Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer acted as the keynote speaker for the first day of CES 2012, with Ryan Seacrest as his co-host/interviewer. What an awkward combination! Thankfully, what they discussed was more interesting than that bizarre pairing.
The new phones look beautiful (HTC Titan II with no specific release date, Nokia 710 and 800 in Canada now, and the 710 in the US on January 11. Although, this indicates it’s available now). As one of the few Windows Mobile 7 users in the U.S., I don’t find the OS to be intuitive. They were doing things on stage that I have never seen on my phone. I appreciate the ability to make my home screen personalized and to better organize my apps, but that’s all outweighed by, for example, the frequency with which I accidentally enter search mode. The HTC’s 16mp camera is truly impressive, but if that comes with an OS that has limited apps and can be frustrating to use, it’s not much of a sell.
And please, companies, when doing demos, make sure your product actually works! If you try to send a text by voice and say “Sounds great”, make sure you enunciate. There’s little that’s more embarrassing than having to pretend you didn’t send a text that says “Sound” in front of a large group of people.
Those new computers (running Windows 8) look sexy as hell, and I love seeing that they’re featuring one of the apps, Cut The Rope, that I recommended for a holiday buy. The full screen apps in Metro look amazing, and they work on PC and tablet. Searchable apps looks like it works well. Not loving the term Charms for the icon links. Side-by-side app viewing looks nice, although I don’t know how often I’d use it. The new IE looks great — your focus is on the page and not the browser’s frame. It’s hard to believe that this is the same company that made Windows Vista. Maybe I’m an easy sell, but I want this OS on a computer. It’s strange how a similar system on a phone is so frustrating to use. Ballmer promises that every PC with Windows 7 will be ready for Windows 8 the very day it’s released.
Um, Microsoft, if I want to see people singing tweets I’d, no, I’d never want that. I barely even want to read tweets on Twitter. All this has me thinking is that they’re trying to kill time for something, and I don’t appreciate it.
Ballmer introduces Xbox as an entertainment center for families. They promise the same metro experience and voice control. Voice command to Bing on Xbox was much more successful than the phone demo, but the guy is talking like a movie theater voice-over guy. Do you have to sound like that to get it to work? Hey, good move, Microsoft in showing a movie you can’t broadcast, so the audio and video feeds get cut. And they come back for a program guide for FiOS. Microsoft announces multiple partnerships, like NewsCorp, bringing all the Fox TV to Xbox. There are promises to engage two ways with the TV using Kinect; they have some poor eight-year-old girl to demo Sesame Street TV. Leave it to Microsoft to make Sesame Street stiff. You can participate in the show or not, the show will adapt to the lack of input. Oh, this kid is never going to live this down. Ballmer promises that this will be used in education and healthcare as well.
To wrap things up, Ballmer says 2012 will be known as Metro, Metro, Metro and Windows, Windows, Windows. We shall see.
(image courtesy of USA Today)
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