If you let the rows of 3D and 4k displays lining the halls of CES paint a picture of the future of television, you’d be missing a vital component. Tucked away inside a pair of ballrooms on Sin City’s famous Strip, representatives from television networks, software companies, cable providers and advertising firms held a powwow dubbed the Second Screen Summit to talk shop and discuss the fate of such experiences after a very busy 2012.
Over the past year, companies ranging from AT&T to Nintendo created a wave of experiences to complement TV content. Even the 2012 Summer Olympics received the second screen treatment with its very own Android and iOS apps, which let users catch live streams of events, access stats and more from the comfort of their couches. With so many solutions on the market, it’s not entirely clear who will come out on top, or if there’s room on the second screen for these myriad apps to coexist.
Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth has a long history of disrupting the industry, and this year’s CES is no different. The entrepreneur / space tourist will join us to day to discuss his company’s swipe at the smartphone space.
Marvell’s been all over the place this week, showing of some the best technology of 2013 it’ll be helping to power. We’ll be sitting down with the company’s vice president of the smart home, Winston Chen, to talk set top boxes.
Headsets with vibrating haptics aren’t exactly novel — we’ve already seen such offerings from Skullcandy as well as Sony. Now AblePlanet is coming out with something similar, but the underlying technology makes it considerably smarter than anything currently on the market. The company recently announced it’s pairing up with haptics firm ViviTouch to make a gaming headset that offers different-feeling vibrations depending on what kind of music you’re listening to, or what’s happening in the game. The as-yet-unnamed headset will go on sale within the next six to nine months, according to AblePlanet, with pricing to be announced at a later date.
Additionally, the companies plan to team up on other projects, including ear canal devices for field workers (firefighters, etc.) and even products for the hearing impaired. Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, we want to give you a quick preview of the headset, which we tested for a few minutes here at CES. Unfortunately, the set we tested today was merely a retrofitted NC1000CH plugged into a control box. Still, it gave us a good sense of what we can expect when the final product drops later this year. Meet us after the break to learn more.
We’re used to CES being all about gadgets and technology in general, but this year, there were actually a surprising number of major gaming announcements. NVIDIA positioned itself front and center, leading the charge and talking about a number of new products and services that are bound to get any gamer bouncing up and down with glee. Perhaps the biggest reveal NVIDIA’s press conference held was the reveal of Project SHIELD, a new Android-based games console that’s packing the company’s latest mobile processor, the Tegra 4.
While that’s impressive enough, it gets even better: Project SHIELD won’t just play Android games, but is also capable of streaming games over Wi-Fi from a computer outfitted with a GeForce GPU. During our hands-on time with the device, we got to see it streaming Black Ops II to its 5-inch 720p screen, so there’s certainly plenty to look forward to with this new device. The streaming functionality makes a good segway to another major announcement from the company – NVIDIA GRID.
With NVIDIA GRID, we’re seeing NVIDIA enter the cloud gaming space, outfitting its server racks with enough GeForce GPUs to supposedly match the power of 700 Xbox 360s. A number of key players have failed or otherwise stalled out in the cloud gaming space, so it’ll be interesting to see if NVIDIA can excel. The company also gave us more details about GeForce Experience, which will do its best to optimize your graphics settings so that games run as good as they can on your rig.
Of course, the show wasn’t only about NVIDIA. The company made a lot of major gaming announcements – that much is true – but it had quite a bit of competition for gamers’ attention. Razer had its Project Fiona tablet on hand at the show, only now it’s been renamed the Razer Edge. Making use of Intel’s third-gen Core line of processors (with one configuration even sporting a Core i7) and an NVIDIA GT640M LE GPU, this tablet definitely has some stellar hardware. It will also have a number of accessories available separately, including a detachable controller dock, keyboard dock, 360-esque gamepad, and docking station that has all the ports you need to turn your Edge into a mini gaming desktop.
As you might imagine, we found during our hands-on time that playing games on the Razer Edge is a blast, and seeing triple-A retail titles like Dishonored running on it at excellent frame rates certainly was exciting. It seems safe to say that if the Edge catches on with gamers, then we can look forward to a whole new era in mobile gaming.
Archos was at the show, and though it had a number of different devices on display, one of the more intriguing products was its GamePad. The Archos GamePad is another tablet made specifically for gamers, though it comes with a far less expensive price tag than the Razer Edge. As one of the only Android tablets to provide physical face buttons, this makes the tablet a prime choice for people who like enjoy games but hate touchscreen controls. In our hands-on, we said that though you’ll have to map the physical controls for a fair number of Android games, the process seems pretty easy, and should keep the downtime between downloading and gaming short.
Right before Pepcom kicked off, we heard that Xi3 and Valve would be showing off a new product. Xi3 was there in force at Pepcom, showing off its brand new 7 series modular computer, and while we made a few guesses at what Valve would be using it for, in the end it turned out that we were wrong. It would appear that Valve has invested heavily in Xi3′s modular computer to offer set-top “Steam boxes,” meant for gaming and streaming content, so we’ll be keeping and eye on that.
Switching gears completely to move from hardware to peripherals, there were two companies in particular that were showing off new gaming mice. One was Genius, which let us get a little hands-on time in with its relatively new Gila mouse. The Gila comes with a number of accessibility options, letting users program any of the twelve buttons and featuring highly adjustable dpi settings.
Mad Catz is not one to be outdone, however, giving us a look at its new R.A.T.M and M.O.U.S.9 mice. If you’re a serious PC gamer, these mice seem to be aimed directly at you. Both mice are quite similar, with the M.O.U.S.9 being just a bit bigger than its brother. Both have very unique designs as far as gaming mice go, with buttons everywhere on the pair. They each can supposedly boast one year of battery life as well, so that’s something to get stoked about if you’re always on your gaming PC.
In the end, this was actually a pretty big year for gaming at CES. All of the stuff we saw during the show will of course being popping up more and more as the year goes on, and we’re hoping that we’ll get the chance to spend much more time with Project SHIELD, the Razer Edge, and the Archos GamePad soon. Keep it here to SlashGear for more information on all of these cool devices, and in the meantime, be sure to check out our CES portal for our full show coverage.
This week we got the opportunity to take a peek at a hero device from none other than camera manufacturers Pentax, their MX-1 showing itself to be quite the looker for the 2013 Summer season. This machine is the very first advanced compact camera the company has ever presented, here showing a 12-megapixel sensor, 4x optical zoom, and a solid body with a classic look. This camera also comes with a 3-inch tilting display that’ll allow you to hold your unit above or below, the display pointing out at your face from any forward angle.
The lens on this machine is a 28mm F1.8 wide angle, making sure your next-level photos bring on a life that’ll make you want to stick with Pentax through the future. The middle of this device is a texturized rubbery black while the top and bottom are a cool metallic with brass panels up top and down below. This machine will be available sometime inside 2013, likely by the time Summer rolls around.
Also revealed this week was the Pentax Q10′s new ultra-vast collection of body colors. You’ll now be able to pick 100 different custom color combinations for the Pentax Q10 – and it still feels so nice to use this classic body and set of controls. Have a peek at pure red here and create your own at the Pentax studio online. You’ll be able to pick your own body color and your own grip color – go wild!
For those of you that didn’t see this camera back when it was announced in September of 2012, it’s a real live interchangeable lens system-toting camera with a 12.4-megapixel sensor all in the size of “a pack of cards.” It’s small and it’s powerful, those two things are certainly true. Have a peek at a whole lot more CES 2013 coverage in our CES portal and be sure to stay tuned to our Pentax tag for more camera action all year long!
While the biggest story of CES 2013 may have been Ultra HD, Android was still a huge part of the show, and it showed up on a handful of new devices that were unveiled this past week. Nobody can deny the impact that Android has had in the technology industry, as well as in tech culture, throughout that past several years. We ended up getting a ton of hands-on time with a number of new Android-powered devices, one of the most-popular being the IdeaPhone K900 from Lenovo, and we ended up talking with Lenovo’s Mark Pinner about the new device.
The IdeaPhone K900 is a beast of a phone. It has a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS display with an Intel Atom Clover Trail Z2580 processor inside. There’s also a Sony Exmor BSI sensor with an F1.8 focal length lens to make up the 12MP rear camera, and it has the widest aperture of any smartphone-based camera right now. The front-facing camera has an 88-degree viewing angle, which again, is the widest angle lens on the market right now for a smartphone.
We also took a look at the Sony Xperia Z, which is a completely waterproof smartphone and the company’s newest and best device to date. It’s got a 5-inch TFT LCD HD Reality Display, Qualcomm’s S4 Pro APQ8064+MDM9215 quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM, and an internal storage size of 16GB. There’s also a 2,330 mAh non-removable battery that provides up to 14 hours of talk time or up to 510 hours of LTE standby time. And of course, the 13MP camera on the back will allow you to get some excellent shots.
The infamous YotaPhone also made an appearance this week, and it’s a smartphone that actually has two 4.3-inch displays — there’s the main one on the front that’s a regular LCD 720p HD display, and then the back has an e-ink display. The e-ink screen is meant to stay on all the time, and the purpose of the phone is to push whatever you have showing on the LCD to the e-ink display for saving battery.
Chinese manufacturer Huawei unveiled two new phones at CES, with one being a gargantuan 6.1-inch phablet-style smartphone, the Ascend Mate. The specs are fairly disappointing, with only a 720p HD display and an 8MP camera, but the 6.1-inch screen definitely turned some heads at the show, for better or for worse. The company also announced the Ascend D2, which has a 5-inch 1080p HD display and a 13MP camera. It also has a 1.5 GHz quad-core Hi-Silicon K3V2 + Balong V7R1 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage. The device itself is a little chubbier than most smartphones on the market right now, but it’s extremely lightweight.
ViewSonic, who’s mostly known for their great computer displays, outed a new 24-inch Smart Display that runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It comes packing with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor with 4-PLUS-1 technology, and it also has HDMI via MHL, full-sized USB, and Bluetooth connectivity. While the company refers to it as a display, it’s essentially a massive tablet that comes with all sorts of goodies, including Tegra Zone with a handful of games the work with NVIDIA’s Tegra line of processors. Of course, it has a stiff MSRP of $675, so be sure to bust out that piggy bank and save up your coins.
Some other new Android stuff we saw was the ZTE Grand S LTE, packing a 5-inch 1080p display, as well as the Pantech Discover, which is AT&T’s latest budget powerhouse, sporting a 4.8-inch 720p TFT display, a 13MP camera, and a dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 processor, all for the price of only $50 after signing a new two-year contract.
As far as Android tablets go, there were a few that stood out. We took a look at the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, which was revealed for Verizon this week, and it essentially comes with the same features as the other variants, except that it runs on Verizon’s blazing fast LTE service. We also fooled around with the Archos GamePad, which comes with a 7-inch 1024×600 display and has built-in physical controls on the sides.
Overall, while a lot of the new Android devices that we saw this year weren’t anything to write home about, a few stood out from the crowd. One reoccurring theme is certain though: bigger screens, faster processors, and better cameras, are continually making their way into smartphones every year, and we’re already pretty excited for what 2013 has to offer in the Android industry, and we can’t wait to see what CES 2014 will have in store. Let us know what you were most excited about from CES in the Android realm, and be sure to hit up our CES portal for all our CES 2013 news and hands-on.
Over the last few days, I’ve spent hours churning out posts in front of the “world’s largest 3D video wall” at the back of LG’s CES booth. Every neuron in my body is exhausted. I may never feel emotion again. More »
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