CES 2011

Last week was the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I'd been quite looking forward to it, hoping to find the tablet of my dreams, but in the end it was, disappointingly, disappointing. Actually, I don't even know why it's called a "consumer" show, when so few of the products are ready to go to market. Maybe smaller, ancillary products were ready for sale, but far too many of the hyped items were still painfully unready. I can't really understand why companies will spend thousands and thousands of dollars designing, building and staffing booths and then stock them with bare-bones, barely functional products that visitors can't even test properly. This was supposed to be the "year of the tablet" but most of the tablets at CES won't be in stores for six months to a year - if then. A surprisingly high number of CES prototypes never even make it to the market! Maybe a developers' or investors' show, but consumers'? Hardly.