CES 2010: Crazy Processing Power + Wireless Bandwidth

There were two announcements from CES this week that struck me as interesting from an entrepreneurial perspective.

The first was Toshiba’s Cell TV which uses a cell processor, giving the television an unprecedented amount of multimedia processing power. The Cell TV is able to use this power to do realtime video processing such as upscaling standard definition television broadcasts to high definition or make them 3D in real-time. This was a great application of the cell processor, but it also illustrates a thought provoking paradigm of throwing premium processing power at a single task to do something pretty amazing in a consumer device.

The second announcement was from Alcatel-Lucent, LG and Verizon who completed testing their 4G (LTE) network gear and committed to roll out LTE service to at least 25 markets this year. Verizon is not the only network talking about 4G, but they seem to be the most ambitious about deployment. 4G LTE speed estimates vary, but it will be at least 10-20 times faster than 3G and on par with wired broadband connections.

Nearly unlimited wireless bandwidth and focused, high power processing makes for an interesting combo of technologies to noodle on for sure. Now if only our mobile batteries could keep up with all this.