8 Trends From CES That Will Define 2010

Last week was a long but exciting one for the editorial staff at LAPTOP. Seven different editors and writers from our office were set loose in Las Vegas with a singular mission: find the trends and technologies that will shape 2010 and beyond. Here are the most interesting things we saw:

1. Tablets will be everywhere (or at least vendors hope they will be). Vendors clearly see mobile Internet devices in the form of tablets as the next big thing.  The press has been hyping the soon-to-be-announced Apple tablet for nearly a year now, but we saw a number of other tablet devices that could give Steve Jobs’ company a run for its money in this nascent product category. Most notable were the MSI dual touchscreen tablet prototype, the family-friendly ICD Vega tablet, the impressive Notion Ink Adam, and the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid, which combines a Linux tablet with an ultraportable Windows notebook. Whether consumers will embrace a device that straddles the design of notebooks and smart phones remains to be seen. Which OS dominates the tablet space — Android, Windows 7, Lenovo Skylight, or Apple’s tablet OS — is also an open question.
2. Everyone shares our rubber fetish. Still in love with glossy lids that pick  up fingerprints or aluminum designs like those found on Apple MacBooks? That’s so 2009. We saw a number of notebooks and devices at the show sporting rubberized/textured decks and lids, and this is one trend we can really get behind. Rubberized materials, though they are rarely made out of actual rubber, are durable while also having some give and flexibility. Every time we see a notebook chassis, the back of cell phone, or the bottom of a MID made out of a rubberized material, we get the feeling that this is a quality product. The most noteworthy products with rubberized design elements we saw at CES were the MSI X350, which has a gorgeous textured palm rest, and the Samung NB30 netbook, which has a rubberized lid and deck for added durability.
   
3. You will connect your notebook to your TV wirelessly; it’s only a matter of time. This year, we saw a couple of different technologies designed to let you easily and effectively stream video (and other media) over the air between your notebook and your home theater. Intel’s Wireless Display technology (check out WiDi on the Toshiba Satellite E205) impressed us because it is built right into notebooks, and it requires no more than a single button press. However, the WHDI solution used in the ASUS Eee Wicast offers full 1080p video at very smooth frame rates.
4. Everyone has different plans to rule the eReader world. In the fall, we saw Barnes and Noble get into the eReader business with its Nook and Amazon come out with a new Kindle, but these two leading book stores are about to face a lot of competition. Hearst media and Sprint are behind the Skiff eReader, an 11-inch eReader designed to revolutionize print media by offering an experience similar to reading the gridded layouts of newspapers or the image-intensive page designs of magazines, complete with print-style ads. Smaller companies like Spring Design and enTourage are entering the market and trying to distinguish themselves by offering dual-screen devices where one screen is an Internet tablet. Samsung also got into the game with a traditional ePaper reader, but its offering seems a bit bland right now, particularly when free books from Google are the primary source of content.
5. Indoor/outdoor displays will redefine eReaders. If eReaders are going to challenge paper books, they need to be legible in bright sunlight. We saw two vendors showing new screen technologies designed to improve outdoor visibility and power consumption on eReader screens. Qualcomm’s mirasol technology is designed to address this problem by using ambient light to create color, and Pixel Qi now provides a dual-mode display–as demoed in the Notion Ink Adam tablet–that can turn from full color to ePaper mode with the push of a button.
6. 4G is still coming. We’ve been waiting for 4G mobile broadband services to be universally available and, while we’re eagerly awaiting more WiMAX roll-outs from the likes of Clear and Sprint, we see Verizon Wireless is finally giving demos of its long-awaited LTE service. We even got to ride in an LTE-enabled car. We also see that Sprint has come out with new 4G devices like the Mobile Hotspot.
7. Smart phones are becoming “super phones.” On the eve of CES, Google released the Nexus One, an Android phone it calls a “super phone” because of its many features. Though the term “super phone” drips with a little bit too much bravado for us, phones with large form factors and even larger feature sets are a definite trend. Our favorite smart phone of CES, for example, was the LG GW990, which features an Intel Moorestown CPU and a whopping 4.8-inch screen that runs at 1024 x 480 pixels, nearly the same resolution as a 10-inch netbook.  The line between mobile Internet devices and smart phones continues to blur, as many of the MIDs we saw have 3G connectivity and the ability to run VoIP programs like Skype. With a mobile broadband plan and Skype or Google Voice installed, why couldn’t something like the Viliv N5 be your next phone?
8. Smartbooks are the real deal. It looks like computer vendors are excited not only by touch-friendly tablets, but by smartbooks, too. Especially those featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform and either the Android operating system or some  custom Linux OS, as is the case with the Lenovo Skylight. The jury is still out on whether consumers will want  midsized devices that aren’t phones and don’t run Windows, but  Lenovo made the most compelling case yet for the category by introducing the Skylight, which looks and feels like a work of modern art, both in its custom UI and its chassis.

If we had to choose one takeaway from these eight trends, it would be that this is a year in which everyone is counting on consumers to buy and use new device categories, in addition to laptops and phones. We’ve seen a number of tweener devices come and go over the years (Sony Mylo, anyone?), so we can’t help but postulate that many of these devices will fail. However, it seems like consumers are excited about the possibility of adding more connectivity options to their lives, so there’s definitely room for a few big success stories, particularly in the tablet and eReader space. Perhaps when we look back at 2010, we’ll see that it was defined by gadget diversity, with everything from smartbooks and MIDs to tablets and eReaders serving different purposes for different users. We gadget geeks are sure going to need our ScottEvests.