CES 2011 LIVE: CES Winners & Losers [Who Had The Best Product At CES? Who Got Embarrssed? We Were Hands On With Them All] Read: CES 2011 LIVE: CES Wi

Posted January 12th 2011 by Kevin Schram

The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show is over. I’m back at home now, after a week in Las Vegas from the show while the rest of the TFTS team has covered the news from their home base. I’ve seen a lot of gadgets over the past few days, so who were the big winners and big losers of the show? Let let me tell you how I see it all came down.

The Winners

Verizon’s 4G LTE Network

Verizon technically launched their 4G network with LTE USB dongles a few months ago. But it quickly became evidence that CES 2011 was the true unveiling of the network. Verizon announces tons of devices for the network, from laptops and netbooks to USB dongles, and of course, the phones. Four great Android phones were announced for the 4G network. When it’s all said and done, it’s an impressive consumer launch of their next generation network.

Motorola Atrix 4G

The Motorola Atrix 4G was a new Android superphone announced for the AT&T network. Just another 4.3-inch Android superphone with a dual core processor? Not so. The Atrix has what Motorola is calling ‘webtop’ support. You’ll be able to plug your Atrix into a desktop dock and use it as a desktop computer. Then plug it into a laptop shell and use it as a laptop. And you’ll be able to transition from desktop to laptop without interrupting your current work session. This is the future of computing, folks.

LG’s New Android Phones

2010 wasn’t a great year for LG in the phone market. Their featurephone sales were sagging, the mid-end LG Ally was a flop, despite a tie-in with Iron Man 2, and despite what our man Catalin said about the LG Optimus One – I wasn’t impressed with it. But, LG has really changed industry perception with their three latest phones. The LG Optimus Black, LG Optimus 2X and LG Revolution are all top-notch Android devices that can compete with all the top phones from HTC, Samsung and Motorola. LG wants to be a major player in the Android space, and they will be if they keep making hpones like this.

BlackBerry PlayBook

Not expecting a lot from the RIM tablet? You should. It features an all new operating system, dubbed QNX, that features ‘true’ mobile multitasking. It’s also an extremely powerful tablet that I believe, it could compete with the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab in terms of performance. Don’t count RIM out just yet – this thing could be a winner.

The Losers

Verizon’s Droid Brand

Verizon established the ‘Droid’ brand as a way to create a common marketing strategy around their Android devices. They licensed the ‘Droid’ name from George Lucas and paid a fortune for the marketing campaign voiced by Lance Henriksen. And, it was a success for the company as even the dumbest American probably knows that “Droid Does”. But, what’s the future of the brand? Verizon undoubtedly created the brand to compete with the iPhone, but with the Verizon iPhone announced today, do they need it? With the four Verizon 4G LTE devices unveiled at CES, only one of the four (the Motorola Droid Bionic) was given the Droid name. How much longer will “Droid Do”?

Samsung, for not having a name for their Verizon 4G Phone

Samsung unveiled a “4G LTE Phone” during the Verizon press conference and didn’t give it a name. At the booth, it was similarly labeled. Why can’t they announce a name for it? Call it the Samsung Innovate or Samsung Hammer or something. Heck, give it any old name and just say it’s a code name. I mean, in today’s world, we know the five codenames of a device before it’s released (Motorola Sholes Tablet, Motorola Shadow, Motorola Droid Shadow, Motorola Droid X), so why announce it without a name? It just causes consumer confusion. Samsung has 275,000 employees, none of them could make up a name before CES?

Motorola Xoom

I really think the Xoom will be an interesting product, I really do. But Motorola blustered in their showing of the device. Motorola Sanjay Jha did tell us that the operating system wasn’t finished, so we’ll blame Google. But Motorola wasn’t allowing anybody to hold the device. And they weren’t even demonstrating the device itself, they were simply playing a video that made it look like it was running Honeycomb. It could of been running Android 1.0 for all we know. Sort of a disappointing showing of a product that could be hot.

Garmin/TomTom/Magellan

The GPS boys were here in full force, as always, with some of them (Garmin) having rather large (and expensive) booths. But, their booths were a ghost town. On the record, I like the personal car navs and I think they’re easier to use in the car than a mobile phone with GPS. But nobody at CES was interested in their GPS units. The consumer electronics industry has moved on to smartphone-based navigation and Garmin and their ilk are in big trouble if they want to stay in the consumer industry.

Those are my winners and losers from the show floor. How did things look from home? Tell me what you think in the comments.

Read: CES 2011 LIVE: CES Winners & Losers [Who Had The Best Product At CES? Who Got Embarrssed? We Were Hands On With Them All] » TFTS – Technology, Gadgets & Curiosities