Procept has attended one of the  world's largest consumer electronics trade shows, IFA.  The event is held in Berlin, Germany every 12 months.

Our main reason for attending a show like this is to keep up to date with key industry trends, although we have to admit that as an engineering company, it is always fun to have an excuse to play with cool new products.

If you have any questions about the show or something we saw, feel free to contact us.

There were a number of trends apparent at the event and we thought we would share the main ones we noticed here:

Green:  Nearly every company had the word ‘eco’ in their product names.  In the case of TV´s, use of LED technology, including variable brightness (localised dimming) was used to reduce power consumption further.  Companies like Miele and other white goods manufacturers where also promoting various developments in more efficient design.  Also some mention was made of WEEE type initiatives and low standby power requirements.  In short, everyone was putting out one or more products with 'eco' in front of its name!

LED technology: related to the green trend, the use of LED based lighting technology is going to increase significantly.  Apart from replacing more traditional light technologies, it will also be used for TV and appliance backlighting.  Based on these developments, estimates are that LED shipments will increase from 70 billion last year to around 170 billion in 2012.  Much of that growth is expected to come from increased LED usage in LCD backlights, in the automotive sector and outdoor displays.

3D: Every major industry player (LG, Sony, Samsung, Philips, Panasonic) had 3D TV technology on show.  Essentially all of these involved the use of 3D glasses (some more primitive than others), although Philips had one which didn´t require glasses (but wasn´t as good an experience).  The Sony 3D gaming was probably one of the best and their demonstration included gaming, movies, music TV and sports.  Fraunhofer was promoting their research and developments in 3D TV authoring technology which seems pretty critical to the success of 3D TV, particularly if live 3D TV is to happen.  

Internet / IP connected everything:  Perhaps the connected home is finally starting to happen… There was a huge number of wired and wireless network connected devices including TV´s, set top boxes, DVD players, etc.  Many of these not only included the ability to access content stored on your home PC (photos, music, etc.), but also were able to access internet content such as youtube, flickr, etc.

Apart from the key trends noted above, a number of other things seen of note include the following:

Samsung Streaming video tablet / remote control:  this wireless remote control / TV device allows you to select and view / listen to audio and video content.  It has a clever user interface that means with a swipe of your finger you can ‘send’ the video to the TV in the living room (or kitchen/bedroom/etc.).  The interface was a little slow, but pretty cool nonetheless.  Product is due to be on the market next year.

Sony Reader: Sony have launched their new reader product which is between A4 and A5 size.  Overall seemed to work pretty well, is small and light and supports on screen scribbling and annotations.  One battery charge supports around 7000 page renders.

TransferJet: This Sony trademark is essentially an industry consortium who have based this specification on UWB technology.  The system supports transfer rates of up to 540Mbps over very short ranges.  At the Sony stand, they showed a demonstration of transferring a video from a wall plate to a phone in a matter of seconds.  Other members include NEC, Panasonic, Fujitsu, Samsung and NTT Docomo (there are 19 in total including Sony).  One big issue for transfer jet is that of global spectrum licensing for UWB...stay tuned. 

DLNA: There were a large number of DLNA compliant products on display using a mixture of ethernet, wifi and powerline network bearers.  This essentially will allow multiple home entertainment devices from multiple manufacturers to talk to each other.

Digital cameras with integrated GPS and mapping software:  Allows you to see on a map where photos / videos were recorded.  Now if only there was some software that could retrospectively do that to all of our existing photos…

Satellite navigation units:  With mobile phones (and many cars) now coming with integrated GPS, companies like Tom Tom and Garmin are clearly looking to move away from being product manufacturers to being service providers.  One example is Tom Tom who have their ‘Live Services’ which gives you live information ranging from traffic to safety alerts to fuel pricing and weather.    These come as subscription based services.

If you have any questions about the show or something we saw, feel free to contact us.