Lalawag Liveblog of Microsoft’s 2011 CES Keynote

What up! The Microsoft CES keynote begins in 15 minutes

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/ces/liveevent.aspx

Just a little warm up for tonight… if we get anything 1/100th as entertaining I will be ecstatic.

If nothing else, I expect the Surface 2 to be a very cool demonstration

This music is totally pumping me up for the most epic chick flick ever.

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME TECHNOLOGY

I hope the delay in starting isn’t because someone forgot the Black Eyed Peas Elephunk CD in the car.

Well, close enough. Look at how much fun they’re having at CES with this sizzle reel! I bet all of those executives throw their hands up sayin’ HEYYYYOOOOOOO all the TIME.

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the CEA is on stage. He’s not a good of a hype man as Puff Daddy was.

Home Appliances! Electric Vehicles! ROBOTICS! I know where I’m headed next.

Ooooh, nice plug for his book available tomorrow at the Barnes and Noble booth! At least he didn’t wear a dress with the release date taped on his boobs.

Someone needs to put that light female folk music back on. I’m losing my enthusiasm already.

“Steve’s infused Microsoft with his own brand of monkey feces throwing enthusiasm”

Oooh we get a laser light show on screen.

And Steve is on stage. I’m kind of disappointed he didn’t do the dance.

1 Billion Microsoft customers in 2010. Apparently all as a result of gambling.

We’re getting a overview of the evolution of Xbox. Suprisingly, there’s no mention of potty-mouthed 13 year olds on Xbox Live

If you see a prolonged silence on my end, it’s because I’m being bored by fluff video commercials.

Mark Wahlberg playing the Kinect? Not you!

Ron Forbes is now on stage to tell us how Kinect has transformed the way we consume media

He’s giving us a demo of the Kinect in the living room. I thought CES was supposed to be about the technology coming out in the coming year.

Oh I bet Ron was watching Twilight: Eclipse last night.

“In respect to the intellectual property being shown to the CES audience, we are temporarily suspending this video content” – Thanks, I’d never heard a Neon Trees song before

Kinect controls for Netflix coming in the spring! I was wondering when that was coming out.

Hulu Plus also announced for the spring with Kinect controls – would be more exciting if Hulu Plus was worth paying for.

The College Bowl pick’em game sounds really fun, I wish they would expand that to every sport that ESPN shows.

Whoa, Steve Ballmer is back as an animated Xbox avatar. HOW FUN

Avatar Kinect video – apparently now you can chat as your avatar.

I can see this being very useful if you have very ugly friends that you would rather see as avatars rather than in real video.

It comes out this spring for free to all Xbox Live Gold members. The Spring Xbox Dashboard update is shaping out to be a decent one.

30 Million Xbox Live members – a new member joins xbox live every 2 minutes

The Xbox 360 has been the best selling console for each of the last six months. I’m surprised Blu-Ray player sales of Sony’s Playstation 3 haven’t made more of a difference.

Whoa, 8 million Kinects sold since launch worldwide – that’s amazing!

It’s barely been 2 months! For a $150 addon to a $300 console!

Fable Coin Golf is coming to WIndows Phone 7 – I can’t say that sounds particularly exciting. Although it is kind of cool that the money you earn there translates over to your Fable 3 game on the 360

Man, if Microsoft managed to replace Apple’s Game Center with Xbox Live mobile… that would be really compelling even as a subscription based product

Steve has now transitioned into talking about how WIndows Phone 7 has made it quicker to do things on your phone.

I think people actually like spending time on their phones. It’s a problem that doesn’t exist.

5,500+ apps are available on Windows Phone 7 right now along with 20,000 developers signed up.

Copy and paste! REVOLUTIONARY UPDATE.

Liz Sloan is here to show us the Windows Phone 7. She looks very perky.

A dedicated camera button is actually a good idea, although the speed of the iPhone 4 and new Android phones make it a lot less annoying to get a picture taken.

Liz just used the term “mission critical” – sounds very epic for the every day user

Nice! Liz knows about animal style In-N-Out burgers!

Listen, the UI of Windows Phone 7 isn’t the problem, it’s actually quite nice. The problem is with the polish of 3rd party apps once you start branching out from the preloaded Microsoft ones.

Xbox Live is by far the most interesting part of Windows Phone 7. It’s just a shame that a lot of people aren’t going to get to use it.

And now it’s time to talk about the Windows PC

7 copies of Windows 7 sold every second. Come on. Now they’re just making these statistics up.

20 Million downloads of Internet Explorer 9 doesn’t mean that 20 million people are using it as their main browser…

Michael Angiulo is here to talk about Windows PCs and SURFACE!!!

He’s demonstrating some of the new laptops with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors.

I feel like we’re on QVC and Michael is trying to get us to buy these products by calling in NOW.

His ears perked up when he got a reaction from Acer’s dual touch-screen laptop.

“Go on let it out!” Oh don’t you worry, Michael. We’ll let it out. We’ll let it allllllll out.

It looks cool, but I can’t imagine trying to type on an entirely touchscreen keyboard even if it is full screen.

The Asus tablet PC utilizes a stylus with ink capability. He shows us that the computer can tell the difference between the pen and our palm.

The viewing angles on this thing are pretty impressive. We can order them right now on amazon

WOOOO SURFACE 2!

They worked with Samsung on this. It’s only 4 inches thin. It’s the size of a coffee table.

PixelSense has infrared sensors all across the screen – each pixel is actually a camera.

These things can survive a beer bottle dropped on top of them from 18 inches above!

Steve is coming back on to demonstrate 20 fingers on the screen at once. Oh and that was it. sad.

I can’t wait to see Surface 2′s at retail locations. It looks very cool and more practical than the original Surface. I also would like one for my coffee table.

Steve reiterates the announcement that Windows will work with ARM chips in the future – SoC. Not just Intel cpus on x86.

If this sounds like gibberish, the only thing you should worry about is that it means that Windows is going to be showing up on a lot more devices than just computers.

Mike’s back to show us what SoC means for the next generation of Windows.

Whoa, naked computer! Shield your young’uns’ eyes.

Steve reiterates that this is a future version of Windows with the old UI

Everything works out of the box by plugging it in.

Nice! Mike shows us the version of windows with the command prompt to make sure it’s real.

Windows is running natively on a Snapdragon processor – this is the same processor that powers many Android phones.

Ummm. We just got a demonstration of printing a piece of paper. Am I…. supposed to be excited?

Power Point! NOW WE ARE PLAYING WITH POWER.

I’m sure these demonstrations are big news and breakthroughs in terms of engineering, but to the average user this all looks like stuff they’ve seen ten years ago.

He’s showing a trailer for Iron Man 2. THIS IS THE NEXT GENERATION!

“Now we are in the future. WINDOWS WILL BE THERE.” says Steve.

We’ll be able to use Windows everywhere we go, but do we really want to?

And we’re done. Oh no wait, Gary from CEA is back on stage. Cmon plug that book some more buddy!

So basically the only thing we didn’t know is the new Xbox 360 update with Netflix/Hulu/Avatar Kinect announcement.

Seeing the Surface 2 in action is kind of cool, but it’ll be awhile before we see actual implementations of it – very promising though.

Windows on SoC chips is a big deal from a hardware manufacturing perspective, but again, it’s not going to be very exciting to us users for awhile.

Thanks again for reading – we’ll be back tomorrow with some more coverage!