After waiting in line for 2 hours and dealing with some power problems (they blew a couple of projection tubes), the Microsoft keynote was underway. While the room was filling up, I felt like I was in a night club. Mos Def, Franz Ferdinand, Black Eyed Peas, and some other electro-pop-new-wave music blasted through the speakers (with surprising bass, too). There was a brief introduction by the CES president and CEO, Gary Shapiro, who was very optimistic about 2010. He cited numerous innovative companies and technologies as proof that 2010 will be a great year for the consumer electronics industry. Once the introduction was completed, Steve Ballmer took the stage and began his presentation touting Microsoft’s most recent accomplishments. In the attached gallery, you can see most of the slides from his presentation. One of the topics that he covered in great depth was, of course, Windows 7. There were some interesting tid-bits of information, but there were also several new products that were demonstrated.
One of the new products is actually the implementation of Windows 7 into a “slate” style computer. Similar to the oft-rumored iSlate from Apple, these are portable and capable computers centered around touch capability. There were three devices on display during the keynote, one of which was from HP.
Another set of new products centered around the XBox 360. Project Natal, for one, is now officially becoming available during the 2010 holiday shopping season. No price was mentioned, but it looks like it will be a “game changer” (that was his quote, not mine). There was some background information about the development of the technology which was pretty interesting (the use of 3-D camera’s, etc.). There was also plenty of bragging about the integration of social experiences into the XBox 360 via Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix.
The other key area that was discussed revolved around home entertainment. Windows Media Center and Mediaroom 2.0 were discussed for quite some time. There are some new implementations of the Mediaroom software to enable TV viewers to pull on-demand content over the web. Most of this technology requires the use of a Windows PC driving your TV viewing experience (utilizing Cablecard and specific cable providers). It was a pretty impressive and seamless experience.
All in all, I walked away feeling pretty excited about 2010′s offerings from Microsoft (more specifically XBox 360, though).
