No, I didn’t go, sorry, I still have to spend my time earning a living and working with my favorite people, my customers. Many of my friends though, did get a chance to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week and here are some of the more impressive peeks into our future that they sent back to me.

Probably the most talked about advancement at the show was about moving into 5G bringing us even more speed and that ever popular better definition on everything from our phones, I-Pads and most importantly televisions. The 5G wars have begun, be prepared to be inundated with ads from Verizon and AT&T next year, as 5G services become available. Oh, for the days of doing things like going into space and landing on the moon rather than finding better ways to sit on are butts and watch inferior actors in crappy movies…but I digress.

Speaking of even higher definition television sets, the new thing now is going to be foldable TV screens. Now in your living room, instead of that puny 40 inch TV screen (how yesterday!), you will be able to buy foldable TV’s that opens up to 65 to 85 inches. A kind of a movie screen for your living room.  And of course, these new sets will come in 8K instead of 4K, so that those same inferior actors in those same crappy movies will look even better, not to mention bigger and I’m sure louder, Oh, I can’t wait!

Voice commands are coming into their own next year. Which mean we’ll all be talking more to devices named Alexa and Siri and whatever stupid names they come up with, than we will to our spouses. Giving us more opportunities to sit on our ever-widening butts, doing  nothing more productive than yelling commands to an electronic box, so that something will happen that we could make happen ourselves, if we had the energy to get off the couch and if we weren’t too busy stuffing our faces with Cheetos to the point of permanently planned inertia.

And then there are the self-driving cars, and if that is not bad enough, a new self-driving motorcycle was introduced at the show. Really? I’m not a motorcycle driver myself, but I’ve always secretly wanted to be, and I always thought the reason to drive a motorcycle was for the fun of it. There have been times when I have been the passenger on the back of a motorcycle, but that never seemed anywhere near as fun as being the driver, that’s what seems like fun to me. I can’t imagine who would want a self-driving motorcycle, but that’s just me. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure I’ll hear from some clever self-driving motorcycle company’s marketing guy who will give me a call informing me of why I can’t live without one.

And, all of this leads me to the ever popular phone, that ever-present quintessential symbol of our times. With everything we discussed earlier especially of course the onset of 5G phones are going to get bigger then ever. Yes, that’s right, they are coming out with new foldable phones (didn’t we used to call those flip phones?). Samsung will introduce a 6.2 inch phone that unfolds into a 12.4 device when you want to really see what you are wasting your time on while riding on the back of that self-driving motorcycle.

Okay, I’m just having some fun with you…sort of, I love all of this new stuff and I’m certain that a year from now I’ll be marvelling about how great my personal drive in theater sized office TV is, especially when I’m watching some of my favorite movies like Hangover 28 and Oceans 21.

But for now, I’ll just keep wishing that these geniuses would invent things that I could really use like great looking personal 3D glasses of my own that I could buy and  wear when watching 3D movies. Or, maybe, being able to buy more than one phone on the same number so that I could have a sporty model for hiking, and more formal model for when I wear my tux (not!) and a smaller model for when I’m travelling, and I could switch them depending on my mood or what I’m doing . I would think the people who make and sell phones would love this idea…being able to sell multiple phones to the same person?

Now, if we could only invent something that would stop hunger and poverty, and give us world peace, or maybe just something that would stop us from being so angry with each other all the time, something we really need and could use right now. That would be something wouldn’t it? That would be something we could really use. It’s only common sense