Bill Gates presented what could well have been his second last CES keynote earlier today. Among the offerings were previously undisclosed Vista and Vista Ultimate features, the latest PC, Tablet, UMPC and smartphone designs, Xbox 360 advances in games and IPTV, a new Windows Home Server, some details on the Ford and Microsoft Sync collaboration and a glimpse into the connected home of the future. Bill Gates’ dream of the connected home and the connected life is slowly coming true through Microsoft software and hardware.

Watching the keynote on video, it’s clear to see that, despite Vista still not being available to the general public, Windows Vista demonstrably delivers a better and easier computing experience, especially when pre-installed onto brand new hardware designed to work with Vista.

A new form-factor desktop PC from Hewlett Packard redefines the look of the average desktop while even cleverly integrating a colour inkjet printer behind the screen, with paper printing out from the front of the screen, in front of its wireless keyboard. A new Tablet PC from Toshiba incorporates ‘Sideshow’ technology, or a screen on the lid of the Tablet meant to deliver information like emails, appointments and selected Vista gadgets, even when the PC is turned ‘off’, or more likely, a very low power state.

Sony’s new Vista Media Center PC looks like a white hatbox and is also quite unlike any PC you’ve seen before. Vista UMPCs, or ultra mobile personal computers were briefly on display, showing integrated keyboards that make data entry infinitely easier than on the initial mostly slate-based devices that relied solely on Tablet PC style functionality coupled with an on-screen touchscreen keyboard.

While some devices had slide out keyboards, the second generation running Vista look far more useful. We’ve no stats on battery life or processor power as yet, but these details will no doubt be known very soon.

Vista itself offers connectivity to new sports programming and movie download services through the Vista Media Center. Vista compatibility also exists with Xbox 360 Live, allowing Vista owners to play games against other Vista owners and even Xbox 360 players who have the same game as you.

One previously unknown Vista Ultimate feature is ‘DreamScene’, a video desktop letting you play a video like a running waterfall as your desktop background, or any video in your collection. Another is the ability to take two photos, say with one child closing their eyes in the first photo, and the other child closing their eyes in the second photo. Just by selecting the best bits from both photos, a new photo can be created which looks just like the photo you really wish you took.

No doubt this was just the tiniest of previews and more Vista Ultimate Extras are on the way. Already we know that one Extra is ‘Texas Hold ‘Em Poker’, originally intended to be a game included with every version of Windows, but removed at the last minute so as not to offend sensitivities in different countries.

We learned that there are over 200m Windows gamers. Considering that a computer is the ultimate customizable games console, as it were, it outranks even Sony’s combined sales of PS2 and PS3 devices to be the true leadership gaming device worldwide.

The Windows Home Server lets you install one box that automatically backs up the different Vista computers in your home, automatically and without complication. It also lets you connect to your home server when away from home, in a secure manner, to access your data when you need it, wherever you are.

The Xbox 360 sold 10.4m units by December 31, 2006, achieving 500,000 more sales than Microsoft had predicted for the end of ’06. 5 million Xbox 360 owners are using Xbox Live, with 2.5 million of those said to be on the paid Xbox Live Gold service, creating what is the world’s largest social network in the lounge room.

Xbox 360 TV and movie downloading has proven enormously popular, with the Xbox 360 due to be turned into an IPTV receiver, like a cable TV box that picks up TV shows through your Internet connection, with a telco in your country likely to be the IPTV provider, with AT&T in the US, BT in the UK and 9 other telcos in Europe, with a series of other telcos and trials underway. We’ll see more on this throughout the year, with a launch due for ‘Holiday 07’, as Robbie Bach of Microsoft put it.

There was also the head of Ford US talking to the keynote crowd, essentially giving out the same details as are already known on the Internet.

Bill Gates finished with some demonstrations from ‘the Microsoft Home of the Future’, supposedly an actual house that Microsoft has on campus where they trial future ideas. A child’s bedroom wall was actually a massive display panel, letting you play games, set interesting backgrounds and receive updates from your calendar and more.

There was also a big kitchen bench which had a projector above which ran a display, hooked up to a computer, that knew which ingredients you had in the kitchen thanks to RFID tags, and could not only advise you on what recipes you could create, but even interactively help you to make the meal.

In all, this vision is something that Bill Gates and Microsoft have been pushing for some time. No doubt there’ll be plenty of other technologies on display that will allow you to do many or even all of the same things using non-Microsoft software or hardware. But at least Bill Gates is consistent in his desire to make the information everywhere and anywhere world, the connected home, the connected life and even the connected car a reality.

That’s a heck of a lot harder than just being dismissive, and even if Bill Gates can be said to be somewhat predictable, one thing is for sure. He’s delivering results, even if sometimes they are years late. The dream is coming together, and whether you’ll be using Microsoft software and hardware or not, life is becoming more digital by the day. Bill Gates calls it the Digital Decade.

Whether you like Bill Gates or not, in this, at least, he is right. See the keynote for yourself at this link.
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