I’m sitting in Terminal 2 at San Francisco International Airport. But tonight at 6:30pm PT, I’ll be in Las Vegas at Steve Ballmer’s final Microsoft keynote at CES–and TIME’s Doug Aamoth and I will liveblog it one last time. You can join us at technologizer/ces12, and I hope you will.
Over at the New York Times, Nick Wingfield has a story on CES 2012 with the gloomy title “A Tech Show Loses Clout as Industry Shifts.” He makes some good points. I’m not a CES apologist–in fact, I recently broached the question of whether Microsoft’s decision to pull out of the show after this year could conceivably be the beginning of the end, and wrote about some of its problems for Slate back in 2008.
Still, I came away from Wingfield’s piece unconvinced that there’s a new sea change going on in the industry that’s rendering CES less relevant than it has been in recent years.
Next Monday at 6:30pm PT, Steve Ballmer will give what Microsoft says is the company’s final keynote at CES. I don’t know whether he’ll acknowledge that fact, in either a serious manner or a lighthearted one. But it’s a safe bet that he’ll talk about Windows 8, ultrabooks, Xbox, and Windows phone. And I’ll be in the audience, along with TIME’s Doug Aamoth. We’ll liveblog the event as it happens at technologizer.com/ces12. Join us, won’t you? (And if you need a reminder, head there now: You can get an e-mailed notification when the event begins.)
Tony Bennett closes out the last Apple keynote at Macworld--to date--in January 2009.
The great thing about the Apple rumors published at Taiwanese component-news site DigiTimes is that you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes it has scoops that really are scoops. Other times–many times–its rumors are strictly fictional. You can neither trust it nor ignore it.
Today, DigiTimes has a story I know I like, whether or not it amounts to anything. The site says that a source tells it that Apple is going to release two new iPads in January, with super-high-res screens. But the part of the rumor that’s entertaining is that DigiTimes’ source says that Apple will announce its new tablets at Macworld/iWorld–the conference formerly known as Macworld Expo –which is being held starting on January 26th in San Francisco.
At the Windows World conference in 1991, an alarmingly youthful Bill Gates recaps the history of DOS and Windows to date and previews Windows 3.1:
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RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis at DevCon.
I don’t mean to be painfully Pollyannaish, but I’m almost glad that RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis didn’t announce any new products or other major news at the keynote during its DevCon conference in San Francisco, which I attended on Tuesday morning. A year ago, at the 2010 edition of the event, he unveiled the PlayBook tablet. I got all excited. When it finally shipped months later, it was tremendously disappointing.
This year, the upcoming products that matter for RIM are the first BlackBerry phones based on the company’s new QNX-based operating system–which Lazaridis did say will be called BBX, and which will presumably come out next year. If RIM had provided a sneak peak at them at DevCon, it wouldn’t have helped matters and might have hurt. All that really matters is that they’re great when they finally come out. Who cares how unfinished versions look in a controlled demo?
For much of the next three days, I’ll be attending the Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco. It’s always one of the year’s best conferences: This year’s guest list includes everyone from Sean Parker to Steve Ballmer. I’ll report on interesting tidbits I glean, but you can watch the whole conference yourself as a free livestream.
I’m in Anaheim, holed up in my hotel room next door to the Anaheim Convention Center, where Microsoft will be holding its BUILD conference this week. It’ll serve as the launching pad for Windows 8, and will give us our first opportunity to see more than glimpses of the OS. A new version of Windows 8 is still a big deal, so I chose to come here rather than attend any of the other tech conferences that are going on this week in other locales. (Boy, are there a lot of them: DEMO, TechCrunch Disrupt, the Intel Developer Forum, the Information Week 500, and the Tokyo Game Show.)
On Tuesday morning at 9am PT, Microsoft will hold a BUILD keynote that’s likely to involve lots and lots of new details about Windows 8, an operating system we still don’t know all that much about. I’ll liveblog the whole event at technologizer.com/win8. Hope to see you there–and stay tuned for other Windows 8 news this week as it develops.
Our liveblog coverage of Apple’s WWDC keynote begins at 10am PT at technologizer.com/wwdc11. Come join me, Ed Oswald, and Techland’s Doug Aamoth as we get the skinny on OS X 10.7 Lion, the next version of iOS, and iCloud from Steve Jobs and company.
First a promotional message: I’ll be at Moscone West in San Francisco on Monday morning at 10am PT for Apple’s WWDC keynote. I’ll be joined in our CoverItLive room by Ed Oswald, Techland’s Doug Aamoth, and, I hope, you. We’ll be at technologizer.com/wwdc11.
In the meantime, let’s review your answers to the predictions I asked you to make about the next version of iOS 5 which Apple will announce tomorrow. (It’ll also finish up launching OS X 10.7 Lion and announce iCloud.)
Without any further ado…
