all Android-backgrounds, this is a 8.1-megapixel module with a Sony Exmor R sensor, autofocus and the ability to record HD video. And, despite the fact that the phone’s basis is not Tegra2, it has very good chances to become a bestseller in Russia provided that it has the right price and fast delivery times, which is not always the case with Sony Ericsson.



    LG showed three powerful smartphones: slim Optimus Black (9.2 mm) with a new type of Nova screens, dual-core Optimus 2x on Tegra 2 and a phone for 4G LTE networks with the loud name Revolution. It seems that 2011 has every chance to become the year of the “thinnest smartphones”. Samsung also rolled out a smartphone on Android 2.2 with 4G support, and its giant 4.5-inch display is also made using the new SuperAMOLED Plus technology - with greater contrast and anti-glare protection. Taiwanese HTC, in spite of the fact that most of the announcements were reserved for the Barcelona Mobile World Congress, still showed three 4G smartphones running Android 2.2 and here: the Evo Shift 4G QWERTY slider, a 4.3-inch ThunderBolt with an 8 megapixel camera and HTC Inspire 4G with the same display. However, all the phones of this trinity will not appear on the Russian market, they are designed for American operators.



    And a bow on the side



    The CES exhibition finally gave rise to a new kind of gadgets - transformers, consisting of a tablet and keyboard parts. With a slight stretch, even the Laptop Dock, which is offered as an accessory to the already mentioned Motorola Atrix smartphone, can be attributed to this class. The docking station is made in the form of an 11-inch laptop, which, however, does not have its own memory and OSes, but uses the power of a smartphone inserted into the connector. The concept is not new - Celiocorp has been offering similar products for several years now - it's laptop-like gadgets for working with Windows-based smartphones and Blackberry phones. As a classic representative and pioneer in the Transformers section, I consider Lenovo U1He is a LePad. Externally, the gadget looks like a regular 10-inch keyboard laptop on Windows 7, but with a flick of the wrist, the upper half, that is, the screen, detaches and turns into a tablet on Android 2.2. We can assume that Lenovo invented this format - U1 was shown at last year's CES, but then the tablet worked on the "bare" Linux. The gadget is successfully sold in China, and you can buy a separate tablet, without a keyboard part. Such a concept is convenient: for example, you take a tablet for a meeting, and at work or at home you insert it into the docking station, it is also more convenient to watch movies on the plane with the tablet - the keyboard is not needed here.



    The trend was supported by Asus, which offered a similar Eee Pad Transformer , but already on the Nvidia Tegra 2. An intermediate compromise solution was the tablet sliders shown by the same Asus (it, however, turned out to be quite unpretentious Eee Pad Slider) and Samsung with its smart Samsung Sliding PC 7 with a blue keyboard.

    Asus Eee Pad Transformer
    Asus Eee Pad Transformer

    Someone else's wedding



    And laptops looked absolutely poor relatives at this exhibition, it was obviously not their holiday. And this is despite the fact that laptops on second-generation Intel Core processors were first shown at CES, so all laptop brands are dutifully moving their laptops to the new platform. In general, there were interesting products, at least take the ultra-thin line of Series 9 laptops from Samsung, which got into a battle with its MacBook Air on its territory. I also liked Lenovo's stylized U260 , it also has five primarily for design: the laptop looks like a thin book and is very pleasant to the touch. I think the best CES concept is the 7-inch Switchblade gaming laptopwith a multi-touch display and keyboard that changes according to the context of the game (something similar was implemented by Artemy Lebedev in his Optimus Maximus). Of course, there were many interesting products of other categories: Sony Bloggie 3D-camera and JVC Everio GS-TD1 , Polaroid cameback (camera + mini-printer in one case), there were a lot of “right” monoblocks like Lenovo IdeaCentre A320 and computer accessories like a mouse Microsoft Touch Mouse , which understands multi-touch gestures and a semicircular keyboard Smartfish Engage Keyboard ... But these are the words of another song.

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