Okay so I've been up since 6am reading CES liveblogs with coffee that's gone cold twice now, and I have opinions. Day two of CES is always the day the initial keynote fog clears and you actually see what people were showing on the floor, so here's the rundown.
The word of the show, hands down, is "Ultrabook." Intel is throwing so much marketing money at this category it's honestly a little funny — every third press release yesterday had that word in the headline. For anyone who hasn't been following, it's basically Intel's answer to the MacBook Air: thin, light, no optical drive, wake-from-sleep fast. There were a dozen of them on the floor and most blurred together into the same silver wedge shape, but the one that actually made me stop scrolling was Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga. It's a laptop where the screen folds all the way back around the hinge so it turns into a tablet, or you can prop it up like a tent for watching video. Sounds gimmicky when you describe it, I know. But watching the hands-on video, the hinge mechanism looked genuinely solid, not the flimsy swivel-screen stuff we've seen on random Windows convertibles for years. It's still a prototype/concept at this stage, not something you can buy yet, but if Lenovo actually ships it close to what they showed, that's the first "hybrid" laptop-tablet thing I've seen that doesn't look like a compromise.
Also worth a mention: the sheer number of ultrabooks running around $999-$1099 that are clearly trying to undercut Apple on price while copying the aesthetic almost shamelessly. I'm not mad about it. Competition is good. I just wish one of them had a keyboard I didn't immediately want to replace.
The letdown: Ballmer's keynote
I watched most of Microsoft's opening keynote last night (well, "watched" — I had it on in the background while doing other stuff, which tells you something already). This is apparently the last time Microsoft is doing a big CES keynote going forward, they announced back in December they're stepping back from it after this year, and if this was the farewell tour, it was a weirdly flat one. A lot of it felt like a highlight reel of things we already knew: more Kinect stuff, Xbox Live updates, some early Windows 8 previews that didn't tell us much beyond what the developer preview already showed back in September. Ballmer did his usual amount of yelling and fist-pumping, which, fine, that's the brand at this point. But there wasn't a single moment where I sat up and thought "oh, that's new." Compare that to two years ago when they at least had Natal (Kinect) as this weird mystery thing to unveil. This year it just felt like Microsoft going through the motions on their way out the door, which, given that they'd literally just announced they're leaving CES keynotes behind, is a strange note to end on. Not a disaster, just kind of a shrug.
Random aside: I also caught some of the smart TV demos and I continue to not understand who is asking for a TV that runs apps and has its own app store. My TV's remote already has too many buttons. I do not need to navigate a grid of icons with a D-pad to check the weather when my phone is sitting right next to me doing that in two seconds. Every year CES has some version of this pitch and every year I feel the same about it.
One more thing that stood out, smaller scale: a bunch of accessory makers showing off battery cases and backup chargers specifically built around the iPhone 4S form factor, which makes sense given how many of those sold since October, but it was funny seeing an entire mini-industry basically springing up overnight around one phone's dimensions. Meanwhile the Kindle Fire crowd is getting a similar treatment on the tablet accessory side, cases everywhere, at every booth, in every color.
Anyway, two more days of this to go. If anything actually surprising shows up on the floor today I'll post again, but so far this feels like an "iterate on last year" CES rather than a "here's something you haven't seen before" CES. The Yoga thing is the exception so far. Everything else has just been thinner versions of stuff that already existed.