Joe Wilcox

The days of teasers and rumors are over. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony Ericsson unveiled the sleek and sexy Xperia Arc. Hell, I thought my Nexus S was bendy-looking with its curved screen. Curved doesn't aptly describe Sony Ericsson's new handset. It truly is arced.

The Xperia Arc has a curved 4.2-inch screen and measures a slim 8.7 mm, which makes it thinner than yesterday morning's CES hotness, the LG Optimus Black. Oh, how quickly these phones are outdated. ;-)

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Is iPhone 4 too rich for your recession-weary wallet? Can't spare $199 or $299 for Apple's newness but iPhone-envy is making you an insomniac? Today, AT&T announced the deal, or is that steal, of the week: iPhone 3GS for a sweet 49 bucks. Starting January 7.

The timing is baffling with the Consumer Electronics Show officially starting today and so many hot, Android phones being introduced -- the Motorola Atrix 4G and LG Optimus Black, among them. These are dreamy handsets. Who can get any work done just thinking about them?

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Critics, and even customers, accuse Microsoft of being empty, of having exhausted its innovation -- and for many of them that means imitation. Microsoft is often called he great imitator. At first glance, last night's opening Consumer Electronics Show keynote given by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer fits the bill. The keynote felt empty, and short. Microsoft didn't even show off something substantially new about tablets, which is one of the event's hottest product categories this year. The rumors about a tablet operating system were wrong.

What is Las Vegas? It's a place to be entertained (and, yes, gambling is one of the recreations). I think of Vegas as where entertainers who have passed their peak of popularity go. It is the city of celebrity has-beens. Perhaps then, Ballmer was where he belonged.

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It wouldn't be the Consumer Electronics Show without Microsoft kick-off keynote. For about a decade, cofounder Bill Gates assumed the role. More recently the burden belongs to CEO Steve Ballmer.

Considering all the accolades given Apple chief executive Steve Jobs during 2010, I wonder if he would give the keynote if asked. After all, Job's is tech's CEO-darling of the hour, he runs the tech company with largest valuation and Apple's most successful products -- at least released during the new millennium -- are consumer electronics: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and newer MacBook models. Apple's products have lots more to do with consumers and electronics than do Microsoft's. Ballmer's company mostly sells to enterprises and earns nearly all its profits from software. Apple sells hardware, and of course bundled software and services, to consumers.

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It's the question I've been asking all week. The Consumer Electronics Show doesn't officially start until tomorrow but unofficially tonight with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's 9:30 ET keynote. Yet there have been major announcements and press briefings all week. It's as if vendor attendees are rushing and stumbling over one another to get out their news before January 6. Now why is that?

There's more than CES going on tomorrow. Apple will launch the Mac App Store. In mid December, when the launch date was announced, I asserted: "Apple crashes CES party with Mac App Store." Perhaps many vendors fear the same. I don't recall there ever being so much news before the show's start. Amazon, ASUS, AT&T, Intel, Lenovo, LG, Netflix, Samsung and Vizio are just a sampling of major vendors holding big press events and/or making major announcements since Monday.

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Second-generation Intel Core Family processors are here, and laptop manufacturers are wasting no time announcing new models. Samsung has the eye-popper of the Consumer Electronics Show (OK, so far), and it's sure to make MacBook Air owners whine with envy (that is if they're between Apple Kool-Aid fixes). Hell, I want one. The Samsung 9 Series packs big performance in a little package.

How little a package? The 9 Series has a ".64-inch profile," (16.3 mm) according to Samsung. MacBook Air thickness ranges .11-.68 inches (3-17 mm) Both laptops weigh 2.9 pounds (1.73 kg). The two thin-and-lights feature 13.3-inch displays with 1366 x 768 resolution, DDR3 memory and no optical drive. But the 9 is two full Intel processor generations ahead of the Air, with second-generation 1.4GHz i5 Core processor compared to the aged 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

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Vendors aren't waiting for the Consumer Electronics Show to officially open. The kick-off keynote, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, starts tonight at 9:30 pm ET. The show officially opens tomorrow. Early announcements, such as ASUS, Toshiba and Vizio tablets, tumbled out like little stones falling down the mountainside on Monday and Tuesday. Today, it's the avalanche. Which announcements matter?

Amazon is opening an Android apps store. That's right, it's Amazon versus Android for Android developers. The Amazon appstore Developer Portal beckons Android developers away from the Android Marketplace. Apple can laugh all the way to the bank.

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Actually, I'm hoping to be wrong in this assertion, and with main Consumer Electronics Show events commencing tomorrow there's still a chance I might be. The most important tablet, or table concept, must come from Google. The plethora of Android 2.x tablets won't be competition enough against iPad. When it comes to products and marketing, there often isn't safety in numbers.

During CES 2010, Google released the Nexus One. The search and information giant designed the HTC-manufactured smartphone, which ran the then newest Android version -- 2.1. Many bloggers and journalists wrongly wrote that Google charted new retail waters by selling direct. I repeatedly corrected this claim. For example, Nokia has sold phones direct for years, Many blog or news posts about the N1 also missed the point: Google wasn't going into retail sales but establishing a reference design for manufacturers and developers. From that perspective, Google executed brilliantly with N1 and continued with last month's release of the Samsung-made Nexus S.

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Smartphones and tablets may be the early buzz darlings of this year's Consumer Electronics Show, but no one should forget USB 3.0. This afternoon, Samsung reminded me in a press release about new USB 3.0 drives it's popping this week.

Three drive lines -- two of which are portable -- will be available. Portable drive colors: Onyx black, Sapphire blue and Coral pink, with capacities up to 1TB. The new desktop drive comes in 1, 1.5 and 2TB capacities.

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Forrester Research claims that one in three Americans will own a tablet PC -- that's 82 million of us -- by 2015. No wonder "Tablets look to steal the show at CES and beyond," as my colleague Ed Oswald asserted yesterday. It's no coincidence that Forrester released its tablet forecast less than two days before the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show starts.

Already, the tablet noise is growing, with Microsoft rumored to be showing off Windows-powered tablets during CEO Steve Ballmer's June 5th opening keynote. Then there are the Android rumors, such as the HTC Scribe running Honeycomb (Android 3.0).

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Let the march to Android 2.3 begin, with (gasp) more smartphones running version 2.2. You've got to love this one-step-behind (sometimes two) innovation that defines Android. My Google-branded Nexus S runs Gingerbread (aka Android 2.3), and it's the only phone that officially does. The carrier and OEM channels move much slower than does Google operating system development. I kind of understand the slow upgrading of existing handsets, but most everything new shouldn't run something old. Hehe, "these aren't the Droids you're looking for." Today's 2.2 star: the HTC EVO Shift 4G from Sprint, available on January 9 for a cool $149.99 (with two-year contract and after $100 mail-in rebate). Update: After I posted, Best Buy announced presale availability of January 6.

By the specs, Sprint's new smartphone impresses (except, perhaps the processor): 800MHz Qualcomm processor (MSM7630); 3.6-inch capacitive touchscreen (with 800 x 480 resolution), slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 720p video capture, FM radio and all the other expected stuff, like GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi. Too bad that the EVO Shift 4G is but another new Android phone running an old OS version.

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I sure don't. Otherwise I would have joined the cacophony writing about Apple's market capitalization milestone yesterday. I see the $300 billion valuation as another excuse for pageview-obsessed bloggers and journalists and hype-seeking Wall Street analysts and investors to write even more about Apple. It's great news for driving the share price higher.

From one perspective, Apple's valuation achievement is so impressive it shouldn't be ignored. Following the Sept. 29, 2008 stock market collapse, Apple's valuation plummeted. Apple's market cap was a mere $88.68 billion on Oct. 2, 2008, down by nearly half from a month earlier. Apple's stock price comeback is nothing short of miraculous over the past two years. In late May, Apple's market capitalization topped Microsoft.

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Holy downloads, Batman, BitTorrent has 100 million monthly active users -- 20 million per day. Average daily downloads: 400,000. That's a whole lot of file sharing, and I wonder: How active are Betanews readers on BitTorrent?

BitTorrent revealed the subscriber data in one of many tech announcements leading into the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, which kicks off with Wednesday evening's keynote delivered by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

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"The race for the lead in US. smartphone operating system (OS) consumer market share is tighter than it has ever been," begins a blog post today on Nielsen Wire. The winner is? No one yet. Apple's iPhone leads in total US consumer market share, while most people who recently bought a smartphone chose Android. I'm among them. "This race might still be too close to call," Nielsen asserts.

Perhaps the more important data point is about the broader smartphone category. "In November, 45 percent of recent acquirers chose a smartphone over a feature phone," according to the Nielsen post. That's up from 34 percent in June. Apple and Research in motion are "statistically tied" with respect to US smartphone OS market share -- 28.6 percent and 26.1 percent, respectively. Android's share is 25.8 percent.

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What should be Microsoft's top priorities for 2011? I've got an answer for that, as I have for seven years now. Rather than make predictions about what the company will do in the coming year, I offer what it should do. The advice is unsolicited, but given nevertheless with the hope Microsoft will make 2011 better than 2010. As I asserted on December 14: "The year 2011 will be make or break."

Unlike past years' advice -- eh, resolutions -- this list is more thematic. Microsoft has a huge perception problem, and as I've so many times asserted: In business perception is everything. The people with the loudest voices, such as analysts, bloggers, journalists, marketers and software developers are pining for companies like Apple or Google. This translates directly to Microsoft's share price, which is moribund and undervalued. In November I asked: "Why won't Wall Street give Microsoft a break?" Perception is a major part of the answer.

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