Here and Foaming in Las Vegas, Part 2
If last year’s CES was all about the smartphones, this year’s event was all about the tablets. There were more tablets being displayed than normally found in Charlie Sheen’s overnight bag. As I wandered around the show in a sugar-induced buzz, all of those tiny screens clamoring for attention seemed like nothing more than a collection of ancient portable televisions tarted up in sexy new casings, ready to suck in the next generation of gadget johns… a siren call of svelte little screens using resolutions that had been antiquated a decade ago.
Strange. The surface lesson of CES was that the computing world isn’t about bigger and faster right now. Just like the mandate the public had tried to push onto the Big 3 automakers (and which the Big 3 had sadly failed to recognize until they were essentially bankrupt), consumers currently want smaller, less power-hungry computing devices. Digital hummingbirds sipping electrons from lithium polymer batteries.
“Have you seen the Xoom?” someone asked me. I didn’t know how to respond. Was this a rhetorical question? Maybe it was a line of introspective thought. Had I asked myself this question? It was difficult to think clearly through the haze of high-fructose corn syrup I’d huffed behind the Nokia booth just minutes before this interrogative intrusion on my conference experience.
“Did somebody say ‘zoom’?” I asked carefully.
“It’s from Motorola,” someone else replied in a voice that was distinctly not mine. I pretended to stifle a cough, and used the motion to pop a couple of concealed malt balls into my mouth.
“Oh sure. It’s going to create an entirely new consumer ecosystem based around a number of media synergies,” I offered. This was a fragmentary canard I have often used in similar situations where I am half-blind and unsure of the people around me.
“Oh totally,” someone said.
That’s right, you foolish swine. Take the bait, I thought.
“The Xoom is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of tablets,” said someone who sounded like they were talking with their head in a bucket of meat.
“The Xoom is the tablet that will make all other tablets seem as dreary as much of my verse,” Edgar Allen Poe said.
“Listen, are you saying ‘zoom’, or ‘exhume’?” I asked nervously, peeling a strip of candy buttons and sticking them on my arms like nicotine patches. “It is more than idle curiosity that prompts my question, for I-”
“THE XOOM WILL TEAR YOUR iPAD’S SOUL APART!” said Pinhead, leader of the Cenobites and their dark corner of Hell.
This was unexpected. Clearly there was something going on that wasn’t listed in the calendar of events program. I steeled myself. It was time to show these amateurs and dead writers and Cenobites what technology journalism is all about. It was time to get professional.
I produced a large plastic bag of icing sugar. In the immediate silence around me, I tore open the bag and upended it over my gaping mouth and the majority of my face and most of my upper torso and a great deal of the carpet.
“GRRRAAAHHHH!” I reasoned.
“Anthrax!” Poe and Pinhead shouted.
I give full props to the Las Vegas Conference Center security personnel who, once they had tasted me, made the correct determination that I was biochemically harmless, although in some danger of glucose-induced cardiac arrest and renal failure. They were very reasonable in their demands, and even allowed me to use the emergency eye wash station before handing me over to the local cops.
It was the next day before I was eventually bailed out by Vector, who had wandered around the perimeter of the conference centre until the numerous pixie sticks he’d consumed wore off. He was shaking and miserable from the comedown when a concerned couple visiting from Lake Tahoe took pity on him and gave him a bottle of water and some salt tablets. When he couldn’t find me, he remembered the envelope of bail money we’d prepared and placed in the sugar stash briefcase, along with the Google map of the most likely precincts the PD would take one of us if that’s how the Fates decided to play it out.
We’re home now, and I am on a strict meat diet with no carbs or overly sugary barbecue sauces. The road to recovery has begun.
A.J. Axline
www.ajaxline.com
Strange. The surface lesson of CES was that the computing world isn’t about bigger and faster right now. Just like the mandate the public had tried to push onto the Big 3 automakers (and which the Big 3 had sadly failed to recognize until they were essentially bankrupt), consumers currently want smaller, less power-hungry computing devices. Digital hummingbirds sipping electrons from lithium polymer batteries.
“Have you seen the Xoom?” someone asked me. I didn’t know how to respond. Was this a rhetorical question? Maybe it was a line of introspective thought. Had I asked myself this question? It was difficult to think clearly through the haze of high-fructose corn syrup I’d huffed behind the Nokia booth just minutes before this interrogative intrusion on my conference experience.
“Did somebody say ‘zoom’?” I asked carefully.
“It’s from Motorola,” someone else replied in a voice that was distinctly not mine. I pretended to stifle a cough, and used the motion to pop a couple of concealed malt balls into my mouth.
“Oh sure. It’s going to create an entirely new consumer ecosystem based around a number of media synergies,” I offered. This was a fragmentary canard I have often used in similar situations where I am half-blind and unsure of the people around me.
“Oh totally,” someone said.
That’s right, you foolish swine. Take the bait, I thought.
“The Xoom is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of tablets,” said someone who sounded like they were talking with their head in a bucket of meat.
“The Xoom is the tablet that will make all other tablets seem as dreary as much of my verse,” Edgar Allen Poe said.
“Listen, are you saying ‘zoom’, or ‘exhume’?” I asked nervously, peeling a strip of candy buttons and sticking them on my arms like nicotine patches. “It is more than idle curiosity that prompts my question, for I-”
“THE XOOM WILL TEAR YOUR iPAD’S SOUL APART!” said Pinhead, leader of the Cenobites and their dark corner of Hell.
This was unexpected. Clearly there was something going on that wasn’t listed in the calendar of events program. I steeled myself. It was time to show these amateurs and dead writers and Cenobites what technology journalism is all about. It was time to get professional.
I produced a large plastic bag of icing sugar. In the immediate silence around me, I tore open the bag and upended it over my gaping mouth and the majority of my face and most of my upper torso and a great deal of the carpet.
“GRRRAAAHHHH!” I reasoned.
“Anthrax!” Poe and Pinhead shouted.
I give full props to the Las Vegas Conference Center security personnel who, once they had tasted me, made the correct determination that I was biochemically harmless, although in some danger of glucose-induced cardiac arrest and renal failure. They were very reasonable in their demands, and even allowed me to use the emergency eye wash station before handing me over to the local cops.
It was the next day before I was eventually bailed out by Vector, who had wandered around the perimeter of the conference centre until the numerous pixie sticks he’d consumed wore off. He was shaking and miserable from the comedown when a concerned couple visiting from Lake Tahoe took pity on him and gave him a bottle of water and some salt tablets. When he couldn’t find me, he remembered the envelope of bail money we’d prepared and placed in the sugar stash briefcase, along with the Google map of the most likely precincts the PD would take one of us if that’s how the Fates decided to play it out.
We’re home now, and I am on a strict meat diet with no carbs or overly sugary barbecue sauces. The road to recovery has begun.
A.J. Axline
www.ajaxline.com
