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CES 2011: Seidenberg Views Broadband As Key To CE Innovation

Las Vegas –
Infusing CE products with the power of high-speed landline and wireless
networks “will accelerate innovation” and make it possible to deliver the same
TV content “to any device, anywhere anytime in a simple way,” said Verizon
Communications chairman/CEO Ivan Seidenberg during his keynote address.

Seidenberg shared
the stage with Verizon president/COO Lowell McAdam, Time Warner chairman/CEO
Jeff Benkes, Motorola Mobility chairman/CEO Sanjay Jha, and Google to
underscore the potential for innovation.

Lowell pointed
out that Verizon decided to “go early and first with 4G LTE-based cellular
broadband to send a signal to the entire CE industry that the market will
develop very quickly” and “speed up the innovation cycle.”

 Networks will be as fast as PCs, he
predicted, with Verizon’s fiber-optic network to the home and businesses having
“no practical limit to speeds,” McAdam said. 4G-equipped smartphones “will be
the biggest wave to hit computing since the invention of the PC,” he continued.

For his part,
Time-Warner’s Benkes said wired and wireless broadband will usher in a second
golden era of TV in which TV content will be “going on demand in every device,”
from TVs to PCs, tablets and smartphones. TV, he said, is “becoming bigger than
TV.”

 To make “TV Everywhere” happen, Time-Warner
has brought together every content-distribution company, including cable
operators and telcos, as well as content creators to develop a way for consumers
who subscribe to a TV service “to have it on demand in every device” and have
it work the same way and not pay more for it, Benkes said.

Tablets will
be one of the ways consumers will access their TV programs, and to underscore
the market potential for tablets, Google demonstrated its Android 3.0 OS,
designed specifically for tablets and adopted by Motorola in its planed
Motorola Xoon for Verizon’s 3G and 4G networks.

Motorola is targeting February
availability of the 3G Xoom incorporating CDMA 1x EV-DO Rev. A, but purchasers
who buy the 3G version will be able to upgrade it to 4G LTE sometime in the
second quarter, when the 4G version will also become available, Jha said.

At the
keynote, Google demonstrated key 3.0 features, including a new 3D-like visual
design to the user interface, the easy addition of widgets to multiple home
screens, ability to view windows on the home screen showing a calendar and
email inbox, and such desktop features as tabs along the top of the screen for
various apps.

 Google 3.0 tablets lack hard buttons on front,
replacing them for virtual keys that reconfigure themselves depending on what
the user is doing.

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