Ten stars of CES 2013: Who made the biggest splash?
As the 2013 Consumer Electronics Shows (CES) wraps up in Las Vegas, we’re left to ponder whether it as was a good show this time round. In 2012, IT vendors, buoyed by Intel encouragement and marketing money, were keen to show off their first Ultrabooks. A year on, and the chip giant’s skinny laptop brand has largely failed to …
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Re: An outrageous omission
Where is their cancer cure? TB eradication? The ability for all of us to give up food and live on sunshine and song?? I am disappoint.
Re: An outrageous omission
"Portal Access Keys™ (PAKs™) are downloaded to a cellphone, pc, laptop or tablet to unlock a quantum portal that then allows data to be teleported from a quantum computer to a human or animal brain programming it for desired benefits."
I think they might be angering GlaDOS here. Not to mention the state's Data Protection Agencies and Public Health Safety Bureaucrats.
ASUS have a winner for me anyway ...
the Transformer AiO, a Intel Core i3-based all-in-one desktop running Windows 8 on an 18.4-inch, 1920 x 1080 IPS LCD touchscreen. The novel part: said screen slips out of a dock to become an independently operating Android 4.1 Jelly Bean tablet.
Hey, can leave Windows on the desk ! Idea comes only about 20 years too late ....
Re: ASUS have a winner for me anyway ...
If the windows can be replaced with a linux distro I'll be all over that thing like a rash.
Re: Hold on
My thought exactly! Communication and teleport lock-on wrist band. I remember Blue Peter showing how to make one using a segment of a plastic cordial bottle as the basis of the band (black paper and other bits stuck nderneath to make the electronics). That was the COOLest piece of recycling I ever wore on my arm!
PS My Pebble should be posted in the next couple of months :)
Re: Hold on
The BBC actually ended up using the Blue Peter design in the end as it was saving them lots of money.
Two things most tablets have sealed in batterys so what the issue with having the same on mobile phones and the second is why oh why do we continually have micro sd slots on devices..What is so hard in manufacturing another 32/64/128MB of memory actually into a device?
quote: "What is so hard in manufacturing another 32/64/128MB of memory actually into a device?"
The extra £80ish per memory step, for one (new iPad, £399 for 16GB, £479 for 32GB, £559 for 64GB) when a 32GB microSD will set you back less than £20. Sure, built-in memory needs more redundancy (it needs to last as long as the device), but that looks like a shameless profit opportunity when you have the same "cost" for the +16GB as the +32GB steps. It's obviously not the extra memory that is the bulk of the costing there... I'd easily believe that a 128GB iPad (if they make one) would come in at £639, using the same magic memory pricing voodoo.
I bought the small memory variant of my phone for that very reason; the phone memory has the OS, the cheap(er) SD card has the high churn data (audio, video) so that's the one that fails first. It's £20 and a minute to replace, instead of sending it back to the manufacturer.
Curved monitors
The concave monitors are the big deal from the show. They're the must-have design feature for your new evil lair's command center. No longer will your evil henchmen have to roll chairs from side to side while pretending to manage an evil plot, now they'll be able to easily survey multiple monitors from a stationary position while awaiting their inevitable doom.
Re: Curved monitors
Do it on the cheap:
http://paulbourke.net/dome/mirrordome/
How much to play Monopoly?
Come on Lenovo, £1058 for a table top computer and the best you can come up with is touch screen Monopoly and a virtual roulette wheel?
Could have least got a Worms or Civilization port up and running.
D- for imagination. Must try harder.
Re: How much to play Monopoly?
Nothing to port if you want Civ on a Windows 8 system with a touchscreen, and the chances the touchscreen will be running anything else?
After installing Civ through Stream on my Win8 Laptop, I got a 3rd option to run a Windows 8 touch optimised version as well as the usual DX9 DX10/11 options. I never use the keyboard or mouse to play Civ anymore.
D- for research.
Re: How much to play Monopoly?
I would totally buy that if someone made an electronic version of BattleTech or Car Wars to run on it.
Ultra HD ≠ "4K" (3840×2160)
Ultra HD is "8K" (7680 × 4320).
This 4K format is a total waste of time, in my opinion, and doesn't excite me all that much, because it makes me think for 3-4 years we will be waiting for 8K projectors in cinemas and so on, while thinking 4K is "the shit".
We've had 15perf/70mm 1.44 ratio horizontal run film in the form of IMAX for decades, yet we have literally nothing to compete with it yet, but somehow people are sucked in by 4K? Ugh.
At least 8K offers a similar resolution but with digital clarity and the fact you can't get physical impurities on the film. 4K is nothing but a timewaster.
Really, we need more resolution, but I'd be happy with 8K to some extent, but I wish aspect ratios could be settled on. 1.44 is probably too tall for most cinemas to be satisfied with, and 2.39 is way too wide for me to be happy. 1.6 is probably about perfect.
Anyway, just a rant.
Yes, I'm drinking. Hello Friday evening!
Re: Ultra HD ≠ "4K" (3840×2160)
On IBC 2011 NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) had a demo of their Super Hi-Vision system (7680x4350 pixels, intended horizontal viewing angle 100°).
I was impressed and thought I saw the future of TV.
However when I compared the image on the 85 inch LCD with the lady in front of the camera, I noticed that the colour reproduction, especially of skincolour, was very poor.
Re: Ultra HD ≠ "4K" (3840×2160)
> I noticed that the colour reproduction, especially of skincolour, was very poor.
Inherent to the tech, or just a poorly set-up individual set, or the camera?
Almost certainly the LED lighting actually
If you light something with White or RGB LED, it is seen completely differently by the eye and the camera, as the sensors are very different - the camera "blue" saturates a very, very long time before the eye when objects are lit with Blue or White LEDs.
Thus reality and screen image differ greatly - for a really extreme example, try taking a photo of Hogwarts at "night" at the Harry Potter Experience thingy.
aspect ratios
Piro, if you find that a 1.6 aspect ratio is probably about perfect, then you’re probably searching for the Golden Section, φ = (√5̅ + 1) ÷ 2 [a bit above 1.618]. On Ultra HD, that would come in at about 6990 × 4320; a closer match to φ could be derived from the Fibonacci sequence, e.g. 6765 × 4181.
Project Shield -- biggest gamble of the show
The Nvidia Project Shield has to be one of the most interesting devices of the show.
It's not a tablet. It's not a console game. It's close to a hand-held game, but is way more than that.
The graphics and compute power of a game console, all fit into the controller. 4K video output. When (if?) Miracast becomes common, complete wireless freedom.
The ability to play generic Android games, special TegraZone games, streaming output from a local PC, and potentially cloud games. We'll see if the latency issues are addressed for the latter two.
If it's under $200, we can be pretty certain that 10M+ of the 25M hard-core games will buy one the first week. If it works well, it will be on every Christmas list.
Pesonally CES is all a bit 'so what' this year - most of the big boys are not there anyway and reckon they are waiting to see what Apple will do. Samsung have been showing those flexi screens for years (not new), curved screens (niche / poinless as I assume it reduces viewing angle which is more important for most applications), iWatches which we have seen for years (Pebble is fugly - can't believe people paid for than about $50 for it).
I think you'll find
That Apple are the ones waiting eagerly to see what everybody else is doing. How else will they come up with new features and then claim they invented them?
Usual Reg blah blah pay-me-by-the-word-fluff.
For starters:
"The TV industry is still waiting nervously to see whether the Cupertino company will indeed have spotted something they missed and shake up the telly business as it did with the phone industry."
Oh come on. Reg is under the impression there wasn't a vibrant mobile telephone industry before 'the Cupertino company' designed one; pretty though it is (WAS [like the iMac's and clamshell-laptop's industry shaking designs]).
Suggestion:
Instead of the usual Reg-blah-blah-pay-me-by-the-word-bs make the article informative and so useful.
A bullet point list of last years' innovations, things that were believed to be contenders for this year's industry shaking stuff. I.e.
* 3D television :: thisCompany, thatCompany, anotherCompany, etc
* Thin laptops :: andThisCom, aUkCom, aKoreanCom
* Tablets :: Google, Samsung, aChineseCom, MicroWhatsItCom
Discussion of what never shook the industry and lots of pay-me-by-the-word stuff.
A bullet point list of this years' hopeful next year's industry shakers.
* Toilet proof mobile telephones :: Sony
* More televisions :: themCom, thoseCome, koreaCom
* Wearables :: Google, Samsung, aChineseCom
* More tablets :: blah, blah
* Even some under the hood Linux stuff :: Valve, nVidia, OUYA, Google, Samsung, HTC, Sony ...
Discussion and more pay-me-by-the-word stuff.
Reg, another suggestion: 2013 = Information-quality not quantity.
low-res content on hi-res tellies
"upscaling video doesn’t improve it"
Not just upscaling. but with techniques like fractal computations you can make them look better. Agreed, you are just "guessing" the added "details", you will not be able to turn that fuzzy white dot in the backgound back in the seagull it really was, but it can make bigger details look less pixelated as the magnification increases (thus preventing the scale-up from mangling the perception of the image). That way you can have a large display showing lo-res content without looking like you're playing an old Commodore game.
Seagate Goflex gen 1 "chunky"??
What are you? A waif-shaped catwalk model?
Seriously, not everything is better thinner and smaller as the vicar said to the maid. The first generation was a fine form factor, quite tactile in fact.
However, the firmware update process is a complete bar steward...
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