DAY 1

Design Systems, Ltd. arrived in Las Vegas on Wednesday morning to a light drizzle and slightly chilly (but nice) temperatures.

The line to get into the Pre-CES opening keynote address by Bill Gates on Wednesday evening was very, very long (see below). Lance Crabbe and David Williams of Design Systems, Ltd. waited for more than an hour and still could not get in the main Hilton Auditorium for the event. However, they were able to watch the keynote address via remote monitors in another Hilton conference facility.

Among the most interesting products announced for Fall 2003 are:

Media To Go -- Partners Sanyo, Samsung and I River will produce a small, hand-held device with a 20GB hard drive and color screen that can play music videos, lots of MP3, etc.

SPOT technology (Smart Personal Objects Technology) -- Partners Fossil, Citizen, and Suunto showed watches that utilize SPOT technology to provide customized information on watch displays. The information is beamed to the watch chip via an FM signal. The chip in the watches has several times more power than the original IBM PC!

Here are more highlights of the first day of CES 2003...

January 9, 2003

This is the long, long line for the keynote address by Bill Gates. His theme was "Smart Living in the Digital Decade". This will require a convergence of services, devices and connectivity, according to Mr. Gates. Of course, he showed how variants of the Windows platform will be integral to this development.

Sanyo showed this prototype 5" compact flat display utilizing the Organic Light Emitting Diode display technology.

We have been watching this technology develop for a couple of years, and it has a great potential to change the flat panel displays we will see in the future.

Sanyo displays the largest OLED flat display to date, and it has great color and resolution. Keep an eye on this technology because it has the potential of making flat displays much less expensive than current LCD and Plasma technologies.

Here is a revealing side view of the Sanyo OLED panel that clearly shows the extremely thin profile made possible by this technology.

The Pioneer Hard Drive Music Server is a multimedia server with an 80GB hard drive to store photos and allows them to be viewed on 3 TV screens at the same time. Other components are connected via ethernet network to the main server and allow on-screen selection of the music you want to hear, or the photos you want to see. Available in April, 2003.

This is the "client" complement to the Pioneer Hard Drive Music Server.

Pioneer showed this combination DVD recorder/hard drive that transfers TV programs recorded on the hard drive to DVD in either the
DVD-R or DVD-RW format. With an 80GB hard drive, the price is expected to be about $800. Programming is done using either VCR-Plus or VCR-type menus.