Once again, this year’s CES was dominated by three things: tablets, 3D, and the desperate sweat visible on the brows and armpits of everyone trying to sell them. “Please like 3D! Please buy 3D! Please like 3D! Please buy 3D!” they chanted, hollow-eyed and empty. “Also, here’s something like the iPad, only nowhere near as good.”
It’s quite a sad state of affairs, really. On both sides, there’s a palpable feeling that it shouldn’t be this difficult. People love the iPad. People (for some crazy reason) have happily paid through the nose to be insulted by cynically post-processed 3D movies. The trouble is that between that and swimming naked in a money-bin, there’s a problem – a fundamental disconnect between the technology companies that are trying to sell things, and the customer.
For tablets, there are two problems, and their names are Windows 7 and Android. The industry is trying to play the usual game, pushing flexibility and features and promoting how much they can do, and waving around spec-sheets, despite Apple having not only changed the rules but kicked the board over.
You can almost see the frustration on their faces as they work down the list of features – faster processor, more RAM, more open operating system and so on – only for the world to say, “Really? Interesting. So, the iPad 2…”
No company I’ve seen offering a competitor really seems to understand that what makes the iPad such a special device is how much attention to detail it offers. The processor doesn’t matter. The amount of memory doesn’t matter. The smooth controls, the tactile response, the build quality, the battery life – they’re what elevate it from simply being a tablet, along with the fact that it feels, for want of a better word, special.
It has its flaws, admittedly, but it’s a device that feels like Apple set down to do its best. Its competitors, at their best, feel like their goal was to build the best device they could within certain limits, using the stuff that’s lying around. Maybe it should be enough, but it’s not. Claiming that they’re more powerful or flexible devices is like saying that at least a drowning man isn’t thirsty. It’s technically true, but utterly misses the point.
Case in point: Android. It’s simply not good enough. Its presence on a tablet isn’t a selling point, it’s an admission of failure. Hopefully by 3.0, Google will have turned this around, but right now, Android is only a good operating system on the phones it was intended to run on. As for the cheap knock-off tablets out there, don’t even get me started. A better way of putting people off tablets as a whole, I really can’t imagine.
Speaking of off-putting formats, 3D is in an even worse position. The core problem here is that even if you genuinely love the effect – the typically pointless, gimmicky effect that adds nothing to most movies except higher prices and the additional chance of eye-strain, and whose popularity showed massive decline in 2010 – it’s become clear that current home technology isn’t going to be the future of personal 3D.
Investing in that technology now is investing in obsolescence, especially with the next generation of glasses-free 3D already making its first steps into the market on cameras and the Nintendo 3DS. Sure, we might be waiting a couple of years for it to hit widescreen TVs, but on current evidence, it’ll take at least that long for directors and studios to figure out how to use the technology properly and build up enough of a content pile to justify pushing it for anything other than sport coverage and a few high-profile movies. Like many technologies, 3D works best when you’re not really noticing it – the added depth feeling natural, like being able to track the ball in a football match more easily, rather than trying to dazzle you into parting with your money.
Unfortunately for vendors, such fancy stuff is key to selling their expensive new kit, and they need us to buy it far more than we need any of it right now. Our heartfelt thanks should go to the enthusiastic early adopters, who are currently funding the revolution the rest of us will get to enjoy in a couple of years time.
Still, this year’s CES offered little reason to join their keen and empty-walleted crowd. Hopefully the really interesting stuff will emerge in the months to come, as projects like the long-awaited YouView are finally released into the wild, and technologies like Intel’s Sandy Bridge are picked up and implemented.
As for the really, really interesting stuff? Well, there’s always CES 2012 for that.