CES 2008 is finally wrapping up. All gadgets have been seen, all booth babes leered at, all parties attended, and all manner of life savings gambled away. And we're over it. It was at times exciting, at other times disappointing, but always hectic, noisy, and filed with sweaty geeks brought together by their undying love for all things shiny.
And how are the troops?
The G-Lab crew is exhausted. Gadget Editor pro tem Dylan Tweney did a fantastic job of editing posts and rallying us bloggers, while Rob Beschizza chased down more stories and took more beautiful pictures than anyone could have expected him to. Jose Fermoso quietly pounded away at an almost unimaginable torrent of news on displays and TVs, and Eliot Van Buskirk pwn3d everything and anything relating to audio equipment or automotive technology. Wired editor Joe Brown was briefly enslaved by a hideous gambling monster. I call him Gamblor! But in a daring daylight raid, we finally managed to free Joe from his terrible neon claws. (You're welcome, Jason.)
__But, what did you see? Besides Walt Mossberg evading capture? __
I primarily covered PCs and cell phones over the course of the show. While there were a fair amount of offerings in each of those categories, I never once encountered anything that blew me away with innovation or design. There were a few products of note, namely the new Motorola ROKR E8 music phone as well as the Nokia N95 US edition with its 8GB of built-in memory.
That's dandy. Got any news on computers?
PCs were interesting to say the least. HP was hot to show us the Blackbird 002; the suped up gaming PC we broke the news on last summer. Dell showed us yet another moderately priced hum drum box (Although they did also show us the new line of mind numbingly gorgeous crystal displays.)
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Well, at least he didn't tap his foot while he was yelling...__
And Apple remained the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. It was right on the tips of everyone's tongues, "what's going to be revealed at MacWorld?" people whispered in the dark recesses of the convention center. "Hey I heard Jobso is gonna announce a touch screen tablet!" yelled a random guy in the bathroom. "No it'll be a 3G iPhone," shouted the guy in the stall next to him.
__I guess we'll just have to see at MacWorld __
Just goes to show you how much of an impact Apple has on the rest of the industry. The effect wasn't as severe as last year when the iPhone was announced and most CES attendees admitted they had gone to the wrong conference. But it was swimming about in the air, casting an invisible shadow on everything that happened on the floor of the LVCC. Will Apple prove to outshine everything tht occured at CES? There's only one way to find out. We'll have a liveblog of the MacWorld announcements next week, right here at the Lab. Stay tuned.
