CES: Sony Wants Wireless In Most Of Its Products

By 2011, Sony plans to enable 90 percent of its products to connect wirelessly to the Internet and each other, breathing new life into televisions, DVD players, digital cameras and even the traditionally less-than-sexy digital alarm clock.

In a glitzy, star-studded keynote speech Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony, discussed how the blurring lines between information technology and entertainment have spurred Sony to adopt a services-enhanced multifunction approach to product design.

Stringer introduced new products that incorporate wireless functionality in innovative ways. Sony's Wi-Fi-enabled Cyber-shot DSC-G3, available now in selected Sony stores, features a built-in browser that lets users connect to WLAN hotspots and post their images to online photo-sharing Web sites, and also can send photos wirelessly to Sony Bravia televisions.

Stringer also showed off a prototype of a next-generation Sony alarm clock with a digital picture frame form factor, which wirelessly gathers customized news, weather, sports and other data and makes it accessible to users through a touch-screen interface.

"With network connectivity in all of our consumer electronic devices, we will be able to add more value," Stringer said.

Stringer touted the progress Sony has made in display technology and said the company is on track to ship high-end Sony Bravia HDTVs this spring that have a width of just 9.9 mm, comparable to that of a CD jewel case. He also gave a quick demo of Sony's flexible OLED display that's roughly the width of a sheet of paper and can be bent and manipulated in similar fashion.

Sony's support for open technologies and its embrace of social networking have created new value chains, a phenomenon that's seen when consumers buy a high-definition television, and are so enamored of it that they then buy a Blu-Ray DVD player, HD camcorder and other HD products, Stringer noted.

Blu-ray's victory in the high definition DVD wars has helped Sony to start taking advantage of the sophisticated functionality of the technology, according to John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, who gave attendees a glimpse of what Sony has in store on this front.

"[Blu-Ray] is one of those things where you can't go back once you have it," Lasseter said. "The amount of data you can put on a disk is unlike anything we've ever seen."

And Sony has only begun to scratch the surface of Blu-Ray's capabilities, Lasseter said. Pixar's latest Blu-ray release, Sleeping Beauty, gathers location-specific data like weather and time of day from the Internet and displays that in the context of the start menu. And in the future, consumers will be able to view 3-D movies at home on their Blu-Ray players, Lasseter added.

Stringer punctuated his keynote with appearances by Tom Hanks, who stars in the Sony Pictures film Angels & Demons, sequel to The Da Vinci Code; Dr. Mehmet Oz of Oprah fame; and former New York Yankee great Reggie Jackson, who discussed Sony's technology sponsorship of the Yankee Stadium that opens next spring.