CES 2018

It's that time of the year again! The Holiday festivities are largely over and all tech journalists are eager to blog and write about the Consumer Electronics Expo in Las Vegas. A local publication once said that there is so much to see in the continent-sized Las Vegas Convention Center.So let's break it down or even better, let's jot down some guesses or predictions what will be shown.

Televisions

In my view 4k (UltraHD) television systems are on the rise. They will be present in high-end tech but conquer mid-range sets in 2018. Also OLED is on the rise. OLED offers high contrast, superior color reproduction and the ultimate black (but it may lack regarding screen refresh rate).Last year we have also learned that HDR (high dynamic range) can help produce superior images - and that superiority may be more noticeable than the actual move to a higher resolution (fun fact - 4K resolution is just 3840 × 2160 px - about 6.2 million pixel up from the FullHD resolution of 1920 x 1080 px). But last year also brought a big mess of strange hard to explain HDR standards. By the time of autumn the industry did a good job explaining to end-users that dynamic HDR is what you want. So basically the light / color distribution settings are provided and optimized for each scene (not for the whole movie - as it is in static HDR).As far as I can see there are two dynamic hot shot formats now: Dolby Vision and HDR10+. And my prediction for TVs for 2018 is: We are going to see more and more affordable 4K TVs which support both standards and also the hot shot 3d Audio formats. So it's less up to the consumer to check what standards his specific home cinema solution needs to support. It will become more generic and just known as HDR works.

Mobile

I don't think we are going to see groundbreaking news in the mobile space. Maybe we'll get some more rounded up (Android) tablets. And probably some more exotic handsets i.e. smartphones with built in projectors or more wild built in VR / AR capabilities.

Laptops

New laptops are always a safe bet for CES. So what could be the trend here: I believe the trend for slim but powerful laptops will continue. We will see more talk about the AR / VR capabilities of these mobile computers. Furthermore I see two specific trends: Intel's 8th generation chips plus AMD Ryzen for laptops plus unified i/O - meaning we're going to see USB 3.1 Type-C - hopefully multiple USB-C ports per device (but also pointing to the need for adapters). Second: Windows on ARM. That was big news at the end of 2017 and I believe we're going to see some nice always on Windows machines.

Virtual Reality

Augmented and Virtual Reality applications will be shown all around. You will see a lot of screenshots and photos of people wearing VR headsets. I must say right now I can not really point to sensible real world applications for this technology. For sure the VR googles will get smaller and the need for tons of wires and for high powered PCs will vanish. We're already seeing parts of this with HTC's wireless adapter: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/8/16863304/htc-vive-wireless-adapter-features-ces-2018

Cars / Mobility

Last year we've really seen a big push with strange Chinese company "Faraday Future" showing their vapor ware car the FF91 driving like one meter at CES for the first time. Well I'm not sure we are going to see more of that - but I predict that electric vehicles and the future of mobility will be big topics at CES.

Machine Learning / Digital Assistants / Home Automation

or as we call it today: Alexa everywhere. This already happened well in 2017 - the big battle between Google Home and Amazon Alexa showed every consumer that digital assistants are an interesting and not too expensive proposition. Well I have a more critical view on these things but I can't say that this isn't a big push. Especially Alexa is catching on in my circle of friends and in my family. It is really quite clever how Amazon pushed their own ~30 / 40 bucks devices. Even the upgrade to full Amazon Music for one of these Echos is a proposition which my friends use (3,99€ per month for a full music streaming service on one echo device).We are going to see a lot of gadgets and a lot of companies trying to take advantage of this hype. Alexa will be put everywhere, in wearables, in gaming and media gear, in more cars and so on.Philips already mentioned they are going to reveal more flexible devices for their home automation systems (something more exciting than a hue bridge - maybe a hue bridge that hooks up to your stereo with Amazon Alexa in it?). So that's it for now :)  I hope we are going to have a great and entertaining CES 2018!