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CES showed us smart displays will be the new normal
Before the start of CES 2018, the only real smart speakers with a display were the Amazon Echo Show and the Echo Spot. But now that Google has partnered with several manufacturers to make a whole line of Echo Show rivals, a bona fide new device category has been born: the smart display. And based on the devices revealed this week, I believe the smart display will slowly start to outnumber smart speakers and will likely be the norm going forward.
Tech wants to solve our tech-related sleep problems
Technology is bad for sleep. It keeps us constantly exposed to an endless cycle of bad news, and the blue light emitted by smartphone and tablet displays suppresses our ability to produce melatonin. Combine that with the feelings of inadequacy generated by watching other people's picture-perfect lives on social media, and it's no surprise that we're all restless. Sleep technology exists to solve this issue, and there were plenty of companies exhibiting new devices here at CES 2018. Many of them intend to tell you how well, or poorly, you have slept each night, in the hope you'll make better decisions the following day. But, as well as becoming more commonplace, sleep gadgets are going to become far more diverse, at least according to what we saw at the show.
Pro-gaming giant Fnatic is introducing eSports to CES
Sam Mathews founded Fnatic about 13 years ago, when he was just 19. Today, Fnatic is a household name for eSports fans: It's one of the most successful and prolific professional gaming franchises in the world, regularly competing at the top tier in games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The brand has expanded past the games and into hardware, and Mathews showed up at CES this year to demo Fnatic's latest keyboards and mice, which are due to hit the market in the coming months.
Touring Hyperloop One's ever-evolving test site
Virgin Hyperloop One, a company that's developing a new way of moving people around the world, has precedent when it comes to missing deadlines. The company pledged to test a fully working Hyperloop by the end of 2016, but its first test didn't take place until Aug. 2017. The future doesn't conform to timetables, and we can forgive plenty, but it's still with trepidation that the company sets its next ambitious goal. It intends to have a full-size, passenger-ready Hyperloop in operation by 2021. After touring the transport company's DevLoop site in Clark County, Nevada, it's clear the challenges now aren't technical but political.
Cruising the Las Vegas Strip in the Smart Vision EQ concept car
Introduced at the Frankfurt auto show in September, the Smart Vision EQ from Mercedes-Benz is the automaker's EV concept that combines mobility, autonomy and connectivity. The result is a car built on the Smart Fortwo platform, can wink at pedestrians, has level-five autonomy (no steering wheel or pedals), and welcomes passengers by name. It also took me for a short ride on the Las Vegas Strip.
This might be the Game Boy's ultimate form
Hyperkin is working on something for retro gamers looking to retire any venerable Game Boys that have seen better days. The aluminum-hewn Project Ultra GB might be the hardware you need to break out your old Game Boy hits. It takes the original cartridges, as well as keeping the dimensions of the Game Boy Pocket and those iconic simple controls.
Engadget Today | CES 2018: It's a wrap!
That's it, the show's over! It's been a wild ride, as usual. After landing here a week ago, we're glad to be packing up and heading back to our own homes, but we'll always have a soft spot in our hearts for the LVCC. We can't wait to see all the new gadgets from the show in the review lab, but for now, it's adios, see you next year. Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.
Dolby knows what you're feeling at the movies
If you thought it was creepy that technology lets networks know what you're watching, you'd better sit down. It turns out that Poppy Crum, chief scientist at Dolby Labs, has been researching how our bodies and emotions react to what we see and hear. Don't panic, though. All that information is being used to understand how to make us feel more when we watch a Hollywood epic, as Crum explained to Engadget on stage at CES. Watch the highlights in the video above. Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.
Aptiv on helping automakers create an autonomous world
Automakers don't build every component in their vehicles. It's a complex combination of in-house parts and third-party components working in tandem to make things like autonomous vehicles a reality. One of the main players is first-tier-supplier Aptiv (formerly Delphi). The company's vice president of advanced engineering, Jada Tapley stopped by the Engadget Stage at CES to talk about the supplier's work with OEMs and the autonomous Lyft drives it was offering CES attendees. Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.
Presenting the Best of CES 2018 winners!
Finally, after long hours of debating about which of our finalists should win our Best of CES awards this year, we've made our decisions. Below is our list of winners for each category, as well as Best of the Best and People's Choice. Congratulations to all winners and finalists!
Artgasm turns the female orgasm into a literal work of art
The female orgasm can be elusive, but at CES 2018, sexual-health startup Lioness managed to capture and immortalize them as works of art. The art is based on information gleaned from volunteers who have used its $229 bio-sensing vibrator, which started shipping in August. The mini exhibit was in Las Vegas to drum up awareness for both the Lioness brand and women's sexual-health issues, particularly how we orgasm. It was shown in a limited preview last year at the Mothership music festival, and Lioness hopes to eventually add more pieces and take the exhibit to galleries all over the country.
Don’t call it a dildo: Kiiroo and OhMiBod on the future of sex toys
CES may have a complicated relationship with sex, but one company at the world's largest technology conference has made it its mission to destigmatize doing it. For the past seven years, the family-run sex-toy manufacturer OhMiBod has made the trek to Las Vegas in an attempt to gain mainstream distribution for its line of tech-savvy pleasure products. This year, the company has partnered with one of the leaders in interactive sex toys, Kiiroo, to create an internet-connected vibrator that can communicate with the Fleshlight-branded Launch male masturbator. OhMiBod's Fuse claims to be the first of its kind to offer bi-directional control -- basically, allowing either the stroker or the vibrator to send sensations to the other device from long distances. Both devices also promise to sync with VR and traditional porn and can be used by webcam models to give their clients an extra-sensory experience. The Fuse can be purchased online, and you can see the devices for yourself at the Las Vegas Convention Center's South hall through the remainder of CES. The Kiiroo Launch is now available for $220 and the OhMiBod Fuse can be had for $150. I sat down with Kiiroo founder Toon Timmermans and OhMiBod's Suki and Brian Dunham at CES 2018 to talk about the future of long-distance love and learned a lesson in interactive sex-toy branding: Whatever you do, don't call it a dildo!
LG puts Google Assistant in its own touchscreen-equipped speaker
Google Assistant's fingerprints are all over the CES 2018 show floor, but it's especially easy to see on a few new Android Things-powered devices. This LG ThinQ Google Assistant Touch Screen Speaker is one of them, and like Lenovo's Smart Display, it's built on a Qualcomm Home Hub Platform.
The challenge of showcasing weed tech at CES
There was, as expected, a thin scent of weed in Roger Volodarsky's 28th-floor Mirage hotel suite as the Puffco CEO and founder demonstrated his latest product. It was 11:30 PM the night before CES opened, and seven attendees gathered in the living room overlooking the Vegas strip. A welcoming, tattooed man with a groomed beard and shaved head, Volodarsky was showing off the Puffco Peak, a smart dabbing rig for consuming cannabis concentrates that he'd presented at the Pepcom media event just hours earlier. Away from the mainstream events around CES, he could show how it truly works.
OnePlus weighs in on smartphone strategy and the value of trust
OnePlus released two great smartphones in 2017, but the smartphone startup is facing more and better competition than ever before. That's great for you and me, but much trickier for a startup still trying to carve out a notable niche for itself. What's a small company to do? In this case, OnePlus' answer is to keep making the best products it can and avoid looking at competitors simply as rivals to be crushed over time. Kyle Kiang, head of global marketing for OnePlus, joined us on our CES stage to discuss the team's strategy for building a successful mobile brand and the difficulties of developing a foundation of trust in through hardware.
You can't talk about accessibility without talking about diversity
Over the past few years, we've been seeing more and more products at CES meant to assist the elderly and disabled. In fact, last year was the first year we added an accessibility category to the official Best of CES awards -- and the finalists in that category were indeed some of our favorite things we saw at the show. This year was no exception, with four finalists in the accessibility category, and a whole bunch of other products we didn't have room for on our shortlist. When and how did accessibility tech come to be so prominent at the world's biggest consumer-tech show? And where is the technology headed from here? To help make sense of the bigger picture, I sat down with KR Liu, who was diagnosed with severe hearing loss at age three and went on to head up sales and marketing with audio pioneer Doppler Labs. Most recently, she teamed up with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Grassley on the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017, which passed with almost unanimous bipartisan support. In our all-too-brief talk, we delved into the technological advancements, of course, but also the social ones -- the issue of accessibility tech ultimately isn't just a question of what's technically possible, but about diversity: Who is allowed in the drawing room? And for whom are we creating tech in the first place? Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.
The Moto Z's keyboard mod feels like an imperfect blast from the past
Motorola's first great Android phone had a physical keyboard, and when I stuck Livermorium's keyboard Moto Mod onto a Moto Z2 Play, waves of nostalgia started washing over me. After I started using the keyboard, though, I suddenly remembered why the smartphone world had moved on from these designs. You'll be able to pick up one of these Mods for $99 before the winter ends, but it's going to be a hard sell for anyone who didn't grow up pounding out texts on actual buttons.
Samsung talks PC strategy and its vision for a connected world at CES
This week, Samsung showed off everything from new laptops to a massive microLED wall to a chattier kind of refrigerator. The message couldn't be any clearer: Samsung would like nothing more than to be the center of your digital world. To dig deeper into this week's big news, we invited Shoneel Kolhatkar, Samsung's senior director for product marketing to our CES stage for some wide-ranging conversation. We touch on Samsung's new Notebook 9 Pen, the growing role of wearables and (most important) how Samsung plans to weave its products into together in a single intelligent ecosystem.
Sennheiser packed its Ambeo 3D audio tech in a soundbar
Sennheiser has been touting the merits of its Ambeo 3D audio for a few years now at CES, but in 2018, the company plans to make that spacial soundscape more accessible. The first speaker product to feature the tech will be the Ambeo 3D Soundbar and the company is showing it off here in Vegas. Sennheiser has been working on 3D audio since 2010, when it was recording classical performances in 9.1 surround sound. Until now, you needed a 9.1 speaker setup to really appreciate that level of detail, but later this year, all you'll need is a soundbar.
Sony's plan for Xperia phones in 2018 considers dual cameras
It took Sony until 2018 to finally add fingerprint sensors to its Xperia phones, which is beyond fashionably late to the party. Now that that overdue feature is (thankfully) out of the way, the company needs to focus on how else it can catch up to its competitors. We chatted with Don Mesa, Sony Mobile's vice president of marketing for North America, to see what's coming next and why it took the company so long to get here. Oh, and we got a closer look at the latest version of the quirky Xperia Ear Open Style concept wireless earbuds too. Check out the video to see it all. Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.
