LAS VEGAS – Verizon used its open keynote here at the Consumer Electronics Show to tout its partnerships and the power of its 4G LTE network.
Verizon Communications chairman and chief executive Ivan Seidenberg and Verizon Wireless president and chief operating officer Lowell McAdam didn't make any announcements - the company's lineup of 4G LTE phones will be unveiled at an afternoon press conference – but instead talked up the reach of the Verizon network and invited execs from Time Warner Cable, Google, and Motorola to show off devices and software running the Verizon network.
For many Verizon customers today, "technology is an extra hard drive for their brains; a second skin," Seidenberg said. "They're using technology to erase the boundaries between home and work; they imagine access to everything at their fingertips and they want it now."
As a result, there's the "opportunity for our industry … to deliver relevant, personalized experiences to all those individuals on a big scale and lead the way to the future," Seidenberg continued. That will happen via tech partnerships with tech giants as well as entrepreneurs, he said.
The keynote, however, focused on tech giants. Time Warner Cable chief Jeff Bewkes talked up the company's TV Everywhere Web-based TV access, while Motorola co-chief executive officer Sanjay Jha showed off the Motorola Xoom, an Android Honeycomb tablet the company introduced here at CES yesterday.
To that end, Google's Mike Cleron took the stage to demonstrate Honeycomb on an unnamed tablet. With Honeycomb, Google spent over a year thinking about how to rebuild Android from the ground-up, he said. Google "focused on taking all the things people already love about Android and making them richer."
Google worked to make its widgets more powerful and focused a lot of effort on making customization and multi-tasking more seamless. Indeed, multi-tasking worked quite well during the demo – a line of previously used apps were on the left-hand side of the screen, and Cleron picked up where he left off in a game of Dungeon Defenders just by tapping the preview pane.
Cleron also showed off Gmail, which has been redesigned for tablets, and his demo of a Google Maps that tilts, zooms, and rotates got a few oohs and aahs from the crowd. Notifications, meanwhile, now carry more information, like a person's photo. More details are in the demo video below.
McAdam, meanwhile, closed his presentation by focusing on the 60 product developers that will be showing off apps running Verizon here at CES, including Live Edge, which lets news organizations set up broadcast-quality news feeds in the field, and OnStar, which is using LTE to turn the Buick LaCrosse into a tech hub.
Stay tuned for more news about new Verizon handsets after the company's press conference.