Christmas doesn't really come for gadget lovers until early January. That's when the annual Consumer Electronics Show hits Las Vegas, bringing over 140,000 people for a city-wide show and tell of the latest tech toys. Technology writers from all over the world spin fitfully in their casino beds the night before the big unveiling of the thousands of gadgets the electronics companies present them over five days. They scoot around the show floors — sometimes literally scooting, as this is the population segment prone to Segway and Rascal purchases — eyeing the goodies heaped upon them.

But as eager as gadget hunters are to unwrap and play with the newest toys announced at the show, they — like us — must wait. And wait. And wait. Until finally "Available this Summer" becomes "Available Fall" becomes "Available Dec. 1st." Even still, some of our favorite CES picks sometimes never see the light of a Circuit City shelf, despite the promise once held as a demo unit in a smiling model's hands. Yep, Santa wrote us some IOUs last January, and one year later, he's reneged.

So while we prep for our exclusive coverage of CES 2007 (starting this weekend!), we'd like to sober our expectations with a look back at the standout CES 2006 gadgets that could've been — and may still be — but presently aren't.

 

"Cable spaghetti" is a nice euphemism for the actuality that is a tangled jumble of component-video, HDMI, and RCA cables necessary to connect a HDTV set to your cable box, DVR, DVD player, and PS3. Moreover, stringing all these cables into a flat-panel display intended to simulate an elegant work of art uglies up the wall hanging. LG's big 50PB2DW, a 50-inch plasma, and accompanying transmitter (for connecting input sources) with wireless tech was supposed to eliminate the cords.

But this marriage of Wi-Fi (as used in the LG 15-inch Wireless TV, which is excellent for keeping tabs on the game while shoveling snow) with the grandiosity of big-screen HD was called off. An LG rep says 1080p flat-panel technology was the company's TV focus in 2006. In August, Samsung pushed its own 50-inch wireless HD set, the SPD-50P7HDT, upon the aesthetically minded (and space-conscious) South Koreans, meaning it is available, albeit at a steep import-only price ($5,000+) and with prohibitively inaccessible technical support.

 

Maybe it was the possibility of the YM-P1 finally making "PMP" something we techies didn't need to spell out every time we mentioned it (or to differentiate it, somehow, from a PVP or, worse, a Windows Media Center-compatible PMC). Maybe it was the possibility that the cool toys seen in this guy's East Asian counterpart — an integrated satellite TV receiver — would swim our way, and we'd get a TV tuner (at least) to record video directly to the 20-GB hard drive. Maybe it was the possibility of the 4-inch widescreen-toting "all-file-types-supported-here!" multimedia player becoming a true competitor to Apple's iPod Video, which had just been launched and was due to crush the bits of every other would-be digital player. But the possibilities were just that, and despite a price tag ($399) and scheduled release date (February 2006), the thing floundered in limbo. Now, with Samsung's apparent abandonment of the hard-disk-player market, the probability of the YM-P1 coming to fruition in the States is close to nil.

 

It's not only the big boys who announce cool new products that never surface — it's just that the smaller firms' stuff fails to elicit (or even solicit) the sort of fanfare the Panasonics and Philips offerings do. (Plus the likelihood of a little guy reneging on a promise of hitting an in-store deadline is that much less.) Still, it's too bad there's no evidence of RaySat's rolling hotspot being available for order on its website. The Wi-Fi antenna would make cross-country road trips much less hellacious, as it would provide YouTube- and IM-addicted teens and "working vacation" suckers Internet access, and the toddlers and old people satellite television. Two years of previews at CES and there still aren't SpeedRay 3000s atop the Greyhounds or Chinatown Express buses? Guess it's back to EDGE….

 

Some of what gets showcased at CES isn't meant to be purchased by the Cs (consumers) directly — but they should be seen out in the wild at some point. And what C wouldn't appreciate a single piece of equipment to replace the stack of DVR, DVD player/recorder, and cable box? As many of us HDTV owners are beholden to the cable companies for our HD content anyway, we'd sooner get an all-in-one solution than try to integrate the necessary tuner into our pile of equipment — and would be willing to lease the thing for, say, $10 to 15 a month if it could store and even burn DVDs with HD shows (down-rezzed, of course).

Cable companies like Comcast and Cox have finally rolled out HD DVRs, capable of some of what the TiVo generation expects (i.e., scheduled recording, HD storage and playback), but none have offerings with built-in DVD recorders — which would allow for the archiving of TV shows without hoarding huge blocks of precious internal memory. Of course, this same "archiving" ability is precisely why the cable companies will never go for Scientific America's MCP-100, as it would put them at odds with the movie and TV companies who expect you to pay them for prerecorded DVDs. $59.99 for Grey's Anatomy, Season 2, anyone?

 

At CES 2005, Toshiba and Canon offered a few lucky journos a sneak peek at their joint effort into superior TV tech: the surface-conduction electron-emitter display, or SED. A year later, excited CES attendees waited in long lines to check out the demo of the slim and spectacular sets in action. According to those who experienced it, the initial SED viewing is akin to a religious awakening unfelt since… HDTV hit.

Basically, these reviewers wrote, SED is to today's HDTV sets (plasma, LCD, DLP, whatever) what HDTV was to standard TV — a huge leap forward in clarity, brightness, contrast, and all those other visible markers of a picture's goodness. Someone looking to invest in a very expensive TV set may have heard of this new tech, and decided to hold off on purchasing an ever-more-affordable big TV for the sake of getting one of the first SED sets to emerge from the joint venture's plant in Japan.

That someone will be disappointed to learn that said plant hasn't even been built yet, and could be delayed further due to a lawsuit. This news following months of setbacks, including the redaction of a 55-inch SED's planned appearance at this year's CES. Initially promised for the end of '06, now expected end of '07, the SED's amazingness will only be believed when it is seen… being unloaded at a Best Buy.

 

— Matt Schneiderman