This is the second in a series of posts on random observations about CES. The first was about screens.

Fashion

More and more companies are understanding that consumer electronics are a fashion accessory. Apple has raised the design bar for consumer electronics and other companies are taking the challenge. This is great news because it widens the market for technology.

Take Samsung for example. In their booth, they displayed many of their phones in what appeared to be a jeweler’s case like one you’d find in a high-end jewelry shop:
If you look closely, the above color phones have a metallic sheen to them, which is more pronounced in person. They look almost like a piece of jewelry, maybe a pendant. Couple that with Samsung’s generally good user interfaces, they make an attractive choice for fashionable cell phones. Samsung has taken a more gem-like approach, as opposed to the ubiquity of Motorola’s cold-chiseled Razr.

Even Taser gets the importance of fashion. Here’s a pink Taser C2. Stun your assailants in style.

Clothing that can control your iPod? Yep! Here’s the basic fabric controller, produced by the British company Eleksen.

This basic component can then get made into…leather jackets!

Or backpacks:

Let’s face it, many cars are fashion accessories, especially something as small as a Smart Car:

But now, you can trick them out like your neighbor’s muscle car:

The takeaway: Consumer electronics are morphing more and more into fashion accessories. Big insight? Maybe, maybe not. What it means is that design matters and that if devices are to reach a wider audience, they need to be designed well both visually and functionally. It also means that our customers are going to demand more fashion in their technology.

It used to be that “nerd” and “geek” were used interchangeably. However, the word “geek” has come to have a fashion component to its meaning. “Geek chic” has meaning, “Nerd chic” does not. It used to be, nerds were the guys who could program in assembly language and geeks where the guys who could run a server. Now, geeks are men, women, girls, and boys who can hack their blog and myspace pages to make them do tricks and hack their cell phones and iPods by following instructions on the Internet. They wouldn’t know hexadecimal or binary if it hit them in the face; still, technology is like air to them. They customize to make tech their own. Most are millennials, but many are not.One example is Anina, a fashion model who’s agency told her last year to choose between modeling and tech. But now, that choice is artificial as more and more, fashion is tech and tech is fashion. Anina recently blogged about Motorola investing fuel cell technology to replace batteries in their phone. She posted a picture of the device and gushed, “I could wear this as an earing!”

Thank God for the fashion shade of meaning of Geek. Not only does it free us from black boxes, it breaks down an artificial barrier, dare I say a prejudice, against technology, allowing everyone to benefit.