CTIA Wireless 2010 held March 22-25 at the Las Vegas Convention Center is a good show to benchmark the state-of-the-art in mobile display applications. While mobile phones make up a good portion of the show, other mobile device display applications including e-readers, tablet PCs, netbooks, mobile internet devices and more were prominent.
The customary CTIA Wireless keynote addresses held each morning prior to the opening of the exhibit floor were informative and high energy. Although strong, the keynotes were perhaps not as engaging as April 1, 2008’s address by Richard Branson. Sir Richard concluded his keynote by inviting audience members who would volunteer for Virgin Galactic’s and Google’s joint project Virgle, to travel to Mars to establish a colony, to join him on-stage. However, the panel discussion keynote on the third day moderated by CNBC Anchor and Reporter Michelle Caruso-Cabrera with Avatar Director James Cameron, Aneesh Chopra, Obama administration CTO, U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Biz Stone, Co-founder of Twitter, made for some eclectic and lively discussion. Director Cameron remarked that Avatar is the most pirated film ever while Mr. Stone suggested that all one had to do to catch the pirates was to scan internet users for eye patches.
The first day keynotes included an address by J.K. Shin, President, Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. during which he emphasized the themes of Screen, Speed and Content. The choice of display Screen as his first theme became clearer during Samsung’s “Unpacked” press conference immediately following Mr. Shin’s first day keynote.
Given the wide range of portable products and applications exhibited at CTIA, there were a comparably wide range of input and output technologies for display and user interface control. The exhibit floor space was perhaps a bit smaller than when I last attended in 2008, but there was no shortage of new product announcements.
Many of the announcements involved advanced displays. These included Samsung’s roll out of their Galaxy S smart phone with a 4 inch “Super” AMOLED display with an integrated capacitive touch screen – clearly aimed as a direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone.
While e-readers were emphasized by only a few exhibitors, Kobo www.kobobooks.com launched new e-reader hardware, the KoboTM eReader. While the KoboTM eReader was a relatively conventional E-Ink display based e-reader, the hardware platform is a complement to the family of Kobo eReading service and software offerings that promise to be device neutral, content rich, open and globally based.
On the input device side, Invensense showed their digital 3-axis gyroscope as a partner participant in the Qualcomm booth. Invensense gyroscope technology is currently employed in a range of consumer electronics products for image stabilization in digital cameras and in the Nintendo Wii game accessory the Wii MotionPlus. Invensense demonstrated at CTIA a smartphone handset with highly accurate gesture input capability. Although there were other new display and input device applications at CTIA, one that particularly stood out for its novelty was NTT Docomo’s demonstration of eye-controlled earphones as a new form of user input device.
If you would like to see photos from the show and learn more details about the Mobile Display and User Interface advances that we found at CTIA Wireless 2010, I recommend that you visit Insight Media’s website and subscribe to their Mobile Display Report.
