CTA canvassed members of the media Thursday who registered for CES 2021 to gauge what they thought of the all-digital show and begin the feeling-out process about their intentions to participate in CES 2022. The five-minute questionnaire sought feedback about what features of the digital event they found valuable and not so worthwhile, asking one open-ended question soliciting opinions about what was “most positive” and “most challenging” about the show. “CES 2022 is scheduled to return to Las Vegas for a physical show and will also make certain elements available digitally,” said the questionnaire. “In what ways, if any, do you plan to attend CES next year?” it asked, posing a list of options between attending the in-person show, participating only in the digital “option,” doing both, or not taking part at all. CES 2022 is scheduled for Jan. 5-8 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

CTA decided in June to cancel CES 2021 as a physical show, a month before its July 28 announcement (see 2007280034), suggested President Gary Shapiro in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. The association by the spring “still had not given up” on holding a physical event “with added safety and hygiene precautions,” he said. But by May, “I was increasingly pessimistic a vaccine could be proven to work, manufactured and widely available in time for CES 2021,” he said. Though most industry CEOs he canvassed “were eager for us to proceed, their staffs were concerned about business travel,” said Shapiro. CTA’s executive board ratified the decision in July, knowing the association would take “a huge financial hit, but we had moral clarity,” he said. “This early decision in June to skip a year of the in-person, physical CES -- seven months from the event -- was unprecedented in the exhibition world. It was tragic for our friends in Las Vegas, who were looking to CES 2021 and the New Year as allowing them to come back. We knew it affected thousands of jobs and lives in Las Vegas.” The calls Shapiro placed to Las Vegas authorities before the July 28 announcement were the “toughest” he ever made, he said. He didn’t respond to emails Thursday.

Nearly 80,750 “qualified” industry attendees from 167 countries visited the all-virtual CES 2021 during its Jan. 11-14 run, said CTA Tuesday. Fifty-four percent of attendees were U.S.-based, but 58% of media visitors were from overseas, it said. The association offered no insights about attendees' engagement, including how many conferences and workshops they viewed or exhibitors they visited. About three-quarters of the 1,900+ exhibitors were from outside the U.S. and represented 48 “countries, territories & regions,” it said. The physical CES 2020 in Las Vegas drew 170,000 attendees and 4,400 exhibitors.

This year's all-virtual CES was “largely irrelevant," blogged Axios tech reporter Ina Fried Tuesday. “Forced online by the pandemic and overshadowed by the attack on the Capitol, the 2021 edition of CES was mostly an afterthought as media's attention focused elsewhere.” Lost with the digital event was much of the physical show’s “draw” in getting “to meet people face to face and touch and use the latest products,” she said. The virtual CES “was able to potentially market itself to a bigger audience,” said Fried. “But holding attention is tougher for virtual events, especially those that stretch over days. When people force themselves on to a packed airplane and overpay for a couple nights at the Wynn, they are likely to be in full CES mode from morning to night. At home, it's easier to move on to other things, especially given everything that's going on right now.” CTA didn’t comment.

Taiwan-based Carkit AI introduced a voice-enabled plug-and-play karaoke kit at CES that pairs with a smartphone and works with music streaming apps. The Roxie car karaoke station has a processor for vocal effects, a pitch shifter and mixer for multi-person singalongs, said the company. The Bluetooth FM pod comes with an extended-range mic that plugs into a car’s cigarette lighter for power.

CTA wasted little time extolling the success of the virtual CES 2021 as having “made history as the largest digital tech event,” without disclosing data on attendance or user engagement. The event featured nearly 2,000 exhibitors and more than 100 hours of conference programming, said CTA Thursday, without mentioning that the vast majority of the content was prerecorded weeks ago. The physical CES 2020 event in Las Vegas drew about 4,400 exhibitors. “The all-digital CES 2021 engaged the global tech community to experience innovation, make connections and conduct business,” said CTA CEO Gary Shapiro. CES 2021 “showed how the pandemic accelerated the arc of innovation and illustrated the resilience and innovative spirit of our industry,” he said. Though Shapiro conceded last month that CTA had no way to independently audit virtual CES 2021 attendance, “the exhibitors will certainly have opinions whether the event has met their expectations or not,” he said then (see 2012170058). Thursday's announcement had no exhibitor testimonials.

Qualcomm Technologies saw a 5G “acceleration across the board” in 2020, said Alejandro Holcman, senior vice president-engineering, in a prerecorded CES 2021 workshop streamed Wednesday. Qualcomm estimates that more than 100 network operators worldwide have “commercially deployed” 5G, he said. Hundreds of smartphone OEMs introduced 5G products, and shipments exceeded 200 million devices, he said. Though the pandemic made 2020 a “very challenging year, things are happening,” and there’s “no sign of a slowdown” in 5G, he said. The rollout is “still in the early stages,” said Holcman, and he thinks the 5G story of 2021 will be “expansion of coverage.” Consumers who buy 5G smartphones aren’t happy when they can’t find a 5G signal, he said. “Some of these things take time,” as they did during earlier wireless transitions, he said. Some higher 5G bands have “lower propagation” than the existing 4G service, he said. Building coverage “requires additional sites, and that takes time -- it’s more complex, you need permits,” he said. “But in 2021, I’m pretty hopeful that everybody’s going to be able to experience the 5G signal that they should get.”

Asus unveiled its 2021 laptop PC lineup, targeted to business, education and gaming use, at virtual CES Wednesday. The ZenBook Pro Duo 15 has a 15.6-inch OLED 4K display and a tilting ScreenPad Plus secondary screen. The ZenBook Duo 14, with an 11th-generation Intel Core processor, is available with either an Intel Iris X graphics card or an Nvidia GeForce MX450 processor, said the company. The latest Intel processors give a performance boost of up to 40% over a standard laptop, said Asus. The 2.9-pound VivoBook S14 has an Intel Core i7 processor with Intel Iris Xe graphics, 16 GB memory, and Intel Optane Memory H10 memory caching. The TUF Dash F15 gaming laptop has an Intel Core i7 processor, a GeForce RTX 3070 laptop graphics processor and a gaming panel with a 240 Hz refresh rate and 3-millisecond response time. Battery life with video playback is more than 16 hours. Prices weren't given.

LG bowed a CineBeam dual-laser projector with 4K resolution up to 300 inches and rated at 2,700 ANSI lumens brightness. The model HU810P delivers 97% of the DCI-P3 color space, said the company Wednesday. Lifespan of the laser light source is given as about 20,000 hours. The projector has bright and dark room modes, and adaptive contrast automatically adjusts each frame for the optimal contrast in dark scenes, said the company. The projector runs the webOS 5.0 platform, giving it access to streaming channels, and it has Bluetooth for wireless audio connections. Other features include 1.6x zoom, horizontal and vertical lens shift, Apple AirPlay compatibility and screen sharing, said the company. Price and availability weren't given.

The Russian government-sponsored hack of SolarWinds Orion software used for network management systems (see 2012170050) prompted Microsoft President Brad Smith to use his prerecorded CES 2021 keynote Wednesday to urge tech industry action to write new cybersecurity “rules of the road.” World governments “have spied on each other for centuries,” said Smith. “But we’ve long lived in a world where there were norms and rules that created expectations about what was appropriate and what was not, and what happened with SolarWinds was not.” The breach amounted to a “mass, indiscriminate global assault on the technology supply chain that all of us are responsible for protecting,” said Smith. The attack distributed 18,000 “packages” of malware on network infrastructures globally, he said. “It is a danger that the world cannot afford.” The tech industry needs to use “our collective voice to say to every government around the world that this kind of supply chain disruption is not something that any government or any company should be allowed to pursue,” he said. “I hope we’ll come out of this CES and move forward with this as one of our clarion calls for the future.”