Watched Steve Ballmer’s Keynote at the one of the awaited event CES2011 (Consumer Electronics Show).

I thought I will give you some highlights in this article accompanied by some pictures that will give you an idea on where Microsoft is heading towards in the coming years.

The keynote included not only demos of Microsoft products released in the recent times but also the future prospects of all those products including:

· Xbox live (Partnership with ESPN to feature live sports experience with family in XBOX and also connected social experience. Some other cool features have also been demoed. To know more about Xbox go to link)

· Xbox 360 Live with Kinect. (If you are a gamer and haven’t heard about Kinect then you better go bing more about this technology. It’s just so amazing experience to play games with your body as a controller. I had just 5mins experience of this in a store on one of my favorite games “Volley Ball” and I just loved it. I can keep going on and on talking about Kinect so let me get back to the main topic. So at CES the Next version of controller free Kinect in “Avatar Kinect” was demoed which also now recognizes facial expressions too. Looked really interesting and astounding on to where technology is moving forward to. To know more about Kinect go to link)

· Windows Phone 7 (Demo on the features of the phone along with future prospects of Xbox live games coming soon on WP7. To know more about WP7 go to the link)

· Windows7 Laptops and PC’s with increased GPU performance. (Demos of the new touch enabled windows7 laptops have been demoed)

· Surface2.0 – This is a wonderful touch screen device that has been further enhanced with build in Intel Core processor. Its already a wonderful device mostly used in schools and educational institutions/News channels as a touch device. The demo showed a much improved and lot sleeker version of the Surface and its introduces “Pixel Sense” in its latest version. If you don’t know what Surface is all about. You can imagine it as a Table top touchscreen device that can be used for various interactive scenarios. For more information on Microsoft Surface go to the link.

· Next version of Windows (An updated on what I would call it as “Windows8” was given and it will support the SOC architecture(System On Chip architecture). I am still new to what this architecture is all about. MS has already started engineering for the next version of windows partnering with Nvidia/Intel/Qualcomm/AMD etc. That will build products on this technology. This is a demo of just the platform support of the future windows OS and not the UI. High performance and easy portability on any device is the motive of the future windows. It’s also about enabling windows experiences to run natively on ARM extending windows commitment to SOC architectures.) For more information on SOC go to the link.

I should say to everyone’s surprise Microsoft is still mum about the Windows Tablet. Many expected there would be an announcement about the tablet at CES but there wasn’t any. Looks like MS fans have to wait more..!

These are just few of the key points and my personal thoughts from the keynote presentation.

For viewing the recorded keynote go to the link. Fast forward to the 2hrs:07 mins for Steve’s Talk to start.