A ton of information on CES can be found on the web, from C/Net, to Engadget, to manufacturer’s websites, to just about any news outlet. The biggest news arguably could have been from a company that didn’t even attend CES–Apple– as Steve Jobs announced its new iPhone. While Engadget was disappointed that it wasn’t a 3G phone, Jobs clearly stated that the future versions will be 3G. If I were a betting man, I’d bet Apple will be one of the first companies that offer a Wimax phone, once Wimax starts getting deployed in the US this year (for example, by Xanadoo in smaller Texas cities). I’ll go out on a limb and predict they’ll announce it by June 30th, 2008.

Still, despite all the news surrounding CES, some of the most interesting stuff on the show floor are the little things that are echoes of future trends, interesting takes on existing trends, or stuff that’s just plain quirky. Here’s a first in a short series of those things that I bumped into walking down the miles of tradeshow floor and talking with folks.

Screens

Screens were everywhere. Major manufacturers like Sharp, Panasonic, LG–you name it–had their screens plastered all over the place. It felt like the future will have an LCD on every available wall surface. Oddly,the scuttlebutt of the show was that LCD picture frames were the suprise popular item for the buyers in attendance. Now that they are ip devices with wifi connections, they’re easy to update. Expect to see more in your family and friend’s homes and offices. There’s a media business just waiting to be hatched that intersperses advertising in people’s personal picture streams in exchange for a free frame. At the very least, there’s an ad network waiting to be hatched in bars using technology like this.

In the hall dedicated to the automotive aftermarket, you could find screens everywhere. Here’s a shot of the inside of a tricked out Chevy Tahoe, note the three rows of LCD screens:

Here’s a shot of an International Harvester CXT parked out front of the North Hall. This is a consumer vehicle(?!?!).

Screens were installed everywhere on this tricked out vehicle. In the headrests, above the license plate, and my favorite, inside the wheel well!

If the prices of flat screens are decreasing, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that people will start putting more than screen together to give them more area, as well as to put them in places we don’t normally see them, like the bathroom, the laundry room, etc. So what’s going to slow down the fantasy of screens everywhere? Viewing angle. That is, the current LCD technology has a relatively narrow viewing angle, meaning, you need to be fairly head-on to see the screen. One solution to this problem was show in the Lifeware NextGen house in the bedroom: attach the HD Flatscreen to a robotic arm that physically rotates the screen. Seems overkill to me.

One flat screen technology promises to widen that angle considerably: OLED, or Organic LED. The problem is that it’s a young technology and can only be made into fairly small screens at a fairly expensive prices. Still, Sony debuted it’s 17″ OLED screen, but would not give any production delivery dates, or acknowledged that there were any production delivery dates. They did make a big deal of the fact that black is black and not a dark shade of gray that they implied is seen in LCD screens. Here are a few shots:

The takeaway: With the death of the vacuum tube, screens will be everywhere. (The TV was the last vacuum tube in the house.)