Palm made a big splash at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, announcing its new mobile operating system, WebOS, and a touch-screen smartphone called the Pre. Here, Palm Executive Chairman Jon Rubinstein holds up the Pre for all to see. Unfortunately, the Pre, and follow-up phone Pixie, failed to make much of a dent in the market, forcing Palm to sell itself. Acquirer Hewlett-Packard didn't fare much better, and dumped WebOS on to the open-source community.
3D television emerged as a hot trend at the 2010 CES show but so far hasn't made much of an impression on consumers. Part of the problem? Expensive glasses and the lack of content. Since then, 3D has been reduced to a feature on the TV, rather than something to highlight.
CES 2010 was also the year of e-book readers. Yes, the Amazon Kindle, which debuted at its own event in New York, has been a huge success, but others that have tried to follow in its footsteps haven't fared as well. Foxit Software's eSlick reader was positioned as a budget reader that used the company's PDF-reading capabilities. But Foxit shut down the e-reader business later that year.
Another e-reader that debuted at CES 2010, the Skiff was designed by Hearst to display newspapers and magazines. The software platform was purchased by News Corp., but not the reader, leaving the product dead.
With his usual enthusiasm, Steve Ballmer touted the new Slate PC, which would be Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPad. Well, it didn't fare so well, as all Microsoft's partners jumped ship to Android for their tablet needs. The few Slate PCs that came out were DOA.
Motorola Mobility had some high hopes for the Xoom, the first tablet to run Android 3.0, also known as Honeycomb, the first version of Android designed solely for tablets. The software turned out to be buggy, and with few apps to support the device, customers couldn't justify paying a premium for it.
T-Mobile USA, at the time trying to mount a comeback with new CEO Philipp Humm, debuted the LG G-Slate at CES 2011. It's one of many tablets that disappeared quickly. The photo shows Humm on the right, with Jong-Seok Park, CEO of LG.
The ThinkPad T430u is one of several Ultrabooks shown off at CES in 2012. It got lost in the crowd as no one really paid too much attention to the slimmer laptops.
