Will there be breakaway hits or trends from this year's Consumer Electronics Show, which opens next week in Las Vegas? Rumors and expectations are floating around as to what, if any, technologies or products will follow in the footsteps of Nintendo's Wii, high-definition television or Samsung's Galaxy Note in successfully launching at CES.
Of course, there have been many, many, many more products that failed despite big CES premieres, including netbooks, 3D TV and Palm's WebOS. With these Vegas odds in mind, let's preview the trends that seem most promising.
Expect to see many new ways in which you can use your mobile  device -- a smartphone or a tablet -- in conjunction with other devices in your home or business, such as your TV, appliance or building heating system. LG plans to show a TV that syncs with your smartphone, for instance, and Google has been working with various TV manufacturers to offer the ability to turn an Android device into a remote control.
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The age of smart, connected things that aren't computers, phones or TVs has been promised for decades now, and CES throughout that time has shown countless variations on that theme. The question is whether this is the year when some of them actually come together in networks, standards, ease of use and pricing.
Cars, for example, will make a big effort to present themselves as wired living rooms on wheels, with new intelligence, apps , and interaction with mobile devices and services being shown by the likes of Ford, Lexus and Subaru.
There will also be renewed efforts to offer networked household appliances, light fixtures and anything else that uses electricity in your home. Given the rise of the open source Android operating system as the leading mobile platform, the power of inexpensive mobile devices, the availability of cheap sensors, and such recent developments as Microsoft buying R2 Studios, maker of a product to control home systems remotely via a mobile device, perhaps this is the year the smart home actually takes hold.
The TV industry, long a backbone of the show, will try once again to sell the generation after HD TV. After several years of futilely trying to convince attendees and consumers that wearing 3D glasses to watch a small amount of 3D content was the Next Big Thing, the emphasis is expected this year to shift to product lines in the two competing, super-high-def technologies, 4K and OLED. (continued...)
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