CES 2012: The Good, The Bad, The Dubious

If you want to know about the most interesting things at CES 2012, talk to someone smarter than you. Which is what I did.

Avi Rosenthal is a former integrator and CE Pro contributor who now works with Evolve, a manufacturer of control systems for the residential and hospitality markets.

He knows this technology stuff way better than I. Here’s what resonated with him:

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The Awesome

Motorola MOTOACTV Exercise Music Player
Avi was totally digging the MOTOACTV smart music player from Motorola. Available in a harness, wrist band and other form factors, the device measures your distance, speed and heart rate, playing your music accordingly.

The free Android app evaluates your music and matches your cadence or pushes you harder with faster songs. It learns your workout habits and adjusts accordingly. It can figure out which songs motivate you best.

Motorola 4Home Automation with Smart Actions
Avi also got a demo of the Motorola Smart Actions with 4Home home automation system -- thanks to our story on the subject. 4Home founder Jim Hunter showed Avi a Razr phone programmed so that pressing the power button turned on the lights and then turned off the lights when pressed again.

Avi says the response was “instantaneous, demonstrating the power of the platform.” He gushes about the capability to link WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS awareness with home-control capabilities via Smart Actions. Holding up his iPhone, Avi says, “This becomes your RFID tag.”

And the endorsement of the century? “It’s so cool I want to drop my iPhone and go with Android,” Avi says.

Currently, he explains, the configuration is done through some if-then-else programming, but Motorola is sure to put a consumer-friendly face on it.

Cheap PCs
Over in the OEM zone, Chinese manufacturers are peddling 21.5-inch PC touchscreens with the Windows 7 Home – nice Intel Atom processor and all – for around $350. Avi bought a few “samples.”

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The Dubious

Dish Hopper DVR
Avi is a serious TV buff. He subscribes to everything. He watches everything. So he was intrigued by the Hopper whole-house DVR from Dish. With its six tuners, the unit can automatically record primetime shows on every major network, creating a virtual video-on-demand TV service.

Dish has a deal with the majors networks, but not the cable networks. That’s the deal breaker for Avi, who says, “I actually contemplated shifting to Dish, but it’s not as cool as it sounds."

He adds, “It would have been really cool 10 years ago when everyone was watching network TV.”

Samsung DA-E750 iPod Dock
Samsung’s trying to be trendy with its new DA-E750 “tube amplifier” iPod dock with all that fancy wood and two awesome-looking tubes that might look enticing to an audiophile (Image from TechCrunch, thank you).

Avi, who says the tubes last only a year or so, asks the Samsung rep how long the tubes last. The Samsung rep says a good 10 years.

Turns out, they’re only on the inputs, and then audio is digitized for the output. Avi says Samsung is touting the speakers for folks who want “mellow, tube-like sound.”

Nutty thermostats

NEST
Avi, who is intimately familiar with energy management, smart thermostats and all the utility initiatives, is a little confused by a couple of the cloud-enabled solutions at CES.

First is NEST, that iPod-looking cloud-communicating thermostat that learns your temperature habits – because you change your thermostat so often throughout the day – and then auto-adjusts so you don’t have to over-exert yourself in the future.

Really? How difficult is it to adjust your thermostat via a billion different interfaces, including iOS and Android devices and, um, the thermostat itself?

The other small thing? The NEST thermostat is round, so you can do a real clean replacement of, say, an old Honeywell thermostat that people stopped using a decade ago. If you have a newer-fangled rectangular stat, you’ll have to patch and paint.

And here’s an interesting factoid intimated by Avi: The thermostat has a ZigBee radio inside, but currently does nothing with it.

“How do you know such a thing,” the NEST rep asks?

“I bought one and I opened it up,” Avi says.

“Why would you do that,” the NEST rep asks.

“Because that’s what I do," Avi replies.

Allure Energy
Then there’s the proximity-detecting, cloud-enabled thermostat from Allure Energy demonstrated at the NRG (Reliant Energy booth). I'm not quite sure why anyone would want to tie their thermostat to their phone’s GPS so that the temperature can start ramping up when you’re one hour from home.

It’s much easier to just tell your phone or in-car dash: “Set thermostat to 'HOME' mode." Or just press a button.

Avi is skeptical as well. Good to know I’m not the only one.

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The Head-Scratchers

NXP Wireless Protocol Bridging
Avi is intrigued with NXP, the big silicon vendor that is trying to bridge the wireless protocol gap between Z-Wave, ZigBee, WiFi, Bluetooth. But, like me, he is slightly confused by the initiative.

Speaking of protocol gaps, Avi would like to see something more substantial for home health, which is “all over the place,” he says. Continua is trying to establish some standards and device definitions for home health technology, but we’re not there yet.

What's Next for Microsoft?
Avi wants to know: Who’s going to get the coveted booth space vacated by Microsoft at CES 2013, and how many years before Microsoft returns?