CES 2007 is a strange one to write up, because the biggest story of the week does not happen on its show floor. Las Vegas is wall-to-wall giant plasmas, the HD DVD versus Blu-ray format war is in full swing, and Windows Vista is days from shipping. It is a great year for televisions and a quiet one for anything that fits in your pocket.
The phone that crashes the party
Then, in the middle of the same week, Apple steps onto a stage at Macworld and shows the first iPhone, and suddenly every slick gadget in this hall feels a little older than it did yesterday. I am not going to pretend I know exactly how this plays out, but a phone that is mostly screen, with real software and a real web browser, is the kind of thing that rearranges an industry.
The trend for the year ahead
The action is moving from the living room to the phone, and a lot of the companies betting everything on discs and big-screen formats may be fighting over the wrong battlefield. If you only watch one thing in the next twelve months, watch mobile.
Enjoy the plasmas while they last. I have a feeling 2007 gets remembered as a before-and-after line, and not because of anything sitting in this hall.
Part of 20 Years of CES Through My Lens, my year-by-year diary of the show.