We still don’t have a show floor proper to peruse, but the press day definitely gave the big names a chance to blast out their big announcements. Panasonic, Sharp, Microsoft, and others took their fair share of the day, but Samsung and LG were the ones that the phone-lovers in the house really wanted to hear about. LG kicked off the morning bright and early at 8 AM, packing the room shoulder-to-shoulder, and then some. I was half-expecting the majority to be hungover and sleeping in, but all the press had perked ears and pens ready. I had heard the night before from some LG guys that a watch phone for Europe was going to be announced, which turned out to be pleasantly accurate.
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Starting off, LG was big on TVs (along with just about everyone else at the show, as it turns out). 3D displays, high refresh (240 Hz), wireless connectivity, software tie-ins with Yahoo! Widgets, YouTube, Pandora, Netflix, slim profiles and high contrast screens with blacks blacker than the blackest black night were some common features that we would also see later in the afternoon with Samsung. Mobile did get some love from LG, including a demo of some noise cancellation technology that they were trying out using two microphones, which should be ready to roll in the second half of 2009. They also mentioned their SkyCharge project, which would let users plug their phones into tiny boxes and lock ’em up for later pickup. The big box could handle upwards of 140 phones simultaneously. Yowza. More notably was their watch phone, which promised to have 3G video conferencing, stereo Bluetooth, voice dialling, and text to voice, all in a surprisingly sleek package. Unfortunately, it looks like that was the biggest mobile announcement for the day.
I didn’t think Sharp or or Panasonic would have much in the way of phone news, so after skipping them, I got in line for the Samsung press conference. And what a line it was. It was like the Nile, only it moved a lot slower, had more SLR cameras in it. In short, the Samsung show was a gigantic flop for anyone looking for phones. Lots of cool TVs, sure (although at first glance, I couldn’t see what set them apart from the competition), but only a brief mention of their involvement with mobile WiMAX and intuitive UI development really had anything to do with cellphones. Boo-urns.
Sufficiently jaded by the Samsung show, I settled into the early line for the Ballmer keynote, a solid 3 hours beforehand. Daddy was going to get a good seat, and all the waiting paid off with fine spot right behind the first three reservation rows, dab smack in the centre. Unfortunately, I overlooked Sony in my earlier hastiness, and they actually announced two phones: the W508 Walkman flip phone and C510 Cyber-shot (A.K.A Kate) both made their official introductions.
Alas, by the time I had found out, I was sitting in the Microsoft keynote, enjoying some beatboxers trying to convince me Windows was cool. The keynote itself centred primarily on Windows 7 launching their beta, and how Windows Live will be following suit. There was a marginal inclusion of Windows Mobile when they talked about a Verizon partnership to preinstall Live Search on a bunch of devices, and using a little something called Total Access which would monitor your XBox’s Netflix subscriptions, but the coolest mobile product out of Microsoft was a demo which showed the Omnia taking multiple pictures for a panoramic shot and having it automatically stitch them together, as well as steering the shots with some guide lines. Very cool. They also demoed mobile devices on the Surface table for sharing some richly-textualized documents – colour-coding relevence of information is very slick.
The keynote wasn’t quite as disappointing as Samsung’s, primarily because I could see myself trying out Windows 7, or at very least the new Windows Live package. Not a problem, the Digital Experience was coming up, and was bound to have a lot of mobile news. Unfortunately, we had some logisitical issues, and didn’t get there until 45 minutes before the show was scheduled to be closing. Will and I split up and covered as much ground as we could before things closed up.