The International Consumer Electronics Show may have a long-standing reputation for hype and hoopla, but overall, I found this year’s edition to be relatively restrained on the over-the-top pizzazz front. One striking example was Sony‘s press conference. There were no celebrity guests or special effects — just Sony executives showing off Sony products onstage. Sure, the execs lavished praise on the gear, and some of the items were technology concepts which may never reach consumers in their current form. But it was still refreshingly low-key by CES standards. One of those executives was Phil Molyneux, a Sony employee since 1987 and the president of Sony Electronics since 2010. Later in the week, when I got the chance to chat with him, I told him that I found the press conference to be more focused on, well, stuff than usual. He told me that was intentional. And when I asked him what Sony’s big story was for CES 2013, he said “We’ve got more than one story — that’s the beautiful thing.” The goal with the press conference, he told me, was to show off multiple Sony products and technologies and explain how they work together. “Particularly with the Sony One-touch demonstrations, it’s about how the consumers can use products from Sony to easily use their content,” Molyneux said. One-touch is Sony’s brand for a gadget-linking feature based on Near-Field Communications (NFC); it lets you, for instance, send music from the company’s new Xperia Z smartphone to a Sony speaker by tapping the phone on the speaker. The Xperia Z was the first Sony smartphone to debut at CES since the company took full control of its phone unit, which was formerly a joint venture with Ericsson and distinct from the rest of its electronics business. Molyneux told me that it was crucial for Sony to create its own phones and make them work well with other Sony products: “The handset is going to be the sensor of consumers’ lives — how they manage their content, how they communicate, how they![]()
