Hasta La Gadget!

PC shipments are still heading the wrong way down the gadget freeway, according to Gartner, who thinks that we’re now consuming media mostly on tablets and just flitting over to the PC for grunt work. The survey outfit theorized that a single shared computer can often suffice for a family, with individuals getting their own tablet instead of a laptop or desktop for personal stuff — especially with compelling, inexpensive new entries like the Nexus 7. Gift-givers were less inclined to wrap up PCs this Christmas, and Windows 8 didn’t give them much of a boost either, according to the figures. The only companies with anything to celebrate during the period were Lenovo and Asus, who experienced 8.2 and 6.4 percent boosts respectively, reflecting another trend that competitors like HP and Dell will want to nip in the bud — and fast.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

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Source: Gartner

Haier had a pretty formidable booth here at CES, so naturally, we had to swing by and cast our eyeballs over anything and everything there. A wall of TVs greeted us, which turned out to be the company’s 2013 Roku-ready HDTVs and Android-packing smart models. Screens were everywhere, but there was also a table with some finger-friendly equipment like 9.7-, 7- and 5.3-inch HaiPads, as well as a Windows 8 laptop, touchscreen all-in-one and tab / laptop slider. The slider looked pretty nice, but all the aforementioned hardware was set up in Chinese, so we lost interest pretty quickly. A central hall booth wouldn’t be the same without a 4K TV, but not to worry, Haier had a couple on display — unfortunately, glare from all the other screens dotted around kind of dampened their impact.

What we were most interested in was all the prototype technologies on show, but all the Haier reps were from the US sales department, so not a soul could talk about the demonstrations. The eye-controlled TV we saw at IFA last year was getting quite a lot of attention, while the mind-controlled set we’ve also seen before was almost certainly playing a looping video to give the illusion something was happening. There were also several gesture-controlled models, but one wasn’t working and the other was hosting a very basic Kinect-type game. A ping-pong game played with a “Sensory Remote” was also up on one TV, but looked unresponsive and therefore, unfun. A multi-view demo using dual 3D specs did what it was supposed to, and a glasses-free 3D TV prototype showed nice depth as long as you were 12+ ft away (the camera can’t really replicate the effect, but there’s a quick video of it below anyway).

The booth also had a household section which we thought was safe to ignore, until a “wireless blender” caught the eye. “It’s just a blender with a battery in it, surely?” this editor asked. “No, there’s an inductive coil built into to the underside of the counter,” was the reply. Thus was our Haier experience at CES, and to revisit it through our eyes lens, check out the gallery below.

Kevin Wong contributed to this report.

Continue reading A look around Haier’s CES 2013 booth: HaiPads, plenty of panels and a wireless blender

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Displays, Household, Laptops, Tablets, HD

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Is solid state storage you’re thing? We’ll be getting a demo of hard drive swapping from Sandisk’s vice president of retail product marketing, Dinesh Bahal, just after the break.

Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!

Continue reading Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with Sandisk’s Dinesh Bahal

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There isn’t a hardware standard for Valve’s upcoming Steambox concept. While the goal of the initiative is to move PC gaming from the desk to the living room, that doesn’t necessarily involve a single hardware standard or minimum spec, Valve hardware engineer Jeff Keyzer told Engadget in an interview this morning at CES 2013. “It’s going to be different things for different people. We’re interested in investigating an ecosystem of devices that don’t necessarily have to share a common spec,” Keyzer said. Nothing’s set in stone, of course, and Valve’s still very much in the exploratory phase of its Steambox push. “We’re exploring the space, and trying to understand what the tradeoffs are and how that impacts the user experience — what it’s like to actually use this hardware and play games,” he explained. Beyond specs, he pointed out that all the prototypes of Steambox on display at CES share one common feature: “they don’t look totally out of place in a living room.”

Keyzer and the hardware team at Valve certainly seem to understand the challenges ahead of them in 2013. In true Valve fashion, their approach to tackling those challenges lies in iteration and openness. “We’re planning to be open and involve users, so I think over the coming year you’ll hear from us, and it won’t be this big secret. I really think that it’s going to be quite open,” Keyzer said. And there’s that hardware beta we heard about last year, lest you forget.

Steam’s Big Picture Mode — a TV- and controller-friendly version of Valve’s widely used digital gaming service — is the first volley in Valve’s big living room push. Keyzer pointed out that several devices already on the market are essentially doing what Valve hopes to do in the coming year with its own hardware. “There are a lot of computer manufacturers that are making computers like these now that you can buy presently and are supporting Big Picture,” he said, referencing the three non-Valve PCs on display in the booth. “But we think that there’s a lot of fertile ground for innovation and exploration in that area, so that’s what we’re doing,” he added.

Continue reading Valve hardware engineer Jeff Keyzer on Steambox: ‘It’s going to be different things for different people’

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Software, HD

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We’re spending the week celebrating the latest and greatest gadgets, but sometimes you’ve got to sit down and talk about precisely what makes them run. Thankfully, we’ll be joined by Matt Wuebbling, NVIDIA’s director of product market, to talk about the role his company is playing in helping shape this latest generation of devices — and to show us some of NVIDIA’s work in action.

Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!

Continue reading Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with NVIDIA’s Matt Wuebbling

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, AMD

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