I’ve been watching the battle wage on with Wholesale Electronics for some time now, and it never ceases to amaze me, to see all the cool new stuff that shows up every time I take a look. I’ll admit, there was a time about three years ago, when it seemed like nothing new would thrill us again, but lately there’s been a lot going on with electronics in every capacity. Are you keeping up with the trends?

So here’s a quick review of what was being talked about at the big International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (CES) that had everyone gawking and staring at electronics as far as the eye could see. Some people are saying that there’s not much going on in the industry these days, and that we are hitting a time of “incremental” changes. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing, though. It means that good designs will be tweaked to perfection, and creativity will be more easily recognized when it does make itself known.

This was the year of trophy TV sets – the bigger, the better. Rumor has it that Panasonic was showing off a 152-inch plasma screen for a little under half a million dollars. For people with more conservative tastes, there were the expected arrays of HDTV and 3D sets to be admired as well, and at a much smaller price tag than a half mil. Meanwhile LG Electronics was showcasing a set that came in at a svelte 2.9 millimeters thick, as their new OLED TV prototype hit the floor. Mobile phone makers also came up with some hot new models to attract attention. Motorola seems to be scoffing at the cloud computing craze, by promoting a handset that houses an Nvidia dual-core microchip, that would make their new product, the Mobility (MMI) Atrix 4G a processor capable of powering an external PC with no CPU of its own. Whatever the interface, however, the fact that connectivity to the Internet is an inescapable reality for all manufacturers these days. It would seem that anyone who isn’t making their devices Internet-ready is lacking in a basic requirement.

Finally, something else that caught my attention about the CES was the return to some old-time classics in tech related merchandise, as rotary-dial telephones and old fashioned game controllers made a comeback in form, if not in function. The nostalgic appeal seems to mesh nicely with the age group of most techies, as they are mostly young enough to be hungry for anything new, and still old enough to remember what it was like to wait or the beep, as it were. On the other side of things, the push to eliminate the conventional game controller has never been as fierce, with Kinect, the Xbox gaming console that accepts a user’s voice commands to provide the interface, and even Netflix, doing a bit of the same. Even Chinese branded TCL made a good showing, by ushering in a series of television that allows users to flick their wrists in order to change the channels. That could become tiresome when you’re subscribed to hundreds of channels, but we’ll see where they go from there. Wholesale Electronics are anybody’s game at this point, and we’re all ready to play.