The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the world’s largest electronics trade show, held every January in Las Vegas. Taking 18 days to set up and usually attracting between 150,000 and 200 bamillion people*, CES is famous for offering a showcase of products and technologies that will, with luck, be available for sale before the next  year’s CES.

An Apple Shaped Shadow

This year’s CES is lining up to be a big response to Apple. The recently crowned World’s-Largest-Technology-Company has never bothered with the show, but casts a long shadow over it. While blue-chip manufacturers like Sony, Toshiba, Samsung and HP jostle for position amongst thousands of stalls promoting the best and brightest electronic picture frames, Apple holds quiet “press events” at theatres in San Francisco to announce their latest super thin product that sports last year’s specs, but somehow does everything better.

Superphones

2012’s event, from Jan 10 – 13, will feature tablets and smartphones. LOTS of them. The Android-powered smartphone market is white hot at the moment, and will turn to steam at CES – with quad-core superphones, 3D phones, phones that can project their displays on to walls, phones that tell the time, and phones that can even take pictures. The tablets will add on similar internal hardware, while offering some advances in spill-resistant and scratch resistant materials (spurred on by Motorola’s recent RAZR smartphone, boasting a  very thin, very strong Kevlar chassis). Microsoft will be attending their last CES, as they prepare for the big shift from desktop computing to mobile, where they remain a niche player. With luck, there will be plenty of gear showing off Windows Phone, which looks like a proper challenger to iOS.

Ultralaptopnetbooks

The MacBook Air, beefed up in 2011, has set the tone for lightweight , razor thin laptops with ultra-fast boot times. This tiny slice of space between laptops and tablets has lead to the term “Ultrabook”, an utterly meaningless term. These are just newer, better laptops. They marry the portability of so-called “Netbooks” with the desktop-class specs we’ve seen from laptops lately. Expect to see a massive slew of solid-state drive, quick-booting, razor-thin machines to join the offerings already out there from Dell, Toshiba and Samsung. Asus is upping the ante with their Transformer Prime, a beefy Android-powered tablet that docks into a full keyboard, offering the best of both worlds.

CompareMobilePlans will be offering a breakdown on truly new phones and tablets with 3G/4G capability at the end of the show. We will include proposed Australian release dates where they’ve been made available. We will also be offering a preview for the Best-in-Show items, and examining the new technologies that will be setting the tone for the mobile marketplace in 2012. Stay tuned!

*not a real number