CES 2009, Wednesday & Thursday

The hotel wanted $10/day for WiFi so most of my blogging this week is offline with just one post online in realtime.

January 8, 2009
My focus while here this year is on product design. There are enough failures of product design in everyday life to keep an angry white man busy for a lifetime. A fair treatment of these issues would balance the design failure with more thought on why it occurred. That can come later. For now I’m just going to rant on them.

Electronic Locks
It starts at the door to my hotel room. Hotels have adopted the new electronic locks for the guest rooms. I haven’t given them too many thoughts but they are rife with design failures. Mine has 3 lights. When it accepts my swipe, it flashes both the red and the green lights. OK, green makes sense. But why red? For me, it doesn’t make much difference since my hearing is good enough that I can hear the gears turn so the lights, of any color, are superfluous. But if I couldn’t hear that and depended on the visual clue to know that it was now unlocked? And what does an invalid card do? It flashes yellow. Now if there was a logical use for the red light, I’d say that an invalid card is as good as it gets. It looks like the device has GYR lights and someone was driven to find a way to use all of them instead of just ignoring the yellow. Of course these devices have the mag-stripe technology so they are prone to all the problems of that technology as well. The New York City transit population has done a good job documenting all the hassles this new technology brought.

Power Off WiFi Switch
Tim is irritated that the WiFi power switch on his HP laptop is so easily thrown that it accidentally turns off the WiFi when he is just moving the machine around. I can kind of get why this design flaw snuck through the process and I see that it seems to have been corrected. His is one of the HP laptops that first had the feature. On his model, the switch protrudes enough that the knurling on the switch will catch on clothing. Then the resistance in the switch is minimal enough that even a gentle movement will throw it.
This clearly shows the subtlety of product design. Had this switch protruded less, had less aggressive knurling or greater resistance to change, the flaw would have been avoided. Yet if any of these fixes were taken too far, they would also create a different design flaw. The solution is a balancing that requires judgment and experience.

The Magnavox TV Remote
Like virtually every hotel room, this one has a tv with a remote to control it. It has buttons labeled:
· power
· chan+, chan-
· vol+, vol-
· mute
· cc
· prev chan
· code search
· 0-9
· enter
· sleep
This remote has a lot going for it relative to most remotes, most notably, a lack of superfluous buttons with strange sounding abbreviations. Yet, even in this restricted vocabulary, the perpetuate design flaws shared with remote controls spanning generations. The code search button is utterly useless for the normal operation of the tv. Yet it has the second most prominent position on the control, just below the primary point where a person’s right thumb would fall. We’ve done extensive analysis on coding schemes that give the most frequent tokens the shortest symbols. Yet when it come to remote controls we seem incapable of thinking through where the choicest real estate on the control surface is and matching it to the most frequent functions. Did they really think that code search would be more frequently used than enter? I hope not.

Another issue with this device is the arrangement and shape of the keys. To its credit, there is diversity on this control, unlike many others on the market. Yet they seemed to be unable to think through how to use it. The chan and vol buttons are arrayed in a circle with north and south being chan and east and west being vol. The mute button is in the middle. They did a good job putting this wheel right where the thumb would go. While chan up and down make logical sense, how can you think of volume as left and right? The only association you can make is a slider control. For my taste, I’d sooner see vol be up and down and chan as left and right.

January 9, 2009

Security at the Show
You’d think that a show dedicated to consumer electronics might give some thought to electronic security. After all companies like Symantec exhibit here. Yet the scores of machines set-up for public access were completely open including USB ports. This allows anyone as competent as a high-school geek to load key capture software and blithely collect people’s passwords as they login to their web-based email systems. Hmmm.

3D TV?
Samsung is exhibiting a 3D television this year. As a technological achievement, it is impressive. Unlike the theaters that exhibit 3D movies, this screen requires no glasses. The only drawback I saw is that there are sweet spots and you will see a blurry image if you are not in one. It only required a movement of a couple inches to find one however. In addition, they also showed a 2D to 3D converter. Paradoxically, this required glasses.

The question that this raises is the potential for 3D. This has obviously been tried since the 50s and it continues to be more of a novelty. IMHO if Hollywood had been able to find a way to enhance story telling using 3D, there would have been at least one notable film using it by now. The true potential for 3D may be in the gaming experience. If so, the TV screen is not going to be the medium, it will be the computer screen.

Besides Samsung, Intel featured scenes from Pixar's Monsters v Aliens including a life blob walking around to attract attention. What they showed required glasses and used what they called circular-polarization. The advantage of circular polarization is that unlike regular polarization, if you twist your head you don't loose the effect.

I'm told Nvidia also showed 3d.


Phoenix Hyperdrive
The Achilles heel of Microsoft has been its bloat-ware. For years they have been dedicated to a single load module for all of their products that includes all the features that anyone in the market might want. A more logical approach to the market would have been product fragmentation which would have kept the product smaller and easier to use. Now the OS and all its apps take forever to load and reached a tipping point in the market that has created a backlash.

That backlash is seen in this year’s show. Phoenix is offering a product that creates a simple OS that loads after the bootstrap but before the OS. This allows virtualization of the OS and insulates the user from a blue screen of death. Since they had the good sense to keep this very small and simple, it loads almost instantly. They the OS can take as long as it likes and you are free to browse the web or look at email while it does. So what took them so long? The next logical step is why have Windows at all?

As if they saw this coming, Microsoft seems to have focused on the extended load time for Vista as one of the features they needed to provide. Balmer’s announcement of Windows 7 focuses on the 15 second start of the OS.

Cable TV
It is almost meaningless to talk about broadcast tv anymore. The people I know who do not use a service are outliers. I had used Comcast for years and I was very excited about what their CEO said about the service last year. He boasted that he would have the entire country rewired for a faster service by the end of the year. Well the year passed and as a subscriber I heard nothing about it.

While Comcast was posturing, AT&T was diligently working on their U-Verse offering. I converted last month and I’m happy with the service. Ironically, the only feature that made a difference to me was the ability to view my DVR recordings from a satellite tv, something Comcast could have easily offered by just replacing the set-top boxes and no investment in their infrastructure. I skipped their keynote this year but I am going to stop by their booth and see what marketing messages they are sending out now.
U-Verse has no presence here.

The Spectacle
Of course LV is all about spectacle. Even a normal trade-show is about spectacle. The combo is heady. To add to the surrealism, this year the Adult Entertainment Expo (porn) completely coincides with CES and even shares one of the convention centers (the Sands). One of my mates even had a conversation with one of the CES cuties who admitted to having had a prior career that would have made her eligible for an AVN award in the past.