CES 2022, with real humans inside

Fourty thousands of visitors, only 30% of which from abroad, that's a far cry from the heyday, but a quantum leap from last year's virtual event. 

Anyway, you can always show off without showing up - CES 2022 simply shifted buzzwords from WFH to metaverse, and amped up everything VRtual.

If NVIDIA's Omniverse predated Facebook's Meta*, special mention to Hyundai for their branding extravaganza: Metamobility, MoT (New Mobility of Things), MobED (Mobile Excentric Droid), PnD (Plug n Drive), DnL (Drive n Lift).... Of course Boston Dynamics' tireless robots are in the loop (always willing to play with BTS members or to showcase innovation campaigns), but there's also the possibility for robots to somehow become our IRL avatars or surrogates. A bit more ambitious than just using e Ink to turn your car into a chameleon (a fun BMW concept car paint, though).

Samsung flexed once again their muscles and screens, between the curvy AI-speaker unfolding into a display to the S-and-G-shaped Flex S and Flex G, and their big browser Flex Note, a monitor that goes laptop. 

 

Yet I fancied even more some of their more conventional hardware: not necessarily the QD Quantum Dot) OLED, but the elegant The Frame (a collector somewhere between The Wall and an upcoming The Stamp?), and the convenient The Freestyle, which comes with Alexa as well as Bixby, but also with Tap View (just tap gently the projector with your smartphone to project what's you've been watching on it).

 

As usual, you can find all kinds of gizmos at CES. I have yet to wrap my head around this one, though. What went wrong at Colgate, and moreover among CTA curators? Who wasted their 20% allocated to pet projects on this slam dung?

But when it comes to relieving an itch and solving pain points, mosqitter deserves more buzz. Maybe that's because this ugly Dalek is into removing buzzing beasts: it lures all female mosquitoes within a 50 m radius indoor or outdoor. 

Maybe that was the whole plan from the start: drawing from a close range annoying innovation suckers to Vegas in order to prevent them from reproducing.

mot-bile 2022

* see "Meta-Fiction or Meta-Stasi?"

Photos: Hyundai, Samsung, CES, mosqitter.

Android Smart TV, Dual-Core Phone, Dual-Mode Policies

A few news from Korea :

LG will release Q4 2010 an Android smartphone running with Tegra 2, a 1GHz dual-core processor made by NVIDIA bound to enhance the mobile multimedia experience (3D, games, video...), and the manufacturer's position in the smartphone race.

Rival Samsung confirmed its ambitions in smart TV, probably also on Android.

At the app level, mobile commerce also benefits from the (late) smart wave, leveraging on a long history in mobile banking. But Hana SK Card (SK Telecom's TouchSeven Card with Hana Bank) "only" claimed 20,000 holders end of May. Yet, KT's Show Touch (with Shinan Bank) joined the party, so the market should grow much faster.

The mobile arena is the perfect space to boost reforms in Korea's SME ecosystem : operators are starting to understand the need to open up and to stimulate diversity, and the government is pushing for a "fair society" : in the country, chaebols (big conglomerates) tend to absorb value as soon as it pops up, leaving crumbs to smaller players, who themselves are not used to surviving off these giant hooks.

On the other hand, the same government is about to grant broadcasting rights to major press groups, accelerating concentration in the medias...

The people doesn't seem to care, provided panem et circenses keep getting better. And that's also what smart TV and dual core handsets are about.

mot-bile 2010