In the last few days I was hooked to the CES 2012 stream to see what would be the coolest products of 2012. It seems that in most categories the coolest products of 2012 would be those of 2011, maybe with a better screen. While this is disappointing to some, I believe that there is a value of small gradual improvements - Tablets just now become more and more useful as a productivity device, we would probably see lots of innovation from the software side in the next few months. But even if CES was rather sleepy this year, some products worth mentioning and also in an enterprise perspective. My list is shorter than Anatoli’s, but I think it’s similar in nature:

• Transparent LCDs – Samsung’s transparent ’smart-window’ concept showed us that transparent LCDs can be used not only in shopping mall installations, but also in homes and office environments. Telepresence Options already see it as a potential technology for telepresence installations, among many other things.

• Smarts TVs are nothing new, but as we see products like the ‘Ubuntu TV‘ and the Android 4.0 powered TVs – it’s only a matter of time before TVs will be the place where most people ‘Skype’ in, and maybe later – companies video-conferencing with. Future TVs might also include depth sensors, and those, beside offering gesture based interface might also help enhance video conferencing experience, as showed in the Kinect Conferencing demo.

• Telepresence Robots – when I first mentioned telepresence robots in the IMTC Blog I talked about them as specialized medical product, that might find their ways into the enterprise world. Well, that’s not really an ‘IF’ question anymore – LTE enabled Vgo robots were showed in CES 2012, and the technology is already being used for remote workers and management.

To me, those were the real highlights of CES (well, unless 4k video is your thing, but we sure need a lot of bandwidth for that).