Despite a couple of days of pre-CES news, CES 2011 officially begins at 1:30PM AEDST. As usual, Microsoft have the headlining spot to kick things off, with CEO Steve Ballmer running the show.
This morning we seen press conferences from Samsung, Motorola, Panasonic, Sony, Hitachi, Sharp and LG to name a few. There’s been plenty of tablets, smart phones, 3D, HDTVs, cameras announced, so what’s in store for Microsoft ?
During the press event yesterday, we heard info on Surface 2, Windows 8 running on Arm processors, so expect a rehash of that. Don’t doubt there’ll be mentions of the companies successes in gaming with Xbox and Kinect, and mobile with Windows Phone 7.
This post will be updated as the important parts are announced, so watch closely, or check back later for a summary. If you want to see the action happen live, Microsoft are streaming (using Silverlight) a very high quality stream 1.3Mbps over at the Microsoft CES site.
Announcements
- Netflix and Hulu Plus to support Kinect (US only) in Spring.
- ESPN allows sports picks to be shared / compared with friends. (US only)
- Avatar Kinect
– Facial tracking, social environment, share to facebook
– free in Spring to Xbox Live Gold Subscribers
– 30 million Xbox Live subscribers, 50 Million Xbox 360’s sold, 8 Million Kinects sold - Fable Coin Golf coming to WP7, Xbox Live support, Fable 3 on Xbox sync.
- 5,500 apps now available in WP7 Marketplace, average 100 new apps per day.
- WP7 Updates pushed automatically, copy + paste, fast app switching coming.
- 20% of internet connected PC are now running Windows 7
- Windows Live used by 500 Million people
- New Windows 7 PCS using Intel Sandy Bridge, AMD Fusion processors
- 6.5 hours battery life for a Core i7 with 6-cell.. Go Sandy Bridge
- Dual-screen LED touchscreen laptop, on-screen keyboard
- Surface 2,
– thin, tracking per pixel, largest piece of gorilla glass bonded to a screen.
– awesome demo.. commercial availability soon, no mention of consumer availability. - Windows 8 support for System on a chip, no UI shown in demo.
– Windows demo’d running on Intel, Qualcomm (Snapdragon), Nvidia Tegra.
Images
Image credit: Screens taken from Microsoft’s Live Stream.