At CES, tablet obsession gives way to tech’s bigger picture

Crowds descended upon Las Vegas to see the latest gear 

at the Consumer Electronics Show

ars technica - Last year’s Consumer Electronics Show was dominated by tablets to what now seems like a ridiculous extent. Everywhere you looked were Android and Windows 7 tablets—with at least one device running both operating systems. There were tablets promising only three hours of battery life, tablets costing more than $1,000, and dual-screen tablets including an Acer Iconia monstrosity with two 14-inch touch screens.

If vendors thought they could make headway in the iPad-dominated tablet market with mediocre devices, they seem to have realized their mistake. Much CES press coverage has dwelled on the show’s declining stature and noted that the year’s premium products are likely to emerge later on, because vendors would rather announce on their own product development and marketing schedules than reveal all their best stuff at CES.

That may be true—Microsoft’s news-free keynote and CES exit supports the argument—but at the very least vendors at this year’s conference seemed to have a more coherent plan based around multiple products like Ultrabooks and smartphones and tying them all together with cloud services. More importantly, CES took on the great technology debate of 2012: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its potential impact on Internet freedom.

It all made for a show more focused on the bigger picture than in the previous year. Although Microsoft’s keynote was disappointing—I was on the verge of apologizing to readers during our liveblog—Intel made up for it the next night by detailing its plan for bringing x86 processors to smartphones, in what it hopes will be the company’s answer to ARM’s mobile success. Intel also showed a prototype Ultrabook/tablet hybrid with a keyboard that can be folded under the screen or used as a stand for watching movies.           More