Less than 24 hours after Apple's event, Charlie and I are here at the CEDIA 2007 home theater show, in gorgeous Denver. Aside from sucking wind in the mile-high city, the convention center is an interesting mix of beautiful architecture, and not-so-crowded show floors, but unfortunately, the damn place is cellular hostile, Ethernet, and by and large, Wi-Fi sterile. WTF, this is 2007.
Both GSM and CMDA carriers are eating shit here. Only the press room has an AP, but the tables have no power cords. The home theater industry could have gotten away with this years ago, but IP-capable receivers and media servers are part of the landscape. This is not acceptable to have a trade show floor with bad internet.
What is acceptable is the press room's full breakfast spread (read: not just continental). I had bacon, eggs and OJ. Very, very nice. (CES, are you listening?)
Sitting here, eating free bacon, I'm thinking about how to cover this show. Let's face it, unless there is some trick to a TV (Ambilight, thin bezels or cases, some revolutionary tech highly visible to the eye) in the field TV "eyes-on" posts are a waste of your time and ours. I think, in order to raise the bar, we'll have to come up with something different. I've got some ideas. Stay tuned.