A product I didn’t expect to like, but impressed me, is the $449 neo-I from Optoma. it’s an iPod dock that has a sweet sound system and a picoprojector that projects a reasonable size image (say 3×5 feet) on a wall). They demo’ed it in a mocked up college dorm (beer bong not included) which looks like a great user case.
The product most likely to go nowhere: the Atrix suite from Motorola. In a year where everybody is selling a unified device in a do-it-all tablet, Motorola wants you to buy a component set that includes a phone that hooks into a dock that turns into a PC with a wireless keyboard that turns into a content input device for your HD TV. They call this a “PC in a phone” but it’s really an internet device with a few specialized apps; the demonstrated benefit was being able to show your vacation videos wherever you go. Nobody is going to want to buy and organize all these pieces of equipment. And to make it worse, their wireless partner is AT&T, master of dropped signals and a no-show at CES.
Under the radar technology that was getting the most attention: Hand gesture input for televisions. Like the Xbox Kinect, the Asus TV with PrimeSense has a microcam pointed at the viewer that reads your hand gestures so you can, for example, change channels by waving your arm up and down. A lot more elegant than yet another remote, even if it has a motion sensor like the Wii.