Remember the Instamatic? It's still dead, but Kodak isn't

It was a scene from a dystopian future where the machines have won: walking, talking and dancing robots; flying and riding drones; human beings lost in virtual-reality headsets.

And that was just one hall of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week. In a hall called Eureka Park, more than 500 start-ups and tech newcomers launched anything from smart hairbrushes to laundry-folding machines. Another hall came close to resembling a parking lot for cars of the future.

When 3,500 exhibitors and 20,000 new products compete for attention, it's easy to be caught up in the fever to find the next big thing.

As a result, you could be forgiven for not noticing comebacks by old brands that had been left for dead.

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However, it was not for want of trying by the brands. Names like BlackBerry, Kodak, Nokia and Polaroid were prominent.

The most surprising recovery came from Kodak, which became a case study of companies disrupted by new technologies when it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012 - killed off by the very digital photography technology it had invented.

A year later, it had been restructured and repositioned as a technology company focused on imaging for business.

At CES last week, it delivered on a two-year-old promise to produce a smartphone that would "fuse the best of Kodak's rich history in imaging with the latest innovations in smartphone photography and functionality".

The result is the Kodak Ektra, a smartphone with a 21 megapixel rear camera and f2.0 aperture. A 13MP front camera with f2.2 aperture positions it at the leading edge of phone cameras, but with a mid-range price tag.

Kodak showcased the features of the handset for a small media contingent during a sunset ride on the world's highest Ferris wheel, the High Roller in Las Vegas. The rich and vibrant colours of the Strip, the city's neon-wrapped spine, provided the ideal opportunity to compare it with other phones.

While resolution may have lagged behind the Samsung S7 Edge, for example, the Ektra provided the most faithful colour capture of all phones in use by the media in attendance.

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Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke promised that the phone would be coming to South Africa soon, via its manufacturer, the Bullitt Group.

Two almost-vanished phone brands also made their presence felt at CES, with BlackBerry in particular solidifying its new positioning as a mobile software and security business. It showed off the new version of its QNX Software Development Platform, which leads the industry in software security for cars.

Version 7.0 of the software was demonstrated in the 2016 Jaguar XJ and 2017 Lincoln MKZ concept cars. This allowed BlackBerry to leverage off some of the most popular exhibits at CES, despite not having its own hardware on show.

The brand that shared BlackBerry's infamy for its spectacular collapse from smartphone market leadership, Nokia, unveiled the Nokia 6, a 5.5-inch smartphone to be made by licensee HMD Global.

The new phone will be sold only in China, with handsets geared to the rest of the world due to be announced at the next big tech extravaganza, Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona next month.

Clearly, in tech, alive is the new dead.

Goldstuck gave a talk on emerging technologies at CES 2017. He is also the founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter  @art2gee and on YouTube.