High-tech homes: Fridges on Facebook and smart security
George and Judy Jetson would feel right at home at the CES floor here. With smart washing machines, magic remotes, and refrigerators that blast Top 40 hits, the automated home has arrived.
George and Judy Jetson would feel right at home at the CES floor here. With smart washing machines, magic remotes, and refrigerators that blast Top 40 hits, the automated home has arrived.
It's official: We've entered the tablet age, and 2013 looks to be a great year for slates. Tablets appeared in all forms at the International CES and were just about everywhere you looked--and the noteworthy and innovative models featured Windows 8, not Android, inside.
If you wander through the small booths inside the Venetian Hotel conference center CES rooms, you find another door, way in the back. It leads to the CES International Pavilion, full of endless aisles of austere booths that all look alike.
It should've been awkward. This year's CES is the first show since Microsoft's amicable split with the Consumer Electronics Association. Redmond severed deep ties, giving up an annual booth in a marquee floor spot, and sidelining the dynamic duo of Ballmer and Gates, who had warmed up the crowd at 15 of the past 18 opening keynotes. Going in to this year's show, we expected the ambiance to match that first uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner after your parents get divorced.
Behold the PCs of CES 2013. They are simpler, smarter, easier to use, and more portable than their now ever-so-clunky predecessors. No mice or keyboards are required. Indeed, these are not your daddy's computers. And let's not even call them PCs. How about: Tablets, hybrids, all-in-ones, and even Table PCs.
Hewlett-Packard is rebooting its tablet strategy with the ElitePad 900, but faces challenges as it tries to overcome past tablet failures and deals with the slow adoption of the Windows 8 OS, analysts said.
Most of the tablets, TVs, ultrabooks and smartphones on display at International CES this week ultimately are bound for someone's home, where they'll have to talk to each other. Six major home networking technologies to make that happen will be on display at the show, some of them making significant strides to keep up with the demand for instant information and fun.
With so much chatter about tablets this year, you might think that the handheld, rectangular devices being unveiled represent a significant innovation. The reality is that so much of what we're seeing is not a whole lot different than what we saw in previous years; these products offer only a few new twists. But those new twists could make the difference between tablets' remaining a niche item and their finally busting out to the mass market in a meaningful way.
My pockets are stuffed full of business cards from people I do not remember meeting, my head is thumping like a flamenco dancer, there's margarita salt on my laptop, and I can't seem to locate my pants. That can mean only one thing: I just returned from my annual pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Chip design firm ARM grabbed the spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week when Microsoft announced that its new Windows OS would work on the ARM architecture. ARM processors go into most of the world's smartphones and tablets, and with Windows support, the company can now focus on the wider market for PCs, where it has virtually no presence. Nvidia also announced that it was building its first ARM-based chip, code-named Denver, for PCs and servers.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) isn't just all tablet, cameras, and laptops; there's plenty of news for the PC component geek, too, ranging from tiny flash drives that pack a lot of heat to the hand-held gaming console.
With the past week being dominated by CES announcements, it can be pretty hard to keep up with what was happening outside of Vegas. Worry not! GeekTech brings you the condensed guide of what else has been going on in the world of geek.
Whether they were big or small, LED or plasma, all the HDTVs on the CES 2011 show floor had one thing in common--they took the best that came out of last year, and added several slight, but significant, improvements.
Prior to CES, there were only a handful of phones with front-facing cameras: the iPhone 4, the EVO 4G and the T-Mobile myTouch 4G to name a few. This year's CES was all about 4G, for sure, but video chat is definitely one of the apps carriers love to use as an example of how great the next generation of data speeds is.
Motorola announced the Atrix smartphone at the Consumer Electronics Show, and while many have been concentrating on its 4G connectivity and clever desktop dock that lets it run a cut-down Linux desktop on a full-sized monitor, nearly everybody has missed something very important.