CES 2013 opened January 8 with a show floor that felt like a preview of the premium TV decade ahead. Samsung and LG both arrived with curved OLED TVs — 55-inch panels that bent slightly at the sides and produced picture quality that stopped attendees cold. The black levels, colour accuracy, and thinness were unlike anything that had come before. Both companies priced them beyond reach for most consumers, but the technology gauntlet had been thrown down.
The wearables category flickered into life at CES 2013. The Sony SmartWatch was among the devices trying to define what a connected watch could mean, while fitness trackers from Fitbit and Jawbone signalled a coming explosion in quantified-self devices. The Apple Watch was still two years away, but the market was clearly forming around it.
On the PC side, Windows 8 launched in October 2012 had set off a category explosion: convertible laptops, 2-in-1 tablets, and touchscreen notebooks of every shape filled the show floor as OEMs scrambled to define the post-laptop computing experience. Most were awkward. A few — like the Lenovo Yoga — pointed toward something genuinely interesting.
CES 2013 set the direction clearly: displays were going OLED and 4K, computing was going touch-first, and something called wearables was about to arrive. ces.tech