Out with the old: The trade show season starts

With the peak buying season over for consumers, save for Superbowl-driven sales of flat-panel TVs, it's time for wholesalers and retailers to begin their buying spree, so store shelves will be full of new gear 10 or so months from now.

Their season opener is the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a behemoth that opens on Monday and will draw hundreds of thousands of people to some 1.7 million square feet of exhibits in Las Vegas. While most of what's on display is electronics hardware of every description, what's creating buzz so far about the show isn't really gear. Instead, paralleling the evolution of consumer electronics itself, the news at CES is becoming less about hardware alone and more about intermingled bundles of content and compatible equipment.

Earlier this week, for example, Netflix, the mail-order DVD rental giant, previewed its big CES news by announcing plans to also begin delivering movies online to some LG-brand HDTVs using set-top boxes built by LG Electronics. [Jan. 4, 2007 UPDATE: A closer look at both companies' press releases reveals that LG will produce set-top boxes to deliver Netflix online content to "large-screen home theater HDTVs," not to just "some LG-branded HDTVs" as we originally and erroneously stated. —Ed.] The annual five technology trends to watch in 2008, from the Consumer Electronics Association, CES's organizer, are resolutely "soft," comprising retailing, radio, GPS services, and the CE production cycle. And the industry spokespeople invited to speak at a recent CES media preview were content types from Universal and Sony studios, talking about their plans for big displays and splashy showcase events at CES.

That's not to say the show won't overflow with new equipment, or that we won't report on it and the trends it embodies. Dean Gallea, Consumer Reports' test-program leader in computers, expects to see a continuing stream of smaller, lighter, and less expensive laptops. Mike Gikas, Consumer Reports' editor for mobile devices, will be looking at how small and capacious the new MP3 players are and how they'll connect to other gear (he'll also look at cordless phones and cellphones, though the latter has its own show later in the year). Jim Travers from Consumer Reports' Cars section will be looking at the next generation of GPS navigators, those runaway hits of the past holiday season, as well as other after-market automotive gear; his posts will appear both on this blog and our Cars Blog. And Jim Willcox will cover HDTV and other audio-video gear; he expects to see more examples of TVs that use OLED, a new technology that makes flat-panel sets look positively chubby, and of sets that use lasers as a light source. I'll also be at CES, and will weigh mostly on trends that transcend the categories above; examples are electronics recycling, content protection, and networking.

CES is only the first and biggest of the industry showcases early in the year. Just days behind, beginning January 12 14, is MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, the meeting of the Apple Macintosh tribe; Tom Olson, our computer database expert, will be blogging from that event. Late in the month comes the digital-camera trade show, PMA08, also in Las Vegas. Let the exhibits, the hoopla, and the buying begin.

[Jan. 4, 2007 UPDATE: The correct start date for MacWorld show is Jan. 14, 2008. We also neglected to mention that Consumer Reports' editor Terry Sullivan will be reporting from the PMA08 show when it begins Jan. 31. —Ed.]

—Paul Reynolds