Recap of IFA 2024 (with Prakash Sangam)

Prakash of Tantra Analyst joins Leonard Lee of neXt Curve to recap one of the largest consumer electronics trade shows in the world, IFA 2024, which took place in Berlin, Germany.

Leonard and Prakash parse through the stuff that matters from IFA 2024:

• First impressions of IFA 2024 (1:35)
• Key takes and themes from IFA 2024 (4:37)
• IFA: The European version of CES? (7:15)
• The impact and influence of Chinese brands (8:03)
• The big focus on smart living and smart devices (8:35)
• Did AI and generative AI make a big splash at IFA 2024? (9:50)
• The state of XR. Has the Metaverse been resurrected at IFA 2024? (11:30)
• Beyond the smart home, contextual computing (14:50)
• The AI PC and the ongoing Copilot+PC saga (19:15)
• The Honor splash in AI PC and foldable smartphones (23:06)

Connect with Prakash and Tantra Analyst at www.tantraanalyst.com. Hit both of us on LinkedIn and take part in our industry and tech insights. 

Please subscribe to our podcast which will be featured on the neXt Curve YouTube Channel. Check out the audio version on BuzzSprout - https://nextcurvepodcast.buzzsprout.com. - or find us on your favorite Podcast platform.  Also, subscribe to the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com for the tech and industry insights that matter.

Chapters

• 1:35 First impressions of IFA 2024
• 4:37 Key takes and themes from IFA 2024
• 7:15 IFA: The European version of CES?
• 8:03 The impact and influence of Chinese brands
• 8:35 The big focus on smart living and smart devices
• 9:50 Did AI and generative AI make a big splash at IFA 2024?
• 11:30 The state of XR. Has the Metaverse been resurrected at IFA 2024?
• 14:50 Beyond the smart home, contextual computing
• 19:15 The AI PC and the ongoing Copilot+PC saga
• 23:06 The Honor splash in AI PC and foldable smartphones

Transcript

0:06

Next curve, everyone. Welcome to this next curve. Rethink podcast episode, where we break down the latest tech and industry events and happenings into the insights that matter on Leonard Lee, the executive analyst at next curve joined by my good friend and fellow industry tech analyst, Prakash Sangam of Tantra Analyst joining me to recap IFA 2024, which took place in Berlin, Germany and just wrapped up toward the beginning of last week, right? And we were there the week prior for Lenovo's Innovation World 2024. So it was good to spend some time with you there. Yeah. Same here. Yeah. In Berlin. Yeah. It was fun time attending Leno and Leno UN Tandifa. Yeah. Absolutely. And glad to have you on Prakash. And before we get started, remember to like, share and comment on this episode and subscribe to the Rethink Podcast here on YouTube and on Buzzsprout. Take us on the road. The road and on your jog and listen to us on your favorite podcast platform. And also check out and connect with Prakash and the insightful work he does at Tantra Analyst and Prakash will provide his contact details toward the end of the episode. So stick around. And with that out of the way, Prakash, what do you think of IFA 2024? Yeah. How many times have you been? This is my first time to be honest. So it was like mini CES, right? Don't tell them that. Yeah. And yeah, very compact. And it was like as you mentioned, walking through Ikea store, right? They want you to follow a specific pattern and you have to follow it. It's typical German, right? So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we got through a really good thing. A lot of, we got to see a lot of interesting stuff, a lot of things that we knew about, of course, lots of TVs, interesting IOT devices and so on. Yeah. It was a fun day. I think the folks who put on EFA might take offense that you're calling a mini CES. I saw some numbers and I think they drew around 200, 000 attendees, which is pretty big, right? I think. Oh, yeah. CES draws maybe about 160, right? So it's sprawled out everywhere, right? In terms of spread, this was much more contained, right? At Berlin Messe, whereas in CES, it's like multiple halls and then multiple hotels. And, their convention halls fail. It's, yeah, it's almost impossible to move in Vegas during CES. But here, I mean We're able to get in and get out pretty quickly. It's very well nice organized. Yeah. Yeah. And I was just really impressed that we basically saw everything there was to see, or at least that we thought was worth seeing on the exhibition hall. In a matter of, like, half, can I say it's a half a day? Let's, let's, I think, I think we went early and then we are out in the evening. Yeah, I think it's more than a day. Yeah, and so not, I just want to give folks an impression of what it's like, you know, because I always scratch my head how big this event really is right in terms of scale. But like you said, it was laid out like an Ikea store. So it was just so conducive to just going through all the exhibits and getting a good sense of what was being showcased by, and and pretty impressive. How quickly, unlike CES, which is very intimidating, right? You don't know where you are, where to go here. Thank you both. Well managed, so multiple floors on the same building, so Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It was good. I mean, and, and the, uh, the exhibitors were a good very impressive list as well. Yeah. We attended just one keynote or, which was okay. Not as big as the agency as keynote halls, but this was, yeah, it was decent decent attendance. Yeah. So let's talk about takes. What were your general impressions and what were some of the things that you took away at a very high level? We can go down ways later on, but what were you, what were things that you took out? Yeah, sure. So I think it is a huge China playground, right? All over the place. It was like Chinese brands with Chinese organic brands like Huawei Honor and and others, but tons of European and us brands, which now owned by Huawei. So it's Huawei owned, or not Huawei owned by Chinese firms. Yeah. Be Toshiba, be it Hoover. Yeah. Lots of them. And many we found. There that they were on those bands. Brands are owned by now Chinese. They're no longer owned by so which is interesting. So that says, and I think it's like when a plague, even in China and see, yes, you get a lot of Chinese participation, but here it is. I think they dominated the event to large extent. And then that's one. And second I think what made it worthwhile for me was checking out the honor foldable phone magic with you, I think, and attended the honor or the magic book 14, which is powered by Qualcomm X elite chipset. So now we now we we're there for the announcement keynote and we also checked it out. So I think I'm really impressed by the affordable, how thin it was. It had good grip pretty high quality. And then the magic book was, it's pretty light, nice 14 Yeah, I know. Copilot plus PC that you have seen from many vendors. So that is the second highlight checking that out. And then a lot of IOT companies, right? Be it by electric bikes, be it home appliances, of course the center of attraction for any consumer electronic show is huge TVs. We saw one. 160 inch tv for my for forgot, I think Hisense and then Samsung, a huge 110 and 140 inch TVs of course. And then, I was also impressed with the Samsung's huge presents. They also showed this, their HomePod Wall E as it's called. So yeah, it's impressive. Yeah, it is very much like CS that you would see in CS in a contained contained fashion. So if you're taking, if they're taking a sense an offense in, if I call it mini CS, how about European version of CS? Yeah, European and maybe I don't know like a chicken or an egg thing. You don't know whether or not things that are announced at IFA are things that are then, presented at CES or vice versa, right? But yeah, things like the big TVs. transparent displays. Those are the things that we were really hot to share at CES. We saw some of those being displayed, like you said really big TVs, very bright, and also incredibly thin. Remember that? Yeah. But these very large. Yeah. Yeah. But if you remember, if you look at CES again, Used to be dominated by the TV space, by Samsung and lg. But here, I think Hisense had a huge space and then I think. Yeah. Yeah. So they were like, they like a few Chinese brands also had. Large space with large displays as such. So that's different from that perspective, too. Yeah. And the company Chong Hong, I think it's called Chong is the one that you're talking about. And yeah, what you really get a sense of is how, like from the white goods standpoint. So my key takes were there was a huge focus on smart living, right? Yeah, smart goods. There was a ton of stuff related to the smart device, making devices smarter. I did so much about the connectivity, like when you last few years at CES matter was a big matter. And you saw some of it, but not a ton of it. It wasn't necessarily about connecting all these things together. Although you did see some of that in the Samsung booth, which you noted was very large, but oddly, I thought there was. This focus on the device. And so whether it's a smart coffee maker, it was how intelligent you can make this thing and how capable you can make it. And the other thing is a lot of the Chinese white goods companies are really starting to move up toward premium and looking at a premium, call it use cases such as wine. It's not just use cases. If you look at the quality and the finishing of these products and now with some of the Western branding, they're really upscale kind of offerings that they had. And then another interesting thing was, I mean, AI was not, of course everybody, everything was AI enabled or they had some ai, but it was not big interface like, and everything everywhere was ai. Right. That's another, you know, interesting. Yeah. That, that's another, I like that. You know, people are not saying your coffee machine is ai. That's is, you know, to buy. Probably there is some ai, I'm sure it is not in your face. ai. Right? Everything is AI and then all of that stuff. That is a interesting change, which I like. That's another thing that I noted as well, that it, that was much more subdued. Yeah. The only place that you saw generative AI spoken about quite a bit was in the KT startup zone. And you and I checked out the hair loss application, right? That, yeah, I don't know how well that worked, but There at least but that's interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I, like you, I think got the sense or like you, I got the sense that the Europeans are not as crazy about all this chat GPT stuff. And the very, very few AI avatars that we encountered didn't work well. Yeah. Yeah. I think you read all of them. I mean, just keep kept repeating what, no matter what you ask, it was like a broken record. Right. Yeah. It was anything but smart. Yes. Yeah. You're absolutely right. Not a lot of in your face AI, but functionality, smart functionality that actually works as practical again at the device level. Yeah. And surprisingly not. This broader IOT theme that I thought we would see. And then, oh, Hey, let's talk about XRAR because that was one of the things I was curious about is how much was actually there. And I didn't, I don't think we encountered it all that much. Or at least Yeah. Correct things compared to if you had gone two years ago, then everybody would have no matter what they did, had a ER or VR glass on their booth, but hardly anything. Right. We checked out. Only couple of them one of them working on working on with Qualcomm chip set. With dual 4k display, they said they're still working on it. The demo was not that great, but they said they're working on it and yeah. Yeah, that, there are a lot of companies I think that feel that, They're not really smart glasses. They called them smart glasses, but more like, glass peripherals, sort of like what the meta Ray bans are like. Right. That's not really a smart device because you're tethered to your smartphone. Your smartphone is actually doing everything that's smart. These are peripherals and that's what they seem to be focusing on more. Of course, you can offer these at a much lower price point than, let's say a vision pro, a much, much lower price point, but much lighter on your head and nose as well. With the, of course. Limited use case and limited utility. Yeah. Yeah. Mostly for entertainment, consumption on a plane or what have you, or maybe even some productivity on a plane. So maybe some of those use cases, but that's my view has been for a long time on these VR glasses. I think the biggest proven. Use case so far has been content consumption on these things, right? Everything else is in my view, speculated at a very early stage, but content consumption, you have your own, whatever infinite screen TV, like your personal IMAX, I think that works and people like it. I think the only question is whether somebody will pay 3, 500 for it or not. Or if somebody comes with more reasonable pricing, I think people will buy it, just a viewer. That's the thing. I think some of these vendors are tuning into that lower price point by basically stripping this concept of a vision pro down to the cheapest, simplest form. And so in that way I think you're correct because these are really not that smart. They're nowhere near as intelligent as a Oculus a three or or a vision pro. Nowhere close, right? Yeah. Very simple. It's to your point. For the consumption of content and by the way, I don't know that it's all snap and I was there latest era had said today, Oh, no, I didn't huge. Yeah, it's huge. Looks very, developer set not for users. Oh, yeah. That was one, the one thing is you do get an impression of how far ahead Apple Vision Pro is. Yeah. Above everyone else. It's a more finished product rather than Yeah. A demo product, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah., there was that. And then I guess one of the areas I think that is formative At the moment or is in a early stage is, this idea of contextual computing that it transcends this idea of IOT. And it's about, a lot of what people are talking about related to agents, but more specifically for your home living. Where. Devices in the home are more cognizant of your situation and context and able to more intelligently orchestrate your home experience. Nascent, bits and pieces. Yes, there's talk about matter, but these frameworks still have seemed to have a long way to go to gel. But you did get some sense that there's interest in contextual computing for the home. There's a lot of friction. You have to make an extra effort to do it, which kinds of bits of purpose. So if it is somehow integrated, all connected together, that's why I think, companies like Samsung. Well, many things, many consumer items at your home can do a better job if you can focus on it. So the smart home experience is has a lot of hurdles in the such you, you have to do extra work to get it working, which kinds of bits of purpose. I think when it becomes very cohesive and part and parcel of what you're doing, that's when it makes sense. And for that to happen, I think you need a ecosystem which is all very well connected and each understands every other devices, position capabilities, actions, context, and so on. So I think it is very hard for a heterogeneous mix of vendors to provide it. I mean, matter kind of trying to do that in a common fabric for all devices to connect. But I think the, my bet would be On a single provider, single vendor doing it. I think Apple is doing a great job with other applications, but other devices. But if you take Samsung, which has almost every device in the home, be it your phone, tablet wearable, watch, fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, TV. I think they have a much better chance of making sure everything is smart. Not because you wanted to be smart, but they're all connected. You don't have to think twice on doing anything. So I think the value of smartness comes in, it preempts and does the things on your behalf without you thinking about it. Right. I was smart device. Let me go to my phone, connect to it and start. I could have just walked to the thing and started myself. Yeah. It's a little tricky though, right? Because and if you're pushing such a broad and comprehensive portfolio, people accuse you of pushing a monopoly monopoly or walled garden. So correct. So I think that is a way that you basically. Allow basic level of interconnect with through, say, matter or whatever. No, I, I think so. Elevated experience. People want to have, I think there is, I mean, yeah, success proves it, right? People need that kind of, I don't know, to think about what is connected to what, how is connected Yeah. Want you things to work with. The push of Yeah. No, I'm just, I'm just thinking just don't tell any of this stuff to open ran. Person. Okay, yeah, I think in a different cycle altogether. Yeah, they want to do, you know, test the water on the other side. But this thing, the IoT is on the other side is seen. The pain points and trying to hold the this. Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of fragmentation. I've been in this smart home thing for a really long time, ever since I was in IBM. And it's just interesting to see how long it's taken. Yeah, for these solutions to really come together, even with enablers like matter, at the connectivity level, just how difficult it is for these solutions to form themselves into an easier button that can then. Bring a system together and to deliver these smart home experiences. I thought AI PC was a big theme at IFA 2024. It was just not a big theme on the exhibition floor outside of, let's say the honor booth and maybe parts of the Samsung booth, actually the Samsung booth as well. Lenovo had their event, right? Their tech innovation world you then had the chip makers also have their own events, right? So Intel, you had Qualcomm, you had AMD, all of these key participants in the AIPC ecosystem make a showing. And of course you can't forget Microsoft, Microsoft with co pilot plus PC. And that, that really is the big thing that's happening with quote unquote AI PC is now you have all three main chip players coming in with a co pilot plus PC capable. Like you I think you mentioned before the Snapdragon X series really kicked off copilot plus PC back at when it was announced in partnership with Microsoft at Microsoft build. We saw so much and we saw and talked about co pilot places so much at the Lenovo event. I think it was less of a focus for us at IFA, but yeah, yeah, walking in and I'm sure you want to AI side. If you attended the keynotes and others, I think, yeah, well, would have been a major theme as well. Right. So. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's big event for AI PCs, right? So you will not come before now the other two jumping into the fray and they already have a device in the market the enterprise market. It basically kind AI PC co pilot plus PC, not AI PC co pilot plus PC is real, right? How much AI you use in those PCs, I think is a separate matter. I think, but this this vision of, more than one day or multi day battery life, very thin, high performance PC kind of era has begun, I think. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. I think the AI part is a little separate from the power efficient. Exactly. Yeah. Power efficiency is probably, that whole story is probably 80 percent CPU, right? More efficient core and core designs for the CPU and maybe 20 percent MPU, right, where you have now. So yeah, I think right now most of the workload is on CPU. So the CPU performance directly. Proportional to how good your CPU is, right? But the vision is going for a lot of applications, which can be moved to NPU, especially in the enterprise scenario, security applications and other things that run 24 seven, those could be moved to NPU, which will improve the performance. So if you have a good NPU, the view is even when that happens you have. Similar performance maintaining. So I would say, over a period of time, instead of the performance of laptops and going down degrading, you at least maintain our, if things are the same or better, it could improve as well. Right. As and more as these apps are more to workloads are more to NPU. What's the CPU. Yeah, I think it's going to start with functions more than apps themselves, right? Yeah, we'll see how all this works out. A lot of the justification for so many tops, right? The minimum 40, MPUtops is really to support this thesis that you're going to have a large language model or a small language model of some sort, either one or many of them running persistently on your device. Let's talk about the honor announcements, because I thought those were pretty big. You've already mentioned honor magic V3. I'm not. A big fan of fold the foldables, right? There's a lot of reasons why I think it's just not a category that's meaningful quite yet, right? I have to be honest, the first time I picked up the magic V three, I was like, whoa. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? I mean, it was almost like a mind changing moment. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in foldable. I love them. Even then it was a wow effect for me because how thin it is. I mean, we, we did the comparison, right? It, the thin, it is as regular smartphone that y as thick as your you right? Which was really s And then it has nice grip a lot of times. I mean, i the the surface, the surface, which gives a re more important affordable than others because of their weight. It was very light as well. So I was blown away with how thin and how light it was as well. Yeah really shocking. And I think according to honor, it's just 9. 2 millimeters thick folded. Yeah, right. We're talking about thinner than an S 23 ultra galaxy S 23 ultra folded. The only one, the only thing though, I thought was big was the camera assembly because they have this periscope photo mechanism that whole assembly was rather big. So while one side when it's opened up, it's thin, you still have this Portion, which is the camera assembly, but I think it has a pretty Good cameras, probably racial. So I don't know, I don't work with the honor, but it had the hallmarks of Huawei design in it. I know Huawei is, I saw their first generation for what their name affordable in terms of look and feel it more look like the Huawei one. So I'm sure there's a lot of, I'm assuming here, I don't know for sure, but there is a lot of Knowledge from Huawei with no doubt there's no doubt. Yeah. Yeah. The engineer tells you that somebody tells you that is a three device. You would easily confuse it for a Huawei device for sure. Well, you know, it is honor though. I mean, it's a separate company, separate brand. It's just that they're cut from a common cloth, right? Right. Yeah. And that was visible as was my point. Yeah. And oddly honor was the mid tier brand for Huawei. Correct. Yeah, before it was quote unquote spun out. Yeah, but the other thing okay, and yeah And this was powered by the snapdragon 8 Gen 3 which is cool. Yeah, so I'm sure it has some pretty powerful camera capabilities as well as That's all the other cool functions that you would see in a foldable variant. That was really impressive. The other thing is, when we were there, we discovered that they were going to unveil the magic book art 14 and George Zao, who is the CEO of honor went up on stage and he presented it. So that was that keynote that we were at. Yeah. And It was attended by folks from Qualcomm as well as Microsoft. And yeah, that we were anticipating the Snapdragon X elite version, right? Yeah. Yeah. Of, of this new laptop. They do also have a. Intel Evo version, but that's powered by a core ultra meteor lake. So afterwards we went back up to the honor booth and I checked out both and I noticed that, yeah, they're not running the latest Intel core ultra 200 V, which is lunar lake. Yeah. And that's not out yet. So yeah, surprisingly they have the same name. So I was surprised. So you got to make sure, both have the Intel version and Snapdragon have the same name. Both are called magic book. Yeah. Yeah. 14 art. So that's interesting. So if you're is buying cortex, make sure you look at The sticker on the laptop. Yeah. Yeah, you have to make sure. The Snapdragon one is going to have the Snapdragon logo and I noticed that the Intel one has the Evo. Evo logo. Yeah, logo or sticker on it. But what did you think about the magnetic camera? So I'm undecided, I would say one because it is not mounted at all. So just to be sure. So it's basically in the the camera is not on the display itself. So it is a detachable camera that it can store in this side of the laptop and it is magnetically attached and you can basically attach it as a front camera or a back camera. So that's interesting. Yeah. A person like me who fumbles quite a lot. I mean, I have every chance of losing it and not having a camera when you really want it. But otherwise it's, it gives in a hundred percent peace of mind, right? That nobody is hacking into my camera, although it looks off, it's not recording or whatever. So That is that benefit, but it's every chance that you would lose it. And then, you're either buy a new one or be without a camera on the laptop, which would be very inconvenient for you. Yeah. Yeah. I was a little bit on the fence about that one. I thought it was cool, but the first thing that I would, that came to mind is I would lose this. Yeah, exactly. And then I would have to buy a replacement. Yeah. Yeah, if they were like you can push it in or out or something like that. I don't know, then you'll be, the display space will be taken off. So yeah, it's it's hard to decide which way. Prakash, thanks for joining me again. It was fun being in Berlin with you and sightseeing and attending IFA 2024, as well as Lenovo's Innovation World 2024. And you want to. Tell our audience how they can get in touch with you as well as tap into your research. Absolutely. Yeah. It's great to be again on your webcast and podcast Leonard. So all of my research is on my website www. tantraanalyst. com. You can also see here on the top here. And I write for a Forbes USA today, and I also have a podcast called Tantra's Mantra on which I had Leonard Many times. So yeah, check it out and comment, like, and share as much as we can. Awesome. I think that was my line, but I appreciate that. And thanks everyone once again for joining us and please subscribe to our podcast, which will be featured on the NextCurve YouTube channel. Check out the audio version. On buzzsprout and find us on your favorite podcast platform. Also subscribe to the next curve research portal at www dot next dash curve. com for the tech and industry insights that matter. And until next time, take care. We'll see you.