CES 2012: The End of Planned

AT&T threw a curve ball at its keynote when it announced this Titan refresh would be hitting the states with support for 4G LTE -- a much welcomed...

AT&T threw a curve ball at its keynote when it announced this Titan refresh would be hitting the states with support for 4G LTE -- a much welcomed first for devices running Microsoft's Mango OS. And as if access to those sweet wireless speeds wasn't enough, HTC's leapfrogged its US competition by beefing up the camera module on this 4.7-incher, bumping it to 16 megapixels with an f/2.6 lens and setting a new standard for imaging on stateside handsets. Unfortunately, that signature, elegant build has gone by the wayside, replaced here by a more traditional encasing.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show was just as large and incomprehensible as ever; thousands of vendors, more than 100,000 attendees (140K by one estimate), acres of show floor to walk and dozens upon dozens of behind-closed-door meetings. That was CES. Yet, that was not the story of CES 2012. It was, as I see it, a collection of evolutionary product changes and, perhaps, the beginning of the end of planned obsolescence.