Green Tech at CES

Although the Copenhagen climate meet didn’t do anything to control environment degradation, our favorite companies look all set to embrace environment-friendly and energy-efficient devices. This year has a showed us quite some “Green products” like the Sony Ericsson Hazel phone, Dell OLED laptops, the next generation of Tegra processor, that has 8 independent processors and delivers a 10% faster performance than a smart phone and consumes 20% less energy than a PC, among many others.

In fact, this CES has a dedicated Sustainable Planet Area which houses more than 30 exhibitors. This area provides a chance for exhibitors to display world-changing technologies which benefit the environment in any way. This environment-centric approach may be partially due to a survey conducted by Samsung, which says that 45 per cent consumers are more likely to buy products from energy efficient companies (Though 60 per cent of them said that it was due to lesser strain on their wallets and had nothing to do with environment concern).

Direct Energy launched a touch screen product called Home Energy Master, which has a dashboard that tells which appliances are using electricity, when and how much is it costing them. It is also programmable to allow user to switch off appliances during peak times, and has support for internet access for social networking, movies and music. The device will be tested late this year, and promises consumers to bring down their monthly bill by 25 per cent

CES 2011 Forecast

1. Glassless 3D: The next step in the evolution of 3D television, is glassless 3DHDTV. While this might seem a pipe dream right now, adoption will be slow without this important factor.
2. Motion Control: Gaming controllers will become more natural, with Microsoft’s Kinect coming in, and expect some innovation in this area.
3. Twitter and Facebook: Hardware integration for Web 2.0 services will increase exponentially, with the content and interaction available on multiple screens.
4. Augmented Reality: We have talked about the Sixth Sense, expect more of such technology to show up at CES 2011. This could entirely be through innovations only at the software level.
5. Flash memory: We can expect a drastic increase in flash storage technology, and its reliability.
6. Wireless power: Some prototype wireless chargers were showcased this year. Devices can probably charge up while they surf.