I just watched the Bill Gates CES Keynote web-cast. Was it all a bit ho-hum or is that because I knew much of it already? Most of the Vista stuff shown has been on Channel 9 for months.
- The big touch screen – Quite cool but really?
- The “Cell phone/PC Table” thing – put your phone down, log-in and let everyone in the departure lounge see your work?
- Vista;
- Another way to Switch Applications?
- Quick Search – why didn’t they show tagging, file system mining, virtual folders etc?
- Transparency in application borders? – Aero will do more than that, show it.
- Scrolling, searching thru 10,000 (?) songs? – it was 10,000 wasn’t it, not 10 million?
- Themed slide-shows a feature? – Surely that was a joke, the other comedy didn’t work though.
- Side-bar & Gadgets – To show, sports results, an RSS feed and a timer?
- Tabbed Browsing?
- Mention of security – Ironic considering the WMF thing going on as they spoke.
- There is some seriously cool stuff happening in Vista yet much of what they showed was underwhelming. Some stuff seen in the Channel 9 Vista media, one camera wobbly video all, is far better.
- Flight Simulator X – Always pushing the latest PC hardware, to it’s stuttering limits, didn’t look that good here but I’ll blame the 300kb video stream for that. It looks a lot better in the screen-shots at Flightsim.com & they have plenty of time before release (said to be 4th quarter of 2006) to add more.
- Yet another proprietary (WMP only) media portal – another way to download Justin Timberlake, great…
- Tablet PC – Showed someone’s making them, but nothing new – why didn’t they show/mention the radical DualCor?
- Media with Targeted Ads just for you – wonderful, that’s a good thing?
- Lots of media stuff that won’t happen here (NZ), at least not anytime soon – great.
- Toshiba have a tiny video player that will work a for a whole 4 hours on a battery charge – A movie + “The making of..” doco and that’s it.
- HD DVD – Cool as it is, the looming format war makes you wonder when will they learn…
- Xbox 360 – It’s a game box, Sony have a new one coming, wait and see…
Under these are fantastic new file systems, graphics technologies, network/broadband capabilities and mega hardware (64 bit etc). Were these really the best examples to show that off?
Some of the technology I saw back in November was far more impressive.
Bill Gates Keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2006
