Hasta La Gadget!

Look closely at the image above. See that clear portion depicting a food fight? That’s coming through the right lens of dedicated eyewear made specifically for Samsung’s 55-inch OLED Multi-View HDTV. The sleek, silver-trimmed 1080p set, recently unveiled at CES 2013, utilizes a quad-core processor and 240Hz refresh rate to send specific “firing patterns” to a user’s eyewear that’s then filtered out by swapping the input control (A /B) located above the left ear. The actual 3D effect varies from an artificial seeming emphasis on layers of depth, to the more traditional, and quite impressive, “in your face” immersive experience. Multiple input configurations are also possible, allowing users in the same room to watch either two separate 3D images, one 3D plus two 2D images or four 2D images simultaneously. So, basically, you can keep playing your PS3 while a loved one watches Homeland.

The 55-inch set also comes equipped with an inbuilt webcam that’s tucked just behind the top front panel and supports Samsung’s Smart Hub. Pricing hasn’t been made known at this time, but you should see the Multi-View set hit retail sometime mid-July 2013.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Samsung

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Hoooooooo-boy. We did it, guys! The craziest week of the year is finally over. It’s time for a little R&R — well, once we’ve spoken to our entire staff about the CES that is. We’re tired, we’re loopy and we’re in it to win it. You’re not gonna want to miss this one, kids.

Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!

Update: video embedded

Continue reading Live from the Engadget CES Stage: the Engadget Podcast CES closer (update: video embedded)

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CES is all about the little guy this year. At least, for us it is. As easy as it is to spill a thousand words out over some new 300-inch floating TV that no currently breathing mortal will be able to afford, we aimed to route around the show’s bellowing giants and find the self-made gems so often lost in their shadows.

Lazy-Hands is the epitome of one of these gems. Armed with little more than velcro, a humble booth, and a dash of ingenuity, they managed to catch our eye amongst thousands of competitors who were twice their size and nth as loud.

The concept behind Lazy-Hands isn’t a complicated one: take a velcro patch and stick it to your device, wrap a couple of velcro-friendly loops around your fingers, and you’ve got an iPad (or iPhone, or Kindle, or whatever else, really) that clings to your hand wherever you might want to place it. It’s a simple product made of almost fundamental materials, and yet it pulls off something quite neat.

Slapping a slab of velcro onto your $500 device obviously isn’t the prettiest solution, but it gets the job done in a universal way — and remember: this is a Mom N’ Pop operation. Let them ship a few thousand of these things and pull in a bit of tinkering money, then watch for what they come up with next.

The Lazy-Hands runs from $9.00 up to $18.00, depending on the size of the device you’re installing it on and the number of fingerloops that you’ll need to support its weight. You can find them all here.

The Almond, a router with a small touch screen that achieved significant success on Amazon thanks to a decent price point and excellent reviews, has a successor from parent company Securifi hitting Kickstarter soon. The Almond+ comes with 802.11ac support, boasts a 2.8-inch touchscreen, and can be set up without even connecting to a PC. It’s the perfect router for a mobile-first generation, and the new version also builds in a smart-home hub that’s compatible with both Zigbee and Z-Wave standards.

The Almond+ includes a small and attractive case that can be wall-mounted easily. Home automation functions can be controlled either from the screen on the router itself or from companion iOS and Android apps, allowing you to connect to the router and access all your remote home management functions in the same place, even from a cellular connection. It’s a natural addition to a device that any home these days pretty much has anyway; the router is often a passive device that users install and then don’t think about again until it fails. But adding smart home features means it’ll actually contribute a lot more use value to a household.

It’ll be arriving on Kickstarter in the near future and will retail for around $100, while the original Almond will be $79, and can act as a wireless network extender if you’ve got the old one and want to upgrade to the latest version.

Even before this year’s CES kicked off, we knew Ultra High-Definition was going to dominate the show. Then from the first press conference to the last, 3,840 × 2,160 resolution displays were a center piece of almost every major manufacturer’s announcements. Leading up to the show, the CEA’s board decided against using “4K” to market these 8-megapixel (1080p is two megapixels) displays, instead choosing Ultra High-Definition or Ultra HD. Of course not everyone followed along, in fact Sony was first to market in the US, late last year, with its “4K Ultra HD TV.” The display is only one piece of the puzzle and plenty of questions remain, however. Like, “Where’s the content?” and “Will I have to replace all my other home theater gear?” Questions aside, Ultra HD TVs are here and more are coming, so click through for these answers and to discover the slate of new Ultra HD TVs for 2013.

Continue reading Ultra HD TVs stole the show at CES 2013, but they’re just part of the puzzle

Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment, HD

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