Hasta La Ideas

Like rival Samsung, LG also caused a stir with their new TV offering, seen above. (I apologize for the crappy photos, but it was a real jostle-fest.) The EA9800 series is freaking curved, providing truly equidistant viewing to the corners, assuming you’re sitting dead-center. The OLED display can also support 3D, which is why the second image looks janky; it looked a lot more impressive through the glasses.

Honestly this seems more a demonstration of manufacturing might than a design innovation that consumers will enjoy, but time and the market will tell. Samsung reportedly announced their own curved televisions just moments before LG, and I like to see this kind of competition–it means sooner or later one of them will be driven to produce a breakthrough the other cannot match, and assuming their designers are clued in, we’ll hopefully see something a bit more profound.

In the meantime, I think the curved screen technology would actually best be targeted to art directors, 3D modelers and video editors, people who spend their lives in front of a screen manipulating images, and typically from a fixed position.

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The rumors were true, and we finally got to see the touchscreen cafe table produced by Korean manufacturer Moneual. It’s officially called the Touch Table PC MTT300, and there’s a little more to it than sticking a tablet on a table.

First off, the invisible stuff: It’s an Intel/Windows 7/Android/Nvidia-powered affair, and features two hidden speakers, though the model hired to flog the table couldn’t say what the audio was meant to accomplish—perhaps feedback for button touches? As for the visible, the screen has a resolution of 1920 x 1080. The demo models we saw all had the menu taking up the entire screen and oriented just one way; will it be split up and oriented for two people, or even four? Or must the menu be swipe-rotated towards each person who wants to order? Again, the rep didn’t know. (I’m starting to get frustrated with this aspect of CES).

As for the physical design, the side of the table features two USB ports, a mic jack and a headphone jack. They’re located underneath the table, presumably to avoid spills that run over the edges, and their presence is indicated by icons:

Not the legs the table comes with

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The largest CES crowd we saw so far, generating an audible buzz, was dogpiling into the huge Samsung section. What we saw there was astonishing, in a way that the photos probably don’t accurately convey: There appeared to be floating windows looking into a different, better-looking-than-reality world.

They weren’t windows of course, but high-def TVs. The crispness of the picture and the thinness of the border lent them their jarring effect. A team of designers clearly slaved over these things—getting up close, you only expect craftsmanship like this from Apple—and their manufacturing must be conducted by magic elves. The TVs “small” enough to be mounted on tables (I put small in quotes because these things were freaking huge) had beautiful polished metal legs and seemed just an inch or two thick when viewed from the side.

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Today we’re in Vegas at at the opening of CES, the electronic geek Mecca of all trade shows. There’s a good 150,000 people expected to converge on this year’s event, piling into blimp-hangar-sized rooms filled with 33,000 vendors and their gadgets. We managed to sneak into one of the convention halls 90-minutes early, not that it did us any good—the sheer amount of product on display is staggering, and it would take us weeks to get through it all. Instead we’ve got two days and one man on the ground.

The good news—or bad news, depending on how you look at it—is that most of the stuff is repetitive from an industrial design point of view. China has 1.3 billion people, and it seems 1.2 billion of them are making flatscreen TV’s. Then there are the world’s tablet and smartphone manufacturers; add all those things up and we’ve passed thousands of illuminated rectangles this morning, with little to distinguish them (except for one manufacturer, which we’ll get to). While we can’t hope to match the manpower of other media outlets—CNET brought a team of ninetypeople—we will try to weed out the repetitive stuff, and find whatever would catch the eye of an industrial designer strolling through the show.

Stay tuned.

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Yesterday Apple released the much-anticipated iPad Mini, and the company’s talking points were clear: They do not consider it a shrunken iPad but instead, a separate device in its own right. It delivers the same amount of pixels (1024×768) as the iPad 2, but in a more portable size, coming in at just under eight inches tall and just over five inches wide.

While everyone knew the smaller tablet was coming, what surprised some analysts was the starting price point of $329. Industry watchers had assumed the iPad Mini’s raison d’etre was to wipe out competitors in the small-tablet space, like Amazon’s $159 Kindle Fire or Google’s $199 Nexus 7.

If Apple had taken the traditional route, where a bunch of marketers determine that competitors are undercutting them on price, they surely could have manufactured a tablet selling for less. But it probably wouldn’t have that beveled edge meeting the glass, or the A5 chip, or the 163 ppi screen resolution, or two cameras (including one that shoots 1080p HD video), or it wouldn’t have been made with an aluminum unibody and absurdly thin 0.2mm-thick glass, et cetera.

No, the $329 price they’ve set conveys a clear message: We are not competing with anybody. The company has earned a position where they can pretty much design whatever they want. And those end up being things that consumers want. While competitors envy Apple’s financial success and market share—at yesterday’s presentation, Tim Cook made the startling announcement that last quarter they sold more iPads than any manufacturer sold PCs—designers have to envy the fortunate circumstances Apple’s design department has worked themselves up to.

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