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stuff and get ten percent off. If you want a trade in a clunker, just call the customer service number on their website or email. That's Hover dot com slash tech stuff. Hello again, everybody, and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette. I am an editor of how Stuff Works dot com and sitting across from me a guy who UH had to stop flapping because his arms were so tired from flying back from Las Vegas. Senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Someone must have slandered Joseph K
for one morning without having done anything truly wrong. He was arrested. What happened to the Biggest Things? The Biggest Baby? So we're talking today about CE selve. This podcast, of course is publishing well after the show, but it's as early as we can get it out there. Um, we wanted to kind of talk about what I saw at the show and sort of the trends and what the show was like. This this year there were actually some pretty big announcements, some of them not directly connected with
what was on the show floor, but still pretty important. Nonetheless, Yeah, c S. They've they've asked us to just call it CES but for branding purposes. But the Consumer Electronics Show right right, And this UH started out a few decades ago basically sort of as a small trade show. And because electronics are such a big part of our lives now, people are really interested in in the stuff that people enveil.
Some of it is uh, stuff that's going to show up on on shelves, some of it now, other stuff will be available later on, and then a few products are kind of in the prototype stage which we may never see implemented into an actual consumer product. Yeah, sort of like the the auto shows. Actually the Detroit Auto Show was going on at the same time, um, but that wasn't in Las Vegas. Curiously, Um, must have something
to do with the name of the Detroit Casino. Yes, um, so yeah, I mean they're they're they're hundreds of companies I guess technically thousands of companies um exhibiting on at the Las Vegas Convention Center and at several hotels around the area, The Venetian, the LVH what was formerly known as the Las Vegas Hilton but is now just the Las Vegas Hotel. Yeah. Yeah, so um uh it's it's always extremely busy. I mean for the people who go.
For those of you who don't, it may sound like it's really cool because you get a lot of time checking out the latest gadgets, but you know, not for the for the people who are working the show, both as exhibitors and the media, it can be exhausting because you're you're sort of uh uh uh and enveloping yourself in tech from the time you get up until the time you go to bed and at night, and it's uh, it's a lot. Yeah and uh and this year was
a record breaking year as far as attendance goes. The the attendance was over one hundred fifty three thousand people. So that's a lot of people, even in in a building as as big as the lvc C. Yeah. I think they said they had one point seven million square feet of exhibition space in the convention center this year. Uh yeah, even in that size, it's it's still crowded, and you gotta you know, if you've listened to our
ce S podcast, we've talked about the experience. So we won't dwell on it too much here because we don't want to repeat ourselves too much. But yeah, it can be overwhelming, especially to someone who has never been to the show before. Now, and this was my fourth c e S, so I kind of knew what to expect. Although in years past the attendance level had dropped a little bit. Last year was was fairly was fairly well attended, but twelve was a record breaking year, which was that
was new to me. It wasn't since two thousand eight that it had felt that crowded. Yeah. Um, And and often at these shows, not always, but often at these shows, there's there's a product or a handful of products that absolutely steal a show. Um. Speaking as someone who didn't go, I didn't get the sense that there was one product that people were just you know, it was just so jaw dropping lee awesome that everyone was talking about it.
But it does seemed like they were a handful of products that people were sort of going, Okay, now that's pretty cool. Yeah, there were there was a collection of products that I think got a lot of attention during the show itself. And while there might not be like you can think of like the Palm pre or the or the smart watch from a few years ago, like those were devices that got people buzzing on the floor
and almost it almost became their show. I agree that I don't think there was any single product that really dominated this year, but there were a lot of products that got quite a bit of of mention and uh, and then there were new product categories they got a lot of attention, like the ultrabook category is a very
good example up to you know, last year's CEOs. Even though there were a couple of computers out there that probably could have qualified to be an ultra book, the designation itself really had not emerged in the first part of it was the second of twenty eleven when we started to hear about ultra books. Yeah, um, specifically, actually they made and tell is behind the term ultra book, and you made their announcement after ce S last year.
So uh, just in brief, and we're gonna have an episode all about ultra books coming out later, so we won't go too into detail here, but it's an ultrabook has to have an Intel Core processor, it has to be a certain thickness or thinner, uh, and it has to be able to boot up from sleep mode to active mode in seven seconds or less. So really it's
an competitor to the MacBook Air. That's ultimately what ultra book is and tablets and tablets, you know, and to a to a certain degree, really, the ultra book was almost an a response to the way tablets had affected the netbook industry. So ultra books are kind of you know that they're they're more powerful and larger than netbooks, but they're also still very portable because they're very, very
slim and light. Because tablets were a big thing at C and they were still a big thing in too, there were odd of tablets on display, a lot of tablets, but they weren't they weren't show stealers like some of the ultra books that you saw. No ultra books, I think mainly because it was a new category took a lot more attention. Because tablets at this point, really, especially Android tablets, we've seen so many of them that it's hard to get people excited about tablet, even if it's
a really good device. It's just, you know, it's almost like the Boy who Cried Wolf, right, You hear it enough times and you're just like, oh, okay, it's another Android tablet, and you may not pay the attention that that device actually deserves to that device. But so there were still plenty of tablets. I would say that just about every major company had at least one or two different kinds of tablets on display. We also saw some
Windows eight tablets on display. One of my favorite devices was an Android tablet on display, which was the Asis Transformer Prime. UM very very sleek, very uh, very responsive. No, it does not transformed, but as it was, you can't get a docking station that's essentially a keyboard, so it turns it almost like into a laptop computer, but a very very snappy processor and that it was very responsive. So that was one of the devices that I actually sought out on the floor. I had heard about it
and I had to find it. And that was a little tricky because it was it was it was lumped in with other companies. It wasn't like there was the ass booth you would go to and see it. It was more like you'd go to these other booths that had one on display in order to showcase something else. But I'm really just interested in the hardware. Um, So that was you know, tablets were still a big deal, but I would say ultra books definitely were more of
a show stealer as far as a category goes. And Intel had said that in we should expect between sixty five and seventy different ultra books coming out onto the market. Uh, some of the ultra books that were on display at CES may not ever go to market, like Intel's Nikishi, which had a clear window in the keyboard section, of
the notebook and you close the notebook. Uh and the clear section gives you an actually touch screen interface, so even when your notebooks closed, you still have an active computing element there and you can run certain apps, check email, that kind of stuff. This is very Windows eight Metro
kind of layout. So, uh, you know, we saw a lot of that and and other innovations and ultra books, mostly esthetic designs, like really super slim, sleek designs to kind of go head to head with the MacBook Air. Samsung Series nine was probably one of the more striking designs. HPS Envy Spector was also very striking, very pretty design. What had gorilla glass on on the outside of the Yes, yeah, to help protect against scratches and things like that. There
was gorilla glass all along the back of it. Gorilla glass also represented ces corning headed booth. It was a gorilla glass too that when the unveiled grill to it's thinner than the original gorilla glass and just as strong and uh so we saw demonstrations of that where they showed people trying to scratch the glass or break the glass, showing how it stood up to force compared to previous versions of gorilla glass. And competing glasses that have you know,
the protection built into it. Um. So yeah, they were there. We also saw I mean, of course CES, it's hard to talk about CS. We'll talk about television's TVs again. We're a huge deal now this year, I would say that the you know, in years past, it's all been about better resolution, faster refresh rates and and the size of the TV. Yeah, this year, those are still important, but smart TV really was another thing that's being pushed heavily at CS. And you know, you went to c
S two thousand eight. You remember the Internet, the I P t V s we saw, right, Yeah, we really took Yeah, no they didn't. Yeah, And see that's one of those things that it's weird to say that four years later we're starting to see it actually kind of get more support. But then you think about it. Back in two thousand and eight, the widgets, the applications you saw and smart TVs were very limited. They were so as things like weather reports or stock prices or news
a news feed, but that was about it. Well, now you go and you look at a smart TV, and a lot of the smart TVs are concentrating on alternate ways of getting content on your television. So having Netflix Instant directly integrated into the television set, or Hulu Plus or Amazon Video. These are are things that are being put into TVs from the get go, so you don't have to have a video game console or a set top box like Roku necessary in order to be able
to access these things. Um Now, I would definitely say that there's not really any danger of those set top boxes going out of business anytime soon, because it's pretty expensive to go and replace your TV, you know. So I think those companies have to really look at what their future is going to hold, like they need to have a long term plan in place, because maybe five years from now you might start seeing companies like Roku having issues because if it's built into more and more televisions,
then it becomes less relevant of a product. So hopefully those companies are starting to develop long term plans that can take into account the the fact that a lot of the stuff they offer right now is going to be built into televisions in the near future. Roku, by the way, also introduced a USB dongle. Yeah, that's exactly
what I was going to mention. Even the set top boxes themselves are sort of changing form factor in Yeah, it's kind of funny because the Roku two came out in eleven and that was a smaller form factor than the original Roku. Right. You look at and you're like, oh, it's so tiny and it's pretty and it's not just a black box. Wow. And then ces they bring out a dongle that connects to a USB port. A lot of televisions now come with USB ports where you can
do things like like load photographs directly to your your television. Uh, and it interacts with the TV and becomes essentially your Roku set um. You know, it has the functionality built into it, but it's it's now it's not even a set top box anymore, right into the TV itself. Yeah, so that's kind of cool, uh, you know. And and again that's the way of differentiating itself from other set top boxes and still trying to keep the price point down.
The one of the things that attractive things about Roku is that it tends to be around fifty dollars, and I think that the USB dongle was going to be priced at around still pretty attractive, especially when you're thinking like, hey, it's one less box, one less set of cables I have to worry about, you know, I don't have to work. It doesn't have to look like an octopus exploded behind my television. You Yeah, that's the way my TV looks
right now. Uh. I would say that probably the television that got the most attention while I was there was an LGO LED display. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's partially because oh lad is still such a it seems kind of foreign, like it's an elusive category to make an organic LED TV. Now, a lot of us have smartphones with o LAD screens on them, but they're far more
common in small form factors than in large. Yeah. Even back in two thousand eight, we saw prototypes of oh led televisions, but in those cases they were very small TVs and expensive, very expensive, and things like, you know, a twelve inch television screen and you think, wow, that's you know, in the era of the of the super enormous big screen TV, that's nothing. Well, this was the year where we started seeing oh lad screens being pushed in the large television form factor and l G had
a fifty five inch television oh lad screen three D capable. Um, it was gorgeous and and depending on who you ask. It was between four and five millimeters thick, which meant that if you looked at it in profile, it looked like a pane of glass. I mean, it was so thin, and and it was just everyone's jaw dropped when they saw how how the profile of this device. People were trying to take pictures of it and having problems taking pictures of it because it was so thin that it
was not really registering in the photo very well. And in fact, I have a picture of one. I took it on my my phone, so it's not a very high definition photo, but I took a picture on my phone and it has one of these television's face on in the background and then one in profile in the foreground, and it just looks like there's a line like like wow, that television is terrible because look at the line of
distortion right in the middle. And no, no, no, that's another TV in profile in front of the one that you're looking at. Whoa so um. And also they did something kind of cool and that they have a proprietary port on the LG television that connects to a control box and so you plug in all your peripherals to the control box and then you put the proprietary chord between these control box and the television set, and that way you cut down on all those chords going to
the TV. Because when you get a form factor that thin, suddenly chord management becomes a big deal, right because you know you're like, well, I've got the power chord and then I've got all my H D, M I chords or whatever component composite whatever you have, all of that has to go to the TV from my peripherals. Well, now suddenly I've got this gorgeous television with all these ugly bulky chords hanging off. Well that that was sort of the approach of getting the control box in there,
So that way you would have a different device. You plug everything into that almost act like a receiver and then feeds all of that stuff as a switch to the television in itself. Um, there's a there's a bit of a caveat. I have to add this lad screen and that's Uh, it'll cost you a pretty chunk of change if you want to buy one. They did not have an official price mentioned at c E S. Then if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Kind of, but there are there's the devices. These TVs have launched
already in Europe. Okay, and if you look at how much they cost in Europe and you were to translate that to American dollars, we're essentially looking at a ten thousand dollar television TV. Meanwhile, you had other companies like Sharp looking at pushing larger and larger form factors, trying to get those popular in the consumer market. So Sharp at their press conference had an entire video about how an eight inch television just that's not that big. Eight
inch television isn't too big for your living room. Okay, Well, um, I just got I just moved into a new place, and I've got a fairly spacious living room, not not huge, but bigger than what I'm used to. Uh. I can't personally, I can't imagine having an a d inch television in that space. It would to me it would look up scene. Um. I'm sure the experience is great because the televisions were fantastic, don't get me wrong about that. The quality of the
TV screens were amazing. Uh. The size, though, just was so enormous. I don't know that I would ever get over the fact that it was that big. UM would be pushing it for me. Yeah. So, um, also, not to be out done, Samsung announced in oh led TV ed TV, so they're competing right with LG in that same space. And uh, meanwhile, you had Sony coming out with a technology they were calling Crystal l e ED, so not O l e ED, they called it crystal
l e ED. I am not entirely clear on what that means, not crystal clear anyway, So I don't know what the technology behind crystal LED actually is. That's something I have to look into. But that's kind of their approach to this ultra high definition era. That was another big deal, the move to ultra high definition. So you know, we talked about ten A D being the the uh, the cream of the crop right now. Yeah, they're talking four K sets and there were even a couple of
prototype eight K sets on display. The trick about these is that there's no one producing content for them yet. That we have an article about ultra high definition. Yeah, that was written by Jessica Toothman. Uh, one of my favorite articles on the site. It is. It is a very good article. You guys, If you have not read how ultra high definition television works, I highly recommend it. I've had industry experts tell me that that's a great article.
So props to Jessica from some of that. UM. But yeah, the four K and eight K sets, that's they're even higher resolution than than what we think of as HDTV right now. But the problem is that if you went out and bought one right now, you wouldn't have anything you could watch on it that could run at that resolution.
You know, we need the rest of it. We need the next level and Blu ray technology, We need the next level in broadcast technology because otherwise you just you just have you have a set that's capable of running at a very high resolution. You just won't have anything that can that can take advantage of it. Um. But we saw some of that. That was like a fairly big move. Another thing that was big at CES this
year we're apps. Apps have become a big deal. Um. I was gonna stop you before we left TV for good. One thing I didn't notice you mentioning was big hit. Oh the big buzzword three D. Yeah, I understand it was understated. This year, three D was still a thing. There was still I think every press conference that I went to the head Television has had a no, not everyone.
I take that back. Most of the press conferences I went to that had a manufacturer that made televisions is part of their main line of products, had a three D portion where you had to put on glasses and watch lgs. Big deal was that they were really pushing
passive glasses technology as opposed to active glasses. Active glasses, of course, have a shutter in them that goes on and off in time with the refresh rate of the television, so that each eye seems just sees just one set of images, and the two sets together combine in your brain to create this three dimensional environment. But they those are powered glasses. You have to you have to have some sort of power source to keep them going, so that means you have to keep recharging them. They're also
a little bulkier than passive glasses. Passive glasses just use polarized light and they only allow one kind of polarized light through, so that you know, each eye gets again one set of images, but both sets of images are being displayed at the same time on your television. They're not alternating like active glasses. And then's like the active glasses have a standard much better chance of breaking well, because it's something else that can fail technologically, and and
they're more expensive. Passive glasses are less expensive. So uh LG is betting on the passive glasses technology. It's not the only one either. There are a lot of other companies that also have passive glasses sets. Three D was still a still a thing, but it was not being pushed as hard. The smart TV element was being pushed way harder than three D. So if you look at years past, I would say that every C E S seems to have a kind of an emerging technology that's
coming out that starts to um get people talking about stuff. So, uh Like in two thousand nine, I would say it was tablets, Like that was when the tablet idea was really starting to get pushed. Two thou ten would be three D. Two thousand eleven was this idea of a digital ecosystem where all of your devices, like your appliances could talk to each other. Now that continued also in but that wasn't you know, at that point, it's no
longer an emerging technology, it's a maturing technology. The emerging technology. In twelve, I would say, besides ultrabooks, which you know is a new category that was the idea of revolutionizing
the user interface across multiple devices and multiple platforms. I think that the big uh, the things that really pushed the industry to do this are the Microsoft Connect that that was obviously a something that was influencing manufacturers in their decision to kind of push user interfaces, and also products like Apple's Serie and and Google's voice recognition software. This is stuff that is pushing the various industries to try and to create new ways for you to interact
with your electronics. UM and that's tough to do because it's not just a technological old barrier, it's a user The user interface barrier is psychological too. You have to look at the way people use stuff, and even if you create a new way that maybe is easier or more intuitive, there's a lot of inertia you have to
fight against to get people to adopt it. So if I'm used to using a keyboard and mouse, or even a keyboard and a touch pad, uh, it might take a lot for me to get to a point where I want to use a touch screen device, right Like, So we're seeing computers that come out now that have touch screens integrated into the computer itself. So notebook computers having a touch screen, or even desktop computers having a touch screen. Well, I know a lot of people who say, yeah,
but I'm really going to use that. I mean, I'm reaching out and touching the screen. Am I'm really going to do that. I think in a couple of years that will pretty much be the norm and we won't even think about it. It'll be like the way the mouse was way back in well we were looking at the next step. We're looking at just your controls where you move, make emotion in the air and that gives a command to whatever your electronics devices and it responds
in kind. I saw a lot of this with televisions where it was going to be uh integrated directly into the TV set. So think of a Microsoft Connect being part of your TV. So if you want to change the channel, you can do that by gesturing in the air, right, you might you might lift the can, You might lift a hand and do a swipe motion to the left or to the right to change the channel, or you
might raise your hand to to increase the volume. There were also a lot that were including things like voice recognition software where you would give voice commands to your device including TVs to get it to UM to respond, and I argued it, well, it's something boisterous, like say
a Super Bowl party that might become a problem. Yeah, you know, where someone yells out something and then the television interprets that to switch over to desperate housewise or I don't know, you know, and suddenly something You've got a bunch of guy who are really getting into the show, which I don't know. It could be a good thing anyway. The point being that I saw that that was a big theme and everyone had different interpretations and implementations of
this technology. So there was a company called soft Kinetic which had a three D sensing technology that is uh, you know, if you looked at it, you would first think, oh, this is like Microsoft Connect, but they use a different approach. So the connect, the way it it interprets depth is that it projects a grid onto the environment from the camera right so, and then it it interprets the um
the deformation of the grid as motion and commands. So think of a flat grid and then if I stand like I'm pressing against that grid, the grid to forms around my shape and as I move around, that's what it measures. Soft Kinetics depth. Sensor technology uses a different approach. It uses light that's being protected at you, not in the usible spectrum by the way that's being protected at you, bounces back and hits a sensor, and depending on how long it took the light to hit the sensor, that's
how it knows how far away you are. So it actually has a greater resolution, like you can get closer to the camera and still have accurate motions than you
could with connect because connects technology is different. If you get too close to the grid, it won't deform properly, right, But this uses a different technology, And so their point was it was something that could be worked into things like tablets or laptop computers where you've got the sensor technology built in, but you can be closer to the camera and it won't be a problem. But another example was Toby t o b I I. They had eye
tracking technology. Really yeah, they just used it used a webcam in a computer that could track your eyes where your eyes were on the screen. You had to calibrate it first, but once he calibrated it, it would know where you're looking on the screen and respond. It was the weirdest sensation to read a web page, and as I was getting towards the bomb the page, it started to automatically scroll up, and as soon as my eyes went up, it stopped scrolling so I could continue to read.
And I was like, I'm controlling it with my mind. And you could even select links. You would stare at a link and if you looked at the link for you know, two or three seconds, that would be the command of I want to go to there. So imagine having Windows eight the Metro design. You have all these icons on the screen that all go to different applications. You just stare at an application for a couple of
seconds and it launches. It was and they even had a video game where it was kind of like Asteroids. You had to destroy asteroids that were coming in towards Actually you're protecting Earth, so kind of a combination of asteroids and missile command. So asteroids are flying at the Earth and you stare at the asteroids and a laser shoots the asteroids you're staring at. So you just have to keep on looking at the different asteroids they are coming in and constrant on the ones that are moving
the fastest towards the Earth. That was again another really neat implementation. Um, And and it's it's one of those things where you know, you're not necessarily going to see a Toby branded computer, but they might be able to form relationships with other manufacturers and incorporate the technology directly into that computer. And yeah, speaking of Microsoft, this was their last year for the keynote. Wow. Yeah, this was their last year being on the floor too. Yeah. Yeah,
so this was it was underwhelming. They said they didn't really bring much now the keynote. The keynote wasn't anything particularly overwhelming or exciting, but that was kind of the point, um, Microsoft. The reason why Microsoft is leaving ce S, or at least the reason that we've been given, is that, uh uh, that that they their release cycle for their products is different than the ce S schedule. So that's the real problem with having a big show like the two big
problems with having a big show like this one. You're beholden to their schedule, not your own. Right, So if your product isn't ready to be shown off, then you have the risk of, well, do we show off something that isn't totally ready yet and then if things fail that could really hurt our product, right, Or do we not show it, not mention it, and then just kind
of have a lackluster show anyway. The other problem is that you're making announcements the same time everyone else is, so there's always the risk that your announcement will be overshadowed by someone else. Even if what you have is a really great product, there's the chance that some little no name company has created something that just it hits that that sweet spot, you know, like the not to say that these are no name companies, but again like
the Palm pre the palm pre got a lot of attention. Well, that took attention away from other products, and there could have been company saying like, I don't understand this product is great, it's fantastic, it's not getting the traction it needs to get. Everyone's paying attention to the smartphone, which is not even in the same category as what we make. Um,
there's that danger too. So uh yeah, Microsoft had made the announcement that was going to be the last time that they were going to be on the show floor and the last time they delivered the keynote. Traditionally, the Microsoft keynote is what launches the whole show. Now there are are press events that happened the two days prior to the show floor opening. But it's kind of like, you don't really think of ceings starting until the Microsoft keynote happens. So the fact that that's not going to
be there anymore, it's kind of a big deal. Also, from what I understand, news dot com reported it took forty five minutes for the exhibition space that Microsoft usually takes up to be sold. And uh, there are two companies that ended up purchasing the exhibition in space. One was a Chinese based electronics company called Hycins. The other company. Do you know what the other company was, You're very familiar with the other company, Dish Network. Oh yeah, they
bought up the rest of the space. Now, for those who don't know, who have never been to cees, Microsoft had some pretty sweet real estate. There are different entrances to the Central Hall and the Central Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Centers, where I'd say the majority of the really really big names are the biggest booths by far are in the Central Hall. That's where Sony and Panasonic and and LG and UH and Tshiba and all these other big companies. That's where they are is in
the Central Hall. Well, Microsoft was in one of the entrances to the Central Hall, the one that was connected to the South Hall. You walk into the Central Hall and on your left would be the Microsoft booth and on your right was Intel, and they just dominated that section. They were huge booths and Intel still will be because they, as far as I know, are still playing on being
and CS. Well, now High Sense and Dish Network are going to have that prime real estate on the left when you first walk in, and it'll be interesting to see how that affects traffic in the Central Hall. I'm really kind of curious about it. Um. But yeah, that I think the sad fact is Microsoft's departure from c E S got more pressed than Microsoft's announcements at CES. Yeah. Now that being said, I did visit the Microsoft booth
and I thought that Windows eight looked really really nice. Uh. And I also played with Connect and played a three D Star Wars pod racing game and had a good time until I hit a wall. Really, pod racing, you mean that that thing was now unveiled in episode one. Okay, I'm not going to defend episode one, and I'm certainly not going to defend the pod racing you know, like many series, that took took over half of episode one. But as a game, it's awesome. Alright. As a movie,
I'm not I'm still not sold. But as a game, I loved it. Um. So that was but that was kind of fun and uh as far as booth spaces go, there were some interesting stories there too. UM. In the South Hall, the upper level of the South Hall when you walk in on your right is the Kodak booth. Now, Kodak was at the time looking at going filing for bankruptcy, which they have Yeah since since the show, they have
actually filed for bankruptcy. Uh. In past years, Kodak has had some pretty cool booths, some very interactive displays, uh, really large ones. Um. You know, there was one where there was a display that was a vertical display and then a horizontal display. So it's like an L shaped uh display, very long and narrow, but it made it
look like a waterfall. You know, information was falling down the vertical side but hit the horizontal side then slide down and the horizontal side was about table height and it was multi touch so you could then interact with the display when it was on the horizontal level gorgeous, very very uh like, when you saw it, you had to go play with it, right, it pulled you into the booth. Well, this year, Codex presence was much more understated.
UM still had a pretty good sized booth, but there was a it was a little bit of a sober atmosphere in Kodak, which was you know, that's kind of rough to see. It's always rough to see any company that's struggling show up at c S because you realize, you know that those representatives are going to have to answer a lot of really tough questions, tough, uncomfortable questions about the state of the company and what they're gonna
do to get out of whatever slump they're in. So I was gonna say gaming gaming, Well, you know, CS is not as big on gaming as E three, but there were a lot of gaming peripherals, um there always are, uh there's and apps showed off a lot of gaming,
including apps made specifically for television. So of course you will eventually be able to play Angry Birds on your TV without any other device connected to your television, because, as we all know, Angry Birds is the measure of whether or not the apps on your device are good or not? Yes, And of course they're coming out with the uh D Angry Birds device, which actually doesn't show TV because they're just an Angry Birds game. Birds wouldn't
surprise me. Um. There's also there are also a lot of examples of gamification where things that wouldn't normally be considered a game have had game elements added to them, including fitness technology. There's a lot of fitness technology. This year at CES we saw that we know, we it's always been part of ce S, but last year we really saw that takeoff with body Media FIT. Little body Media is back and they showed updated versions of the
fit device. That's an arm band you wear that has sensors in it, including uh sensors that that measured the um how much you've sweat, your body temperature, has accelerometer in it and everything so that it keeps track of how much activity you do and it accumulates data and then exports that to your computer. You sink using a cable um at least the standard version, You sink with the cable, and then you can track how much energy
you burn per day. You also can put into the software you know what you ate so that you can track how many calories you consumed versus how many you burned and stay on track to lose weight or just use an exercise program. Well, there are a lot of other devices out there that compete directly with the body media fit. Motorola had one Motoactive that was very pretty um I was also an MP three player, so it had added functionality there you could you could use it
while exercising and listen to music. But then you had a device. There was a device called the Strive str i I V which you could attach to a key chain. Uh. This also was sort of like an advanced pedometer, so it keeps track of your steps. But it also had some games in it. It has a touch screen interface and there's a game that's kind of like farm Bill, like as you exercise, you accumulate currency within the game and then you can use that to to build up
your your character's realm. But it also had a really cool idea in that as you as you uh take more and more steps, you can dedicate the the currency that you generate. Two charities, three different charities. There's one for clean water, there was one for save the rainforest. Um I forget what The third one was off the top of my but as you walked you could end up banking that toward a charity and then Strive and its corporate partners would donate money for every x amount
of energy that you expended. Yeah, so it gives not just gamification, but also sort of this this idea that you can help other people while getting fit. So, in other words, just other ways to motivate people to stay with it and not just you know, buy a product and use it for a couple of days and then forget about it. Yeah, by the way, you got ten points from mentioning gamification, thank you. Uh. And there there
were a lot of other kind of cool things. There was a company called a Rasma which did augmented reality applications where you know, we've seen like the Nintendo three D S has augmented reality elements built into it where you have specific cards that you can point the three D S at the camerat and it'll create a virtual character will pop up on your screen on top of the picture of the physical card that's on the table, right,
So that's augmented reality. Well Erasma sort of does similar stuff, except they do it with all sorts of things, not just uh, specific cards. So you can have let's say that you have a company that enters into an agreement with the Erasma and Erasma produces the app that would exist on your smartphone device or whatever. It has to be a device as a camera. And then obviously and then uh, the company, Let's say it's a soft drink company. If you point your camera at that soft drink, it
might suddenly create this little animated character, right. That could end up being a link to something along the lines of you might get nutritional information, or it might be a link to a sweepstakes or a survey. You know, it could be pretty much anything that the manufacturer wants it to be. But it gives you that added level of information on top of the physical product, which is what the promise of augmented reality is all about. So
that was really exciting to see. There was there was a lot of interesting Oh, cell phones, let me talk about smartphones. Yeah, okay, so did you see what I what I said I wanted after I saw it? You mean the Samsung Galaxy Note. I want a Samsung Galaxy Note. It's bigger, that's the weird thing. It's smaller than a tablet, but it's bigger than a phone five point three inch display, which is big for a smartphone. And I was skeptical when I first saw one. I thought, yeah, when I
first saw when, I thought, there's just no way. That's just too big. It's just too clunky. And then I got in my hand and I'm like, okay, all right, it's not too big for my hand. It doesn't feel uncomfortable. What about my pocket? So that slid one in my pocket, like, okay, it's not too big for my pocket. I no longer have an excuse um. And also black coats with sunglasses came over and said, okay, buddy, can you take that back out of your pocket now? Except that in this case,
I was actually using someone else's Samsung Galaxy Note. It was a guy named Tony who works for This Week in Tech. He had one, Yes, so I got to play with it. Um. It has a stylus and it actually has handwriting RECOGNI technology built into it. So let's
shout back to the newton Um. Yeah. But then, so let's say that you want to a text message, but you don't want to type it in using an on screen keyboard, you can actually scribble it down and then it will translate your chicken scratch into text, hopefully accurately. I guess it all depends on how bad your chicken scratches. But yeah, that was a really cool phone. I thought that. Uh it has the Android operating system that I love, and it's got a nice big screen, so you can
use it for all sorts of stuff. Uh. The biggest argument against is that it was at that size, it's a little awkward to use as a phone. It's almost more like a tablet than a phone in that case. But then you have to ask yourself, well, if you don't use your phone that frequently, then is it as
big a deal? And the truth is, I use my phone not that often, Like I'll use it to talk with my wife, um or I might occasionally use it to make a call once in a while, But in general, I use my phone far more for executing apps and browsing the web and and that's o email and that kind of stuff. So, uh, you know, that's that's an argument for something like the Samsung Galaxy Note. Now, if you just can't get past that form factor, then you know, I can totally you know, I can totally understand, like
because it is it is pretty big. Um other interesting things the Razor project, Fiona, did you see that it's a gaming tablet and it's kind of cool. It had a special controllers that you could hook up to it that would uh turn it into this really kind of um innovative gaming device. Speaking of gaming, I also got a demonstration of hands on demonstration of the Nintendo we you and guys. I kind of liked it. Uh, it was really a pretty interesting implementation of a video gaming device.
This in this case that we you you know, it has a controller that has its own LCD screen inside the controller and it's in the can strollers big. But you can use it in various ways. One way, the obvious way that a lot of people have concentrate on is that the game that the screen could show supplemental information.
So for example, let's say you're playing a game like a Zelda game, Well it might be that all your health information, your items information is on your little screen, and then your big screen, the television is dedicated to the action that's going on in the game itself. So in that way, your your WEU controller could take the place of a heads up display. So then you just glanced out your screen to get that info and then otherwise you look back at the television for everything else
but heads down display HDD. Yeah. The other the other way that it was used I thought was really cool was in multiplayer mode where they had four people playing with standard WE controllers, so the we remotes and the nunchucks, and then a fifth person was playing with the Nintendo We You control ler, and it would be the four versus one in various games. And then one of the games a person played a character who's trying to escape the other four by evading them for a certain amount
of time within a maze. So I likened it to playing the game pac Man, where the person using the Wii You controller is playing the part of pac Man and everyone else is playing the part of the ghosts and they can actually you know, coordinate, Like I see him. He's heading to the yellow section and everyone starts running over there. It's like, oh no, no no, he's cut back to green and like you you so you try and cut them off and and and trap them. Uh. That
was a really cool way of playing a game. I thought, now, is it gonna be enough for a Nintendo to really compete against Microsoft and Sony? I don't know, but I can tell you that U. When it comes to games, like if if you're really interested in having games where you have groups of people over to play, I thought, I thought it was a neat way of shaking things up. And I kind of like it where you know, you can take turns being the one guy versus the other
four players. That's kind of uh, you know, if nothing else, it gives you bragging rights if you if you win, like I was up against four of you guys, and I still kick butt. Yeah, yeah, well I've I've actually and this is the subject really for another day, but I have been hearing rumors that Microsoft and or Sony may consider getting out of the gaming hardware business just because it is so expensive and cutthroat to do uh
research and development and compete so um. Not that they were getting out of gaming, but out of the manufacturing of the machines themselves. So that might, you know, if they decided to do that, that might give Nintendo the ability to stay in the market, if they're willing to do that. Yep. See ye, and uh, I guess i'll U. I mean, there's so much more I can talk about. I haven't talked about any of the the like the parties I went to, or I did go to some of those to get my hands on some stuff that
wasn't really being shown on the show floor itself. Up. I also went to the International Association of web Tv Awards, which was really cool. Are buddies over at tech News Today one for Best News Show, and uh the guys over at Rooster Teeth one for Best Animated Web Series, and the Guild one everything else not not not entirely true, but it started to seem like it well deserved. They are all pioneers and web television, and it was kind of an interesting thing to see the the award show
and actually, you know what, surprisingly went pretty smoothly. There were a couple of technical glitches, but overall I thought it was a pretty good effort. And actually I was very impressed. I shouldn't say pretty good, it was very impressive. Um, but I'll say one last little bit, the last little thing that I thought was really cool at the show floor. And we've seen these before. Two three D printers. Now, the idea of that three D printer has been around
for a while. There have been quite a few of them out and there are companies that use them to help design prototypes. Um and there are other companies that will use them so that you can send a design and and they will print it out in three dimensions for you using some sort of polymers various ways. We've done a podcast about three D printers in the past. Well, the MakerBot was there and they actually have pre orders
open for two thousand dollars for three D printers. So this is actually coming to the market where the average consumer, assuming you've got too grand to drop, can get hold of one of these printers. There was also the Cube three D, which was another three D printer on display at CS. Both of them were really interesting and they are able to print uh some neat stuff in various colors, and I mean it was it was it was cool
to see them work, you know. And it's one of those things where we're getting closer and closer to the time where you'll be able to create a printer, just like the promise has always been there. You'll be able to create a printer that ultimately can print all the components for a second printer and then you just replicate printers. Yeah, I'm I'm thinking about buying myself one of those and printing myself a new car. Yeah, it might be. It's kind of like the Johnny Cash one piece of the
time song. Yes, what model is it? Well, it's because it's gonna take you a while to get all those parts printed out, that's right, not in the lunch box. Uh yeah, the printer. The printer is not so big that you could print a car. And plus I guess if you printed a car in one piece, it wouldn't really move, would it now? Anyway, Yeah, it was. It was a good show overall. I had a really good time. Saw a lot of my friends that are in the tech journalism business. UM got to meet some other really
cool people. Met with the channel flip founders who were They were great guys, phenomenal guys, very nice. Uh my buddy I as actar over this weekend Tech. He and I hung out a lot, uh and just sort of talked about the show and as well as just debated on where to go to eat that that was always a big discussion at c S. UM got to be on Tech News to while I was there, so those guys were there seen it was there. There are tons of celebrities at the e S. That's also a big thing.
It's the companies will get various celebrities to come in and help draw attention to their booths. So like Tozy Robotics brought in Justin Bieber, which raised the question of whether or not he's a Bieber bot and uh I Hip brought in Snooky from the Jersey Shore as classy. I did not go to the I Hip party. I thought I was gonna go, and our our former editor here at How Stuff Works that Candice Keener, was begging
me to go. But it started at ten pm local time, which now Vegas time, ten pm feels like one am to me and I am not. I am not a night ol. So that was that end up not happening. But yeah, other celebrities a little cool J fifty cent a, Linza Dishku was the celebrity ambassador to c e s A. Felicia Day of course was there for the International Association of Web TV Awards as well as just seeing other stuff that was there. Um Rick Fox, former Lakers player,
was there. Very tall man as it turns out. Um Wayne Brady of of whose Lives It Anyway and and Game show fame was there. Very funny guy. Yeah, it was. It was cool to see these folks around. I didn't really I'm name dropping like crazy, but let me make it clear. I did not chat with these folks. I watched them and thought they were really cool, and they seemed to know their stuff, which was very refreshing. It didn't feel like it was a UM at least the
once I saw. I didn't see Justin Bieber in person. I didn't see Snooky in person, but the others I saw, and they all seemed to really know their stuff, which was kind of cool. UM. But yeah, I did not personally go up and meet these folks, so I don't want to give the wrong impression there. I'm not best buds with any of them. They don't know who I am, and it's probably for the best. So you're Jonathan, Well, mama said knock you out. Please do not call going
to come back. I've been here for years for to be exact. Yeah, So that's that's the lowdown on CS twelve. There are tons of websites out there that list all the technology that was on display from the big manufacturers, you know, the best of CS that kind of stuff, and uh, I do recommend you check it out if you're interested in seeing the sort of things that could
be coming out in twelve. Keep in mind that some of the more adventurous and innovative designs may not ever make it to consumer electronics in the form that they appeared in at CS. They might eventually make it, it's just they might be totally different by the time they get there. Yeah. Anyway, Yeah, and then you shook a narrow to the name. All right, Well, on that outdated meme.
We're going to wrap this this conversation up. If you guys have any topics you would like us to cover, you can let us know on Facebook and Twitter are handled. There is tech stuff H s W. Or you can send us an email at our brand new email address. O, get out your pendant paper. It's tech stuff at Discovery dot com. And Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you