Refresh
OK, it’s time for the final push, as CES draws to a close. Sadly for this liveblogger (and happily for you readers) there’s a lot more analysis and insight to come from the TechRadar team, who have been ably finding all the really cool stuff from the show despite not being there.
One of my favorite things so far, and probably of all time, is the Amagami Ham Ham robot bear, which will nibble your finger like a pet, but without all the bacteria.
Shut up, you’re weird. Now, onto some highlights from the previous days:
Oh man, can you get more CES than a smart dog collar? Smart tech: check. Pet stuff: check. Something like something else but for dogs? Check. This was one of our biggest stories yesterday, and I’m here for it.
This is Invoxia’s attempt to bring Apple Watch-esque beauty to your pooch, with the ability to track both respiration and heart rate, using GPs and accelerometers as well as AI (another CES trend: check) to allow you to monitor the health of your pooch as well as making sure it doesn’t go missing.
It’s funny, the things that, as a child, you think will excite you about being grown up. Late nights, unlimited sugar intake, watching TV all day.
I still do enjoy doing all of these things, mind you – but what really gets me excited these days are the boring adult things like remote controls.
Not just any remote controls – specifically, the freshly announced Samsung SolarCell remote – and this was another of day 2’s biggest stories.
Needing no charging base, the remote uses solar and RF energy harvesting to wirelessly charge, meaning even your end-table lamp can be a part of the process. Wild.
This has been one of our biggest stories over the last three days: headphones that are so invisible that they aren’t even there. CES in a nutshell.
This Noveto N1 soundbar will track your head in real time, using facial recognition to stay locked onto you. It will then use beam forming, where it directs the sound, to small audio pockets around your ears, meaning only you can hear the sound.
Is this useful or practical? Probably not – a pair of open-ear headphone could probably achieve the same thing. But it’s incredibly cool, and if it works could well be a cornerstone of future offices – meaning instant ability to chat to colleagues with a ‘secret’ concert going on at the same time.
This came in late yesterday, so it’s definitely worth checking out again – the wearables of CES are rounded up here.
In fairness, it’s basically just two re-imagined Fossil Gen 6 smartwatches, a couple of new nuggets from Garmin and smart rings.
That doesn’t paint the whole picture, in fairness – by not being at the event in person, we weren’t able to dredge the fitness pavillion, for instance, and find the cool things that smaller brands are coming up with. There could be smart fitness bands, or advanced face masks that won’t make their way into the media for a few weeks – or CES could have just been something of a damp squib.
Either way, the Movano smart ring looks the most exciting to me – grabbing some lovely metrics and ways of making your data more accessible:
“The ring has an impressive list of capabilities, covering sleep monitoring, heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration levels, temperature, blood oxygen readings, step count, and calories burned – and the company is promising that the device is going to get more features over time as well.
“Those features, pending regulatory approval, will include blood glucose and blood pressure monitoring, something that smart rings haven’t managed to achieve so far. The Movano device might just hit the sweet spot in terms of price and features.”
The Alienware X14 is one of the most popular laptops that’s emerged from CES this year, which is a curious thing – it’s a gaming laptop that sacrifices spec for portability, but doesn’t necessarily make a bad choice, as our US Computing Editor Jackie Thomas highlights:
“The Alienware X14 is the most portable gaming laptop that the luxury brand has ever put out. From what it looks like, it won’t lose much on performance but the limited spec options means you really have to be into the portability aspect.”
It’s limited to an RTX 3060, which tells you where it sits on the gaming spectrum – but like the rise in mobile gaming, it speaks about a world where the hottest and most powerful consoles aren’t always the ones people care about the most… and it looks darn striking too.
- Hands on: Alienware X14 review
This is an interesting one, especially as someone who has a small child who I know would either love this or be entirely apathetic to it.
The Picoo ‘console’ (a bit of a stretch it call it that) was one I mentioned in the intro, but we’ve dug a bit further into it and it looks pretty cool.
Basically, spend $250 (around £180 / AU$350) and get four controllers and five game cards. The controllers are like PlayStation Move wands and allow kids to play Zombie games (like tag, but your controller changes color when infected), or flash when you’re found in hide and seek.
There are loads of sensors in the controller that allow it to work out how it’s being held, proximity to others etc, and beyond an app to set up, you don’t need much else.
These cards mentioned are scanned into the controllers and can communicate with other Picoo controllers via radio networking, and the system is expandable with additional controllers and games available for purchase.
The games are actually very reasonably priced, even if the controllers are hella expensive, coming in at around $5 (£3.50 / AU$7), a far cry from the lofty prices seen in actual console games.
Right, who’s ready to be creeped out? There were a number of robots on show at CES this year, as ever, and we’ve gone and found the best / most frightening of them.
While most of them are obviously benign, and you can read all about them in this excellent roundup, I’m going to focus on the dystopian nightmare they could create:
Ameca – Just look at the video above, it’s clear why that one is frightening. The article says ‘don’t worry, it’ll be 10 years before something like that is walking among us’. THAT IS NOT LONG ENOUGH.
Hyundai’s Metamobility concept – take a robot dog with you, hug your dog at home with it through VR. Until the two become entwined in some horrible internet nightmare and you have to become absorbed by the metaverse to save your dog, being held prisoner by a virtual Zuckerberg.
Amagami Ham Ham – Looks cute, nibbles your finger, gets OTA hack to make the mouth super strong, bites off finger.
See & Spray – Tractor can pinpoint weeds with herbicide automatically, saves 80% herbicide. Gets OTA hack to use final 80% into your eyes.
Massage Robotics – Robot fingers and arms can give you a precise, sensor-driven massage, and you can save the levels of pressure and rubbing to the cloud. Until the cloud is hacked and it squishes your back.
I’ve realised that all of this is pretty unlikely with just a modicum of web security, which most probably have. Just don’t go near any robo-tractors, just in case, OK?
What’s better than a single hot product from CES? Well, let me tell you: it’s 20 of them. And that’s what we’ve cooked up from our Hottest of CES list, which is the who’s who of the best stuff from the show.
It’s not the biggest or most brash stuff – it’s the things that have got people talking, that we’re excited about, and that the team debated heavily to come up with this list.
In my view, the Sony Vision-S02 should have been in there, because Sony might make a frickin’ car, but I was shouted down in favor of a toothbrush. It’s a really exciting toothbrush, to be fair – it rivals the best toothbrushes we’ve reviewed already and it’s not even been in a TechRadar mouth.
Check out our list, and let us know over on @techradar if you agree…
Right, the end is on the way – CES finishes in a few hours, but that’s enough time to still pick through some of key themes of CES, as well as bring you a few more of our favorite highlights from the show so far.
Let’s start with this excellent piece from Lance Ulanoff – he posits that the metaverse might have been both everywhere and nowhere during CES 2022, as there’s not really a thing that is the metaverse.
However, he uses Hyundai’s (and Microsoft Azure’s) Digital Twin Concept, which lets you be somewhere remote and have a robot act as your avatar – and that could be the way the metaverse works. In person without really being there.
The only thing he’s wrong about is whether or not he would be as star struck seeing Tom Holland in real life on stage at the Sony keynote or virtually – judging by his reaction during the stream, it’s safe to say he’d lose his mind.
First of all, kudos to Olivia Tambini for a great pun about record players still being groovy. Then kudos again for a great round up of all the top players still kicking around in 2022, highlighting the renaissance the format is packing.
This isn’t just a simple list of the best record players from the show, but a detailed look at the juxtaposition of old-school, warm and crackly technology with modern desires for everything to be instant and digital.
She discusses why Bluetooth has become important, why cost is important, and finishes with a call to action we can all agree with: “Sonos, hurry up and make a record player, will you?”
Here’s a company that could be everywhere in five years time if it can truly make its technology compelling enough for the everyday consumer.
Abbott made its name with the FreeStyle Libre – a continuous blood glucose monitor that consist of an adhesive patch that’s placed on your arm, with a sensor that sits just under your skin, and now it wants to go one furthern with Lingo.
So called because it ‘speaks your body’s language’, Lingo will track not only glucose levels, but keto, lactate and even blood alcohol – the latter feasibly meaning you could see a day where you won’t be able to get behind the wheel of a car if you’re over the limit (although that is scarily draconian).
I’m interested in the lactate element though – anything that can give me more insight into my athletic performance is something I’m super interested in and I’ll test until my legs fall off.
The Lingo sensors are still in development, and there’s no suggested price or release date yet, but we’ll be following Abbott’s progress over the coming months and years, and will keep you updated when we know more.
There’s been something fishy about Garmin at CES this year – mostly that the stuff the brand has shown off is a bit, well, boring. The Venu 2 Pro and Vivomove were fine, but hardly lit a fire under the world of wearables.
Many, including me, really suspected that we were going to be getting a Fenix 7 finally, with the watch rumored at the right time and leaked in images before the new year – a telltale sign that a launch is in the offing, and CES would have made sense.
But nope – nothing. And that led our intrepid Fitness Editor, Cat Ellis, to scratch the surface of what else is missing and, as it turns out, there are seven watches that we should have got at CES this year – and she makes a compelling case for all of them.
Working out the scariest stuff from CES is often a case of how wild your mind is – anything can be scary if you put your mind to it. That new smartphone? Could be filled with malware that’s trying to steal your money. That new wearable? Filled with poison, slowly releasing into your bloodstream.
Or… the more mundane, but still slightly creepy, which is what we found at CES. Half the team found the Amagami Ham Ham robot cute beyond belief, where others (like me) found it disconcerting.
The tractor that can identify weeds with herbicide? Mark Wilson also spotted, like me earlier in this live blog, that tractors can be frightening with a mind of their own.
And the TenMinds pillow, which will adjust your head when you sleep to stop snoring, sounds cool – but something that watches you sleep and moves you? Nope. Creepy.
A personal air taxi is being shown at CES 2022. You can’t fly in it, but if you’re at the show in Vegas you’re allowed to go and sit down in the cockpit of the small aircraft.
It’s from a company called SkyDrive, and it looks much more like a giant drone rather than a vehicle. Think of this like a mini-helicopter, especially as it’s only designed to seat one person.
It features eight horizontal rotors, and it’s capable of lifting objects (or people) up to 1,000 pounds. We’ve seen similar concepts to this before, but it’s interesting to see a new competitior in the space.
Don’t expect to see these flying in the sky anytime soon. Test flights are underway, but the company behind this version doesn’t expect it’ll be able to use it until at least 2025.
Our resident smart person, John Loeffler, has spotted a trend that might go a little under the radar: budget PC gaming got a real boost at CES this year.
The new RTX 3050 is better than the 3090 Ti, in his opinion. Intel Alder Lake and its support for DDR5 is a massive deal for gamers thanks to the fact manufacturers are going to be able to bundle it in for cheaper.
And budget gaming laptops are just getting better, which isn’t necessarily from CES this year but the overall trends from the show definitely point towards it.
In short, it’s good news for those on a budget that don’t want to game on a console.
I’ve slept on this one, and I’ve decided I’m still into it as an article, because of all the things I love about CES each year is the health stuff – namely sleep, if I’m honest, because I’m so exhausted by jetlag.
But this year, there’s been a number of cool new devices shown off, from the Ible Airvida E1 (billed as the world’s first air purifier with built-in headphones, and emits negative ions that “can disrupt and breakdown coronavirus’ carbon-hydrogen bond and inactivate them immediately”) to the… interesting… Sengled Smart health Monitoring Light that can monitor your vital signs and even let the authorities know if you fall, should you have a network.
Most of this is conceptual at the moment, and we need to see more from this kind of stuff to know if it’s any good… but check out our roundup to see more from the amazing world of health tech.
Right, we’re drawing this live blog to a close now as the CES show winds towards its close. Thank you so much for anyone that’s joined us on this wild ride for the last few days – we were wondering whether the event, confirmed to be 75% down in attendance on the ‘usual’ numbers (whatever they were), would be as action-packed, and it largely was.
I’ve enjoyed so many highlights – all of which you can see in the intro above – and we’re already getting jazzed up for CES 2023… which we’re desperately hopeful will be in person, otherwise we don’t know if Lance Ulanoff will be able to cope…
I share this because I miss seeing that arch in person. #CES2022 #CES https://t.co/27T8cJOvMiJanuary 5, 2022
