With all the main stories already posted, I thought I would take this time to quickly sum up Digital Life. The show, itself, still has a lot of room to grow and I think that growth will occur when the industry is convinced to take it more seriously. None of the major players had any over the top booths and the depth of interesting products was noticeably lacking. The fact that Apple wasn't even there and Microsoft didn't have the Zune on display only serves to prove that none of these companies seem to believe that the Digital Life convention is the place to win over new customers.
There were some products, though, that I was impressed with, but lacked enough information on to really flesh out an article. The Intel Viiv platform is very cool, especially when you look at the small form factor of units like the Ion. It's a shame that Intel had decided to use rather poor looking Dell LCD televisions instead of something higher quality. The Intel spokeswoman that greeted me didn't seem to take kindly to my comments about the "questionable" picture quality. As someone who's interested by Home Theater equipment, I was definitely turned off a bit.
During my time at the convention, the HD-DVD 16 wheeler show room truck wasn't there (or I completely missed it) so I had little material on the format itself. I did manage to see the HD-A2, Toshiba's second generation player. The A2 is still limited to HDMI 1.2 support and tops out at a resolution of 1080i. When I inquired about the HD-XA2, I was told they couldn't get it to the show in time. I guess it wasn't important? Either way, without seeing the truck, HD-DVD didn't show off anything too impressive. The one Toshiba plasma used to show off the HD-XA1 was a low quality set and again served to turn me off a bit. I don't understand why companies like Toshiba and Intel don't make sure the demo displays they use are actually of decent quality. It all just felt very nonchalant.
Gaming was huge at Digital Life. Microsoft has both PC and Xbox 360 gaming kiosks set up and there were two large PC gaming tournament areas. In one area, the PC version of Halo was being played by a crowd of at least 100 people squared off in mini tournaments. I stayed away from public humiliation and checked out the WWE: Smackdown vs. Raw 2007 kiosk. The graphics were amazing. Everything was so well detailed and alive. The announcing was terrible, but that's expected in the series. My friend and fellow Neowin member, bigbluepride35, had his fun with Flight Simulator X. By that, I mean he sent a plane into a nose dive and took pictures as it crashed. I encouraged him to do it, so I guess I'm to blame for the immaturity.
With all of that said, the coverage ends here folks. It's a fun show once you get past the fact that it's still a fledgling and needs time to grow and mature. I would like to thank bigbluepride35 for joining me for the day and using his digital camera since I'm of a rare breed known as "geek without a camera". I hope everyone has enjoyed Neowin's coverage of the event and I look forward to doing it again next year.
Images: Intel Ion | Ion on a Dell | Toshiba HD-A2 Images: Flight Simulator X Crash | Raw vs Smackdown 2007
