Sunday, January 15, 2012, 12:04 am

Reacting to Apple at CES 2012, part three: Sony, Motorola, RIM, Nokia

By Daniel Eran Dilger

CES motorcade of distraction: Motorola, NVIDIA

A number of CES exhibitors apparently didn't have too much to show this year, so they resorted to building fancy booths and showing off hot cars within them instead.

Motorola built its booth boundaries out of translucent white tubes it then projected video images on, creating a walk-through curtain that was more impressive than anything actually within the Motorola booth.

The company appeared to be most excited about promoting MOTO ACTV, its Android-based iPod nano/Nike+ clone that looks like it was designed by the Soviets in the 1970s, after seeing a iPod nano thrust back in time.





Outside of Motorola's wall of tubes, a series of exhibitors had hot cars on display. Beyond companies actually showing off their new automotive technology at CES, there were a variety of exhibitors who just dropped a hot car in their booth to garner some attention.

Here's a yellow Lamborghini that might have been brought in by Clarion, and a red Tesla on the floor of NVIDIA's booth. NVIDIA is no doubt hoping that Windows 8 drives adoption of its Tegra 3 (demonstrated onstage during Steve Ballmer's Microsoft Keynote) better than Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets drove shipments of Tegra 2 or the Zune HD drove demand for its original Tegra.





Two more cars: Monster had a polished aluminum Audi on hand, apparently to make its HDMI cables look affordable in comparison, and RIM subsidiary QNX had a nice Porsche on hand, apparently to direct attention away from the fact that RIM doesn't actually have a QNX-based vehicle for accelerating its BlackBerry smartphones yet.





On page 3 of 4: Dinosaur exhibits: RIM, Polaroid