It just dawned on me that I attended my first Consumer Electronics Show in 1979. I think I went in 1980 and 1981 as well, then didn’t go back until January 2006. For years, Comdex was the place to go if you wanted to see new stuff in the computer industry. Today, Comdex is gone and CES has taken its place and then some.
So, I’ll be in Las Vegas next month. My CES 2007 folder in Outlook currently has 310 messages, and there are probably another 100 or so scattered in other folders that I haven’t rounded up yet.
This week I’ll be answering all those meeting requests (mostly with “no, thank you very much”) but I do expect to schedule 4-6 meetings a day for the show’s four days, in addition to attending two mini-tradeshows where I’ll have the chance to spend some time with 100 or so exhibitors in a more relaxed setting.
I’ll be spending a fair amount of time in the Microsoft booth to see what sort of messages they’re delivering about Windows Vista and which partners are there. I’ve also got visits scheduled with some big PC makers, starting with Dell and Toshiba. I’m going to be taking a long look at any Media Center-related hardware, of course.
So what else should I be looking at? What sort of coverage would you like to read about CES here?
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
It’ll be interesting to see the ATI/AMD booth me thinks, for a bunch of reasons. For instance, they still haven’t put out a DX10 card into the market, while Nvidia already has the 8xxx series out. It would also be interesting to see where their hardware roadmap takes them with Vista coming out now.
You might also stop by at the Creative booth and see if they’ve gotten the soundcards ready for vista. Looks like the audio stack has been re-written to such an extent that sound drivers no longer have direct access to the hardware, meaning that you cannot get hardware accelerated sound. I know creative is trying to work aorund this with their openAL drivers, but it seems more like a hack than a true native solution. I’d be interested to see what they’re doing with that, seeing as how I’m a gamer and all 😛
I’d be curious to see what the state of HD-DVD and Blu-ray for the PC is going to be, as touted by the folks pushing either format there.
Hey Ed, since you’re going to be showing up again at CES this year I’d like to invite you to the bloggers-only party being hosted by the Blog Business Summit team on January 9th.
You can find more info about the party on our site, cesbloggers.com, if you click through to the “blogger party” page.
If you’d like to attend, just shoot an e-mail to Teresa (the e-mail address is attached to this comment) and we’ll get you lined up.