A newcomer’s guide to surviving CES 2009

The silent videographer and first time CES attendee blogs about her first experience in the ultra-tech world of the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.

If you’ve been an avid reader of Sync while we’ve been away at CES this year, I’ve been the silent videographer capturing all of the amazing electronics for you to see. It was also my first time attending the show, so we decided to bring you ‘The newcomer’s guide to surviving CES 2009′ and also to share with you some of the goods I thought were quite cool from a semi-tech-savvy point of view.

First off, you don’t get just how huge these halls are from reading the blogs or watching the videos. You keep walking… and walking… and walking… and maybe 6 hours later or so you’ve seen one hall. And there are four. I never really anticipated how much walking I’d actually be doing to cover each hall or how sore I would be at the end of the day. There’s a feeling of electricity in the air (no pun intended) that just motivates you to keep on walking though, we never knew what new product we were going to find next.

The amount of products from each booth is staggering – both in volume and in technology. Some of these ideas I’d never even thought about, like turning your Blackberry into a personal remote control or even just designing a recyclable cell phone. I’ve never seen so many TVs, OLEDs, digital picture frames or personal computers in my life. Just the variety of products at the show was incredibly overwhelming.

I’ve been asked over four days, what was my favourite thing to film or see? Automatically I can give you the answer, and I saw it on the last day, almost the last product: the Anybots ‘QA’ robot. This is the real iRobot that I could definitely see sometime in the future. I loved the idea that you could be across the world interacting in real time through a robot if you couldn’t be there yourself. Too bad I can’t afford the $30,000 US price tag. I was also a really big fan of the amount of green products that were showcased, like the EcoNation Design It Yourself speakers or the Motorola Renew – this is what companies should be thinking about and designing for because I really do believe it’s the way we need to be thinking for the future.

What many don’t realize about CES this year is that it took place at the same time as the AVN show (if you don’t know what it is, then look it up, this is a kid friendly site) so there were tech geeks bumping into ‘stars’ of a different kind. In fact, one of halls was directly beside the AVN show. While exiting that hall, we bumped into Ron Jeremy. I have a picture of his backside, thankfully it was fully clothed.

Overall, CES was a really exciting show to experience. I’m curious to find out which products that I saw will actually make it to the Canadian market. Hope you’ve enjoyed our coverage this year!