Hasta La Gadget!

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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Earlier today AMD’s director of global business units marketing, John Taylor, joined us on our CES stage to talk chips. Specifically, tablet chips, and laptop chips, and chips for products that have elements of both. While he was up there, Mr. Taylor flashed a reference device — a laptop hybrid with the keyboard and touchpad built into the carrying case. Obviously, we weren’t satisfied with just a quick tease, so we caught up with him afterward to learn a bit more. As it turns out, it runs a quad-core version of AMD’s new Temash chip, which is being billed as the first quad-core, x86-based SoC. (There’s also a dual-core version.) Built into the chip is an HD Radeon 8000 series GPU with AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture, so in theory you should be able to pull off PC-caliber gaming even on a tablet.

All told, it promises 50 percent more performance than AMD’s Hondo processor, which you can find in Vizio’s new Windows 8 tablet. Of course, those are just marketing claims, and besides we haven’t had a chance to benchmark either a Hondo or a Temash system yet. So, to put that in better context, it might be helpful to hear AMD talk about its competitors. Obviously, Intel is a biggie, but in particular AMD says Temash should be able to compete with Clover Trail tablet chips, going all the way up to Core i3 on laptops. We’re told Temash will ship sometime in the first half of this year, and that AMD will be revealing more details about the platform at Mobile World Congress, which kicks off in late February. Until then, we’ve got hands-on photos of the unit below, along with some performance impressions after the break.

Continue reading AMD shows off a reference device with a quad-core, x86-based Temash chip

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, AMD

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It’s only the second week of January and it’s already been an eventful year for Lenovo. There’s the newly minted ThinkPad X1 Carbon to talk about — and that whole Lenovo Business Group / ThinkPad Business Group split to talk about. The company’s Executive Director of Worldwide Product Marketing, Jerry Paradise will be on-hand to answer our questions and show off some of the company’s latest laptops.

Continue reading Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with Lenovo’s Jerry Paradise

Filed under: Laptops, Lenovo

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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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T-Mobile knows that the easiest way to get new customers is to give away your service for free, and it’s handing access out like so much candy with its new 4G Connect strategy. Similar to what we’ve seen for Chromebooks, the deal supplies 200MB of free data every month for up to two years, right out of the box. Those who need more than casual email checks on the road just need to pay T-Mobile’s prepaid rates to keep the broadband going. The Dell Inspiron 14z and HP Pavilion dm1 are the only devices available for now that qualify for the 4G Connect plan, but more are lined up for 2013, including (but not exclusively) devices with Qualcomm’s Gobi chipsets in PCs or its Snapdragon chips in Windows RT tablets. T-Mobile tells us that we won’t have to hunt down specific Magenta models, either — once a PC line includes 4G Connect, every American variant should carry the needed modem as a matter of course.

We had the opportunity to try a Pavilion dm1 with 4G Connect, and it’s clear that T-Mobile is largely letting the PC builder take priority. The hardware is very much vanilla on the outside. Most of what you’ll notice, apart from reasonably fast HSPA+ data when you’re away from WiFi, is a custom T-Mobile app. Both a Live Tile and the full app will show usage; diving in shows everything in a simple not-Metro layout with extra options for SMS messaging and topping up when the bandwidth runs low. Apart from having to register the PC in the first place, the service is as simple as we’d care to see. Now, where’s our LTE connection?

Continue reading T-Mobile’s 4G Connect offers free 200MB of monthly data on PCs and tablets (hands-on)

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, Mobile, T-Mobile

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Source: T-Mobile