The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2018 is officially over, meaning we get to reflect on some of the very best tech that we saw on the show floor. So without wasting any of your time, let’s get started.
First, in no particular order, I really enjoyed watching the demos of the Synaptics Clear ID fingerprint sensor. This is a sensor that is embedded on the display of an OLED smartphone. It’ll actually peer through the pixels to scan your finger when it’s pressed on the display to unlock your smartphone. It was actually being demoed in a smartphone from a Chinese company called Vivo, making it the very first smartphone to feature an in-display fingerprint scanner. And in the demos that I saw, it actually worked pretty well. It’s a little bit slower than traditional fingerprint sensors but not by very much. I’m definitely looking forward to the not too distant future where just about every flagship smartphone features this scanner.
Razer’s Project Linda is a pretty neat concept that I saw at CES but with a name like Linda, it’s probably not going to come into fruition. (It’s a joke.)
What it is is a portable laptop that is being powered by and built around the Razer Phone. So you just pop in your Razer Phone into the slot below the keyboard and the Razer Phone’s screen becomes the trackpad and basically the brains of the laptop. The only hardware that Project Linda provides is a keyboard, a larger 13.3-inch screen, and a larger battery. That’s about it.
The HTC Vive Pro is the successor to the HTC Vive and it brings some big, new features and overall improvements to virtual reality. So it features higher resolution displays, two of them, one for each Retina and built-in headphones so you don’t have to worry about stringing other headphones around your head in addition to the VR headset. There’s also some design changes that will just make the headset much more comfortable when it is sitting on your head, which is really important for a device that will sit on your head for hours on end. You’d want it to be comfortable.
What’s also cool is that you can actually pick up a wireless adapter now for the Vive and the Vive Pro so that you don’t need to run a cable to your PC. So all we need to know now is the price. We’re not sure what this new headset will cost but the headset does look really cool and it’s one of my favorite things that I’ve seen at CES 2018.
The Lenovo Smart Display lets us look at what the next wave of Google Home units could look like. So Google has been rumored to launch a Google Home with a display and that’s exactly what the Lenovo Smart Display is. So with this device, you can actually view the weather forecast as well as listen to them. And you can access a host of video content and photos that aren’t available when you’re just using your voice or when you’re just using a standard Google Home unit.
It looks pretty cool and it will retail for between $200 and $250, depending on the size you go with when it goes on sale later this year.
Now there is some non-smartphone/non-tablet tech that I do want to mention. I’m not a big gamer, although I have been playing a lot of NBA 2K18 recently. But NVIDIA launched its big format gaming displays. They are large 4K screens with low latency. They feature G-Sync technology and NVIDIA’s Shield built-in. They deliver one of the smoothest gaming experiences possible from a big screen so that’s really cool. If you’re a gamer, you’re going to love that.
LG announced the world’s first 65-inch rollable UHD TV. It was remotely controlled to extend and retract from a long rectangular base, making it easier to move. There are three different viewing modes depending on the content. There’s a 4x3 mode for viewing news and weather, a 21x9 mode for watching movies, and then just a fully extended mode which is more like a traditional format TV.
Samsung unveiled a TV wall that sports modular micro LED technology. What this means is that the size of the TV can actually change to fit your room by removing or adding different pieces. It looks really promising.
DJI announced the Osmo Mobile 2 stabilizer for your smartphone. It has zoom controls, can track objects and even let you film in portrait mode. I’m definitely going to try and get this here in the studio to feature it in a Best Tech video because it definitely looks like Best Tech material.
Other than that, we saw Panasonic release a variant to the GH5 DSLR camera called the GH5S. It basically is the GH5 with a 10.2-megapixel Dual ISO multi-aspect sensor, which is actually half the resolution of the GH5’s 20.2-megapixel native sensor. And that allows for better low-light performance. It can handle up to a 51,200 native ISO and 204,800 extended. So it’s predominantly aimed at videographers so if you’re a photographer, you’re probably not going to pick this up. But it does look really cool.
Last but certainly not least, one of the coolest things I saw was a ping pong robot called the Omron Forpheus. It consists of an AI-powered arm that swings the paddle and the motion controller tells the machine how to hit the ball, advising it on timing and direction within a 100th of a second. The amount of tech-- sensors, cameras, and processors to make this all happen is pretty remarkable. I definitely want to play against this machine someday. I feel like I could beat it. But I’m not a ping pong pro. I just feel like I’m not too shabby.
With that said, those are my favorite products to come out of CES 2018. There were so many different devices, concepts, and ideas that I inevitably could not talk about in this video. There’s no way I’d have enough time so please feel free to share your favorite product/thing about CES 2018.
