CES Keynote by Steve Ballmer
The Steve Ballmer keynote address was interesting but not monumental in my opinion.
First of all, it was a chore to find a wireless connection in which to do live blogging so that didn’t happen. I wasn’t able to tether to my phone either. When I tried to mate my Win7 nettop to my bluetooth phone connection i found….ohhh, a couple hundred bluetooth devices in the room!
I was only able to use twitter on my phone with what little battery life I had left but some managed to make it through to the end.
I’ll try to sum it up the best I can. It started late due to power issues. I wonder if Mr. Ballmer was back in the green room fuming due to the tardiness.
He started with the typical rundown of 2009 and technology. He spoke of 39 million xBox 360′s in use today and hinted towards Project Natal. He really pumped up bing.com and went through several demonstations of it’s abilities. The street view demo was pretty cool. Bing will be the default search engine and MSN the home page on HP PCs in 42 countries.
He pulled out an HTC HD2 phone running Windows Mobile and I thought this might be where he gave us some news on their hidden agenda with WinMo 7 and a possible phone but he left us hanging. He did mention that there will be additional news next month at the Mobile World Congress.
He spent a lot of time on Windows 7. Go figure. In 2009 – 50% increase in Windows PC sales compared to prior year. “A recent survey found a 94 percent satisfaction rate among early adopters of Windows 7.”
There were a dozen or so PC’s and laptops on stage all running Windows 7 and Steve went through them all showing gaming, portability, etc.
I think we were all surprised to see Media Center coverage at the keynote. He ran through a scenario where he recorded 4 different shows at once. He demo’d a couple of scenarios for students and then Robbie Bach hit the stage and we were not to see Steve again. Before he left they did show 3 tablet PC’s in an obvious “trump card” play to Apples much hyped tablet if it does exist. They were called “Slate” computers though.
Robbie showed off a couple of new games that will hit in 2010. One of which was Halo Reach which will take the gamer back in time to before the original Halo. Reach will be available in the fall of 2010 but ODST owners will be offered a beta of the game before then.
Robbie also showed off an arcade experience for the 360. It looks to be a virtual arcade that your avatar can either build or play games in with friends on xBox Live. The games showed at the KeyNote were the classic games such as Galaga, Centipede, etc. Expect 30 games in the arcade to begin with and up to 1000 in 3 years time. This is due out in the spring.
Project Natal got some air time at the end. Natal is the project where they use a camera and software to evaluate body movements and translate that to gaming. If you have seen the demo videos it looks very exciting. He did offer up a release date for the holidays 2010.
That was about it. This is a very high level view of all that was talked about and you can view the entire keynote here.
I was lucky enough to sit in the front row for the KeyNote so I have some photos to share. Enjoy.
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Category: Windows Home Server
Were the words "Windows Home Server" mentioned at all?