During his keynote address at CES 2007 (see my special report), Microsoft chairman Bill Gates touted some of the interesting and exciting new hardware designs, inspired by Windows Vista, that are coming from the company's partners in the PC industry.
"The strength of Windows has always come from the ecosystem around it," he said. "We've done a good job now of reaching out to all our partners, and showing them Vista, giving them a chance to get ready, and it's been very gratifying to see them rallying around this opportunity
"One thing that we're very pleased about is the way that people have stepped back and thought about new Windows PC design based on these features. Now in many cases they came to us and we put the right feature into Vista, or we did the feature and we went to them and encouraged them to do something very innovative. A good example is touch screen. Touch didn't used to work very well because your fingers would be too big. Well, in the software we've come up with a way to let you target in a rich way. And so now HP with their TouchSmart selecting photos to print, and doing lots of things with touch, it's just so obvious that you wonder why touch hasn't always been there as one of the great ways of doing interaction."
"Toshiba with their Portege has done all sorts of neat things that you'd expect for a leading edge portable. They've taken the ability to have what we call a Sideshow alert, put that on the side of the machine so you can see information, even when the device is closed. They created a document station that actually uses high bandwidth wireless, ultra wideband, so you don't even have to plug in to get your video display. It just sends the DVI signal across that wireless connection."
"Sony with some great Media Center packaging. Medion [is] taking this Ultra Mobile [PC], the small screen concept, making that really a great second PC that you can carry around and do reading, and media type things."
"Here, the partners are going to keep surprising you, but the ones that I showed specifically are actually timed for the Vista launch. And so right then there's something very dramatic, but every month people will be building things, whether it's the large manufacturers, the system builders, things that take the Vista phenomena and actually drive it forward in a new way. So let's take a look at some of these new Windows Vista PCs."
Here are some still images from the video Gates then showed to the CES keynote audience. Enjoy.
Welcome to the New Wave ... Powered by Windows Vista
Ultra-Mobile PCs
Laptops
Gaming
Entertainment
