Web/Tech

Bill Gates CES Keynote - ho-hum?

Robin Capper

Robin Capper

— 2 min read

I just watched the Bill Gates CES Keynote web-cast. Was it all a bit ho-hum or is that because I knew much of it already? Most of the Vista stuff shown has been on Channel 9 for months.

  • The big touch screen – Quite cool but really?
  • The “Cell phone/PC Table” thing – put your phone down, log-in and let everyone in the departure lounge see your work?
  • Vista;
    • Another way to Switch Applications?
    • Quick Search – why didn’t they show tagging, file system mining, virtual folders etc?
    • Transparency in application borders? – Aero will do more than that, show it.
    • Scrolling, searching thru 10,000 (?) songs? – it was 10,000 wasn’t it, not 10 million?
    • Themed slide-shows a feature? – Surely that was a joke, the other comedy didn’t work though.
    • Side-bar & Gadgets – To show, sports results, an RSS feed and a timer?
    • Tabbed Browsing?
    • Mention of security – Ironic considering the WMF thing going on as they spoke.
      • There is some seriously cool stuff happening in Vista yet much of what they showed was underwhelming. Some stuff seen in the Channel 9 Vista media, one camera wobbly video all, is far better. 
  • Flight Simulator X – Always pushing the latest PC hardware, to it’s stuttering limits, didn’t look that good here but I’ll blame the 300kb video stream for that. It looks a lot better in the screen-shots at Flightsim.com & they have plenty of time before release (said to be 4th quarter of 2006) to add more.
  • Yet another proprietary (WMP only) media portal – another way to download Justin Timberlake, great…
  • Tablet PC – Showed someone’s making them, but nothing new – why didn’t they show/mention the radical DualCor?
  • Media with Targeted Ads just for you – wonderful, that’s a good thing?
  • Lots of media stuff that won’t happen here (NZ), at least not anytime soon – great.
  • Toshiba have a tiny video player that will work a for a whole 4 hours on a battery charge – A movie + “The making of..” doco and that’s it.
  • HD DVD – Cool as it is, the looming format war makes you wonder when will they learn…
  • Xbox 360 – It’s a game box, Sony have a new one coming, wait and see…

Under these are fantastic new file systems, graphics technologies, network/broadband capabilities and mega hardware (64 bit etc). Were these really the best examples to show that off?

Some of  the technology I saw back in November was far more impressive.

Bill Gates Keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2006

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