Well it’s safe to say I’m shattered. I’ve wandered all 25 halls of Berlin’s Internationale Funkausstellung (more commonly known as IFA), chatting to manufacturers and getting familiar with the gadgets and technology we’ll be seeing hit our shelves in the coming months.
As always happens at these big events, we’ve seen a number of themes crop up again and again, from manufacturer to manufacturer. One of the biggest ones this year has been 3D. You might have thought it would be a fad, but the manufacturers certainly don’t seem to agree.
In fact, most of the big companies, and even some of the smaller ones, were pushing the third dimension hard – from those just launching their first 3D TVs like Sharp, to 3D consumer camcorders at Panasonic, and 3D laptops at Toshiba. There was also plenty of glasses-free 3D on show too from the likes of Samsung, LG and Philips, so maybe we’ll be able to ditch those stupid glasses sooner than we thought.
Staying with the 3D side of things, there was something that couldn’t fail to catch my eye – LG’s 31-inch, 2.9mm thick OLED 3D TV, the biggest, thinnest OLED TV in the world and launched at IFA 2010. It is stunning. What’s not so stunning is its price tag – at £6000, you’re going to have to have a fair bit of cash at your disposable to be able to afford this beauty.
Another theme has been tablets. From the affordable, such as the surprise offerings from Binatone, to not so affordable but oh-so-desirable Samsung Galaxy Tab, it appears that where Apple has gone many others are now attempting to follow. As if we’d expect anything less.
From my time with the ones here at IFA, I can say it’s most definitely a mixed bag in terms of performance and user experience. The winner by a long way has to be the Galaxy Tab – and in fact, it’s probably my favourite announcement of the whole show. It really has the "wow" factor you want from a gadget – browsing was a breeze, it’s a great size for gaming, and really responsive (save for a touch of lag that will no doubt be solved in the fully-finished firmware). The price was a bit of a shock though – at 799 euros, it’s pricier than an iPad. However Samsung told me they’d expect most to buy the Tab on contract. No word on how much that’ll cost as yet though…
Finally it seems connected TVs are also the talk of IFA. They may have been hanging around on a number of manufacturers sets for a while now, but the content is finally getting bigger and better, not to mention more open – both Samsung and Philips have invited third party developers to design apps for their services.
Elsewhere Sony demoed its Internet TV with Google TV built in, LG announced its Smart TV connected service, Philips introduced new partners for Net TV, Panasonic promised ambitious growth for Viera Cast and Samsung promised content for Internet@TV would grow this year "like never before". Could this be the beginning of the end for the set-top box?
Probably the most interesting annoucement in this arena though was Qriocity from Sony, a cloud-based service that will offer music and movies to you across Sony devices (as well as some non-Sony devices too). It’ll work on Bravia TVs, Blu-ray players and home cinema systems, VAIO, PS3 and PSP, and will allow you to play music from the cloud for a monthly fee (cost unannounced as yet), and rent movies for a one-off cost.
From our demo, it seems that the music service will also offer a "premium" option, but unfortunately the representative we spoke to said he knew nothing about that. However he did confirm the standard service would be paid-for, so there’s no Spotify-esque ad-funded model here.
And while we’re on the topic of Spotify, I can’t round off this post without noting the IFA-announced Spotify and Sonos tie up that will now allow you to access Spotify through the Sonos S5 multiroom player. Easily controlled via a free app, you’ll be able to play your Spotify playlists and search for songs just as with the desktop version, but also be able to create a playlist on the fly by dragging and dropping songs you want to listen to into a queue. Awesome.
Keep an eye on our IFA hubsite for plenty of hands on pictures coming soon, I’m off to eat some thoroughly German food.
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