Sometime during the 2012 baseball season, I became aware of Mike Trout. A player for the Angels, he had a pretty solid minor league career but I had never heard of the guy. When I finally did hear about him, it was because he was putting up amazing numbers. Not just great stats for a rookie, great for a baseball player in general. He basically came out of nowhere to dominate the league, seemingly suddenly.
I feel similarly about the state-owned Chinese company Hisense. Informal surveys of my colleagues and others confirm that I am in the large majority of Americans who have never heard of this company before this week. But here they were, at CES, in Microsoft’s old spot in the Central Hall. And what they filled their booth with was pretty amazing. Here are my favorites:
Interesting Smart TV functionality. They support the Opera TV Store, which aims to bring web apps to TVs. Also, robust support in many of their models for Google TV, and a Google TV set-top box called Pulse.
An entire station dedicated to showing their support for HTML5 – on TVs.
Facial Recognition capabilities
An HD projector with very short throw (at a fraction of the cost of LG’s stunning entry at this CES)
A transparent 3D screen and a transparent touch screen
They also had performing dancers, some mobile devices and nice large UltraHD TVs. Not bad for the first time out.