CES doesn't technically open the show floor until tomorrow but the press conferences started tonight, and I stayed up watching the livestream of Samsung's keynote like the sad tech blogger I am, coffee gone cold next to the laptop by the second slide.
BK Yoon, who runs Samsung's consumer electronics division, spent about forty minutes telling us the Internet of Things is coming and Samsung is going to be the company that makes it happen. He said something like 90% of Samsung's products will be IoT-enabled by 2017 and basically all of them by 2020. Big number. Confident delivery. I still don't actually know what it means in practice, and I don't think that's just me being slow.
Here's my problem with the whole pitch, and I've been grumbling about this since Samsung bought SmartThings back in August. "Open" and "ecosystem" got used so many times tonight I started keeping a tally on a sticky note (I stopped at fourteen and went to go refill my coffee instead). Nobody on stage showed me an actual thing my actual fridge is going to do differently in 2016 that solves a problem I have right now. I don't need my washing machine to talk to my TV. I need my washing machine to not eat socks, which, for the record, mine still does regularly and no amount of IoT branding is fixing that.
Maybe I'm the wrong audience. I've said before on this blog that I don't want a smart toaster, I want a toaster that toasts bread evenly, and nothing about tonight changed my mind on that. If anything the vagueness made me more skeptical, not less. When a company spends this much stage time on the vision and this little on the "here is a product you can buy" part, that's usually a sign the vision is running ahead of the engineering.
The one thing from tonight that genuinely got me leaning forward was buried in BMW's press event, not Samsung's. BMW demoed a version of their self-parking system where you summon the car using a smartwatch, the i3 backs itself out of a tight parking spot and pulls up to you with nobody in the driver's seat. It's a remote valet thing, using sensors already built into the car for the self-parking assist, and watching the empty car crawl forward while a guy on stage just stood there holding his wrist up was more compelling to me than every slide in Samsung's deck combined. It's a narrow, specific, solved problem (I hate parallel parking in tight garage spots, everyone does) instead of a vague promise about a connected future five years out.
That's the split I keep noticing at these CES pre-show events every year. The big keynotes go wide and abstract because they're selling a platform story to investors and press, and the smaller booth demos go narrow and concrete because they're just trying to show off one neat trick. I'll take the neat trick every time. Ford did something similar a couple years back with a parking demo and it stuck with me the same way.
Anyway, the actual show floor opens Tuesday and I'm sure I'll be back with more of this once I've had a chance to walk it (or more realistically, once I've read what the people who are actually there this year end up writing, since I'm covering this one from my kitchen table again). If Samsung's SmartThings-powered future shows up with an actual product I can go buy at Best Buy, I'll happily eat my words about the buzzword tally. Until then I'm filing tonight's keynote under "impressive stagecraft, thin on details," and I'm going to go check on my sock-eating washing machine.