Smartphone Thoughts: My CES Experience: Part 1

While CES may have been a couple weeks ago, I haven't had the chance to post about my experiences yet. It was a great event and it provided me with plenty of opportunities to meet and talk with different companies and site owners. So, with the "better late than never" thought, I give you My CES 1.0 - part 1. :-)

I arrived in Las Vegas late in the evening on Saturday (the 5th of January), just 22 days after my last visit to the city. And that's not a bad thing either. Vegas is always a fun place to go visit - be it for vacation or work. Given the time change and my late arrival, I simply checked into my hotel and called it a night. Let the adventure wait until I had some sleep.

The fun and excitement started on Sunday as we (Steve Hughes, Eric Hicks, Johan van Mierlo, and Jason Dunn) started to make our way to the Samsung press event in the Sands Expo Center. We had all pre-registered for the press event. We arrived 15 minutes before the event was scheduled to start and the line up was crazy long. It went down the hall, around the corner and then around the other corner. Of course, this doesn't mean much if you don't know how long the hall is. So trust me when I say it was LONG and this was the line for press that had pre-registered. There was another line just as long on the other side of the conference room for people who had not registered. However that line wasn't moving very fast because each person had to prove credentials and register prior to getting in. The good news is that our line was moving - not fast, but moving. Before long we had rounded both corners and were about 50 feet from the entrance when the line stopped moving. Samsung representatives made their way down the line letting everyone know that they are full and can not allow anymore people into the room. As you can well imagine, this didn't go over well with a number of people. What's the point in pre-registration if you register too many people?! This didn't leave me feeling very happy about Samsung. Even the 1GB MP3 Player they handed out didn't take the sting away. I'm just plain disappointed that they would do something so stupid. I can understand that they might not have expected everyone to show so they could over book a little. But this wasn't a "little". There was a large amount of people still waiting to get in. It was a disappointing start to the show.