TechStuff Visits CES 2013: Part 1

I'm barely able to string two coherent sentences together. Why is that, Jonathan? That would be because I just returned, as in within the last forty eight hours from c e S in Las Vegas, Nevada. We live in Atlanta, Georgia, which is nowhere near Las Vegas, Nevada, and she has a totally different time zone. Yeah yeah, Trixie, Trixie. That c c S being um the the convention formerly known

as the Consumer Electronics Show, Yep, yep. Now they're just known as c e S and this is where companies come to show off the product lines that they want stores to carry. So, uh, I have a friend this there's gonna be a lot of name dropping or potentially a lot of name dropping in this episode, and I want to warn everybody about that. I'm friends with Nate Lankson, who is the editor of Wired dot co dot UK. Former c NET employee. Nate is a great guy. I got to meet him in person for the first time

at the c E s and Nate's perspective. As we were walking around, he was saying to me, Jonathan, well, I don't understand is that why these booths here that have these ipolled cases? I mean, what, why would they even bother? And he doesn't. Actually suddenly that Ben't may need to be from the south of London and he's not. But I said, well, Nate, you know you have to understand that a lot of these these then these manufacturers are actually here in the hopes of getting their products

carried in various catalogs and in retail stores. Yeah, I suppose I just look at the world as if it's all meant for me. And I said, actually, Nate, so do I. So we shared something in common. But I do understand, you know, that's the purpose for the event is to get in front of the press and in front of retail establishments to say, hey, here's all the stuff that's gonna come out this year. Isn't it pretty and shiny? And don't you want it? And quite a

few people do this. There's more than three thousand exhibitors as of yeah, this show, So these numbers are very slightly outdated. Um uh And and they are crammed into one point nine million net square feet of existed space. Yeah and uh and there are about a hundred and fifty thousand people attending and uh, it really felt pretty crowded this year. There have been passed c e S shows where attendance was down, especially right after the recession.

A lot of companies ended up not being able to go. They weren't able to afford the space. You know, they were having bad year might not have been the best time to show off. According according to wired It, it costs like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars minimum for everyone but the smallest vendors to set up a booth and you know, fly people out there, feed them for the week. Sure, I mean, and some of these booths

are incredibly elaborate. I mean, things like l G had a very elaborate booth, Samsung Sony, Panasonic, you know, the big names and electronics you would imagine have a fairly large presence. Now, there were a couple of exceptions. Microsoft famously did not have a booth this year. Normally you would walk into the Central Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which has three major halls, a North Hall, Central Hall, and a South Hall. The South Hall actually

has two floors. This is a huge amount of space. Now, the Central Hall usually if you walked in from the main entrance, you would have Intel on your right and Microsoft on your left. Microsoft took it easy this year. They said not to come in and play, and instead Hycinths was on the left. Uh and Dish Network was also on the left. So Microsoft had had withdrawn from the show, although that didn't stop Bomber from showing up

at a keynote in the yote keynote. Yeah, there were some people who said it was a Bomber keynote and he had his buddy from Qualcom there. And I would not go so far as to say that, but some other folks on Twitter we're saying such things. Well, if I've heard it was a little bit wacky or the Microsoft ever quite got with a keynote. There's some there's some really entertaining videos about the sort of antics that went on it. You know, Big Bird showed up. Yeah

that's gangster. You got Big Bird coming out throwing down sweet rhymes. I'm not I'm not positive. I think I'm that word. One thing? Did he think? Give me the streets? So he comes from a street, not not d streets? Well, because he lived life on the street. Okay, he's at least as gangsters. Vanilla Eyes was can you grant me that? Yes,

stry collaborate and listen. Okay, alright, so yeah, Big Bird was there, Maroon five there who in the podcast in the live streaming were overdubbed by um dido I believe were they because they didn't have the rights I guess to stream. That's kind of interesting, it was. I was not aware of that from everything that I've seen. It was just like everything that is insane about the internet live on stage, and I'm not positive that that's what

qualcom meant to do. Right. Well, it was pretty great for me to watch anyway there, and there were there were tons of interesting moments. I mean, there were a lot of celebrities there. I saw Danny DeVito. He was wearing it It's always sunny in Philadelphia Baseball cap. But

I didn't get to chat with him. He was He was very far away and on top of a stage, and I have a feeling that if I had gone up to stay hi to him, some very large men would have very prevented you, very gently but firmly discouraged me from doing that. Um. But Day DeVito was there. You know, there are other performers. Fifty Set was their exhibit.

Was there. Um, Felicia Day was running around. Felicia Day was the Entertainment Matters ambassador to c She had one of her fans made a sash for her and she wore that the entire time. Uh, I'm delightful, I am told I didn't run into Miss Day this time. I have met her in the past, but I did not see her this time. L L. Cool J was there, but we were not allowed to call it a come back. Um. There were Yeah, there were a lot of performers there.

Because a lot of them also lend their names to particular products or they endorse specific products where they are there to help bring even more attention to a specific company. I mean, this is the company's chance, any individual company's chance to grab that spotlight. But they're competing against everybody else. So you can pull out a lot of stops, room full of three thousand spotlights and everyone trying to write just your your rubber necking all over the place, trying

to see what the next big thing is. And so you really are struggling to try and capture that attention. So what were some of those next big things? Well, let's talk about It's it's easiest probably to talk about this in terms of product category groups of stuff, yeah, because we could go company by company, but that just gets really confusing. So let's talk about t vs first of all. Now, televisions, that's always a big thing at CES. They're they're big, they're shiny, I mean you can and

they they're getting pretty darn big. There were more than a few eighty four inch sets on the show floor. That's that's a bunch. Yeah, And there was one inch TV as well that I saw, So, I mean, these are not those aren't typical. Most of the ones you see are tend to be still huge, and there were a lot in the six seventy in range, and there were a few there were oh, LAD screens that were more like in theft inch But that's huge too, because

huge in a different way. A few years ago, when when when my former co host and I Chris, when we first went the very first year I went to c S, I remember that the two of us marveled over an o LAD display that was eleven inches and it was and you sit there and look at and you knew that was never going to market. This was just a proto prototypes. Now we're seeing fifty five inch TVs with OLED displays that are becoming more and more of something that we're gonna see come to market, including

high ultra high definition displays. We're talking four K resolutions, so four times the ten a DP resolution that we consider high definition. This is ultra high definition. This is incredibly vibrant colors, great like you can get right up onto the screen and stare at it and you can't see the pixelation. It's pretty phenomenal stuff. Um you got usually you have a pretty high refresh rate, so it's refreshing the image at a very uh fast rate, so

that you've got this very smooth motion. If any of you went out and saw the hobbit in the forty frames per second. You know what high frame rate looks like. It's kind of like that. It's great for stuff like sports, it's a little distracting in some other forms of entertainment as far as I'm concerned, just because it gives a sort of glider unreal. It's weird to say unreal because it's very real, because because it's extremely real, but but

not cinematic or or or it doesn't feel like TV right. Well, you know, it's whenever you're dealing with a film format that was not really intended to be shown at that resolution, you're going to run into issues like that. And I've heard that actually, Sony, which is one of the companies that has one of these super high definition televisions out is starting to put out four K cameras. Yes, there were four K cameras out there on display in the on the show floor. They looked very heavy, These were

big cameras, but there. But Sony's actually leading the way and creating four K cameras meant for the consumer, so not just the pro sumer or the professional. Yeah, because you know, there have been four K cameras available for a while, but they were just within the grasp of movie directors studios. Yeah, we're talking like you had to

have millions of dollars to get them. Now they're still not cheap there, there are thousands and thousands of dollars, but they're starting to get to a point where they are within the grasp of consumers who happened to have a good amount of discretionary income. But you know, that's the thing is that we're seeing. This is the way

technology works, right. You see a new technology come out and at first it's really expensive, and then as more people adopt it, manufacturing processes improved, things get more efficient, and the prices start to come down. The same thing with Moore's law. I mean that's the basis of Moore's law as well. But getting back to TVs, Ultra high definition was the buzzword in TVs. I mean everyone had

an ultra high definition television. Samsung showed off an eight K TV which was enormous and was really more of a prototype concept type thing. Um there does there's probably a point where the human eye will not be able to discern the difference in quality once you get to beyond a certain resolution. We're just not most of us don't have the acuity to be able to see that kind of difference. But it means that you could create

ever larger screens and not not lose resolution. Right. So it may not be good for a consumer, which is weird when you think of the name used to be consumer electronics, showcase or show rather. Uh, it might not be for a consumer, but you might have an enormous display, say in Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, and you want to have an enormous display that has great resolution, and instead of having it made up of fifteen screens, it's

made up of one enormous screen. You could theoretically do that once you get that resolution cranked up pretty high. The biggest criticism I heard of the four K TVs had nothing to do with the sets. It was these are amazing TVs, The images are beautiful. Where is the content going to come from? Because without having someone to deliver the four K content, you have a television that's capable of showing these amazing pictures, but it's not getting

the information it needs in order to do that. Uh. Nate legs and again he suggested that perhaps we might expect the next generation of video game consoles to support four K, so they would become a reason for people to upgrade their TVs, not not that you could only see it in four K, but that they'd be capable. I I just made a face, and I think the face was me imagining playing Survive a horror video game K and that doesn't sound like a thing that I actually want to do it. It would be the blacks

would be very, very true blacks on the screen. Um. In fact, there was one oh Lad TV that one person said gave it an infinite contrast ratio, and the contrast ratio we're really talking about how how true is the black on that screen? Because of course, if you're using an ol l c D screen, it's backlit, and so anytime there's anything on the screen, anytime the set is on, there's a light behind the screen that's on.

So there could be problems with backlit displays showing a true black on the screen because it didn't come out like charcoal gray. But a lot of the sets there were more about representing true black on the screen. They also had there was the world's first curved oh led TV. Yeah, two of them. Did you get to see any of those?

I got to see both of them both. Yeah. See, here's the thing is that you have l G which had the world's first curved oh led TV, and you had Samsung, which had the world's first curved tvOS and Curious. Both companies were claiming that they had the first curved led TV. Why you would want to curved oh led TV. I I'm sure there are reasons, and I'm sure they are valid, but I do not know what they are. I've heard. I've heard that um that actually viewing from

the sides gets easier with a curve. That makes sense. I mean at least at least for the majority of the screen. I would imagine if you get a little too far are than the curvature would mean that the side closest to you would be obscure. But it's a very slight curve. It is. We're not talking about you know. Yeah, it's not like it's not like a yeah exactly, Yeah

it is. It is a very subtle curve. It's one of the things that if you're looking at it from the side, you can, like from profile, you can tell. But otherwise it's not like if you were looking at dead on It's not uh, incredibly obvious. But yeah, I know that both of them had it, and that's one of the things about Leo led screens is that you can create uh, curved or even flexible screens depending upon the material you're using. Um, so that was kind of neat.

Let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsor now and now back to the show. Also, there was not as much of an emphasis on three D this year. Yeah. What was it two years ago that three D was just the buzzword and everyone was Yeah, two years ago, I would say was probably the hardest push for three D. Everyone had three D Last year. Three D was still important and there were a few play pass that had the glasses free three D, which uh, you know requires that you are in a sweet spot to view it

and three D effect. Uh. Three D was not as it was still present in several different sets on the floor, but it was not nearly as big a feature touted this year as it has been a year's past. Yeah. Well, you know, I think that people have started to realize that not everyone is going to go out, run out and replace their entire television in order to get this content that really only exists in an extremely small sample

size of the media that you can play. Yeah, there's that, And I think there's also people who still resist any sort of television that would require them to wear glasses. And you know, you have two choices. You have the active shutter lens glasses, which means that these are glasses that required to be you knowed, their battery operated right, or you have the passive ones. But either way you have to keep track of them. I mean, I don't know about you, Lauren, but for me, it's very easy

for me to lose my remote. I would hate to also lose the glasses I need to watch my TV right sure, And for for me personally, I mean, I really I avoid seeing movies in three D whenever I can, because it's kind of headachey and a little bit of orient it can be for some people. I like the three D effect. It's just that, uh, it's not. It's not a killer feature for me. Now that being said, there was one company, Samsung in fact, that had a dual vision television A dual view TV. Yeah, I heard

about that. It's it's essentially a split screen television, except both screens are happening at the same time, and depending on which pair of glasses you're wearing it's it's projecting two images and two different people can sit in front of it and see two different things and c two different and you're hooked up to a two headphones something you're each listening to your you can get and there are two different variations of this too. You could get

one that was active, or you could get passive. In this case, the Samsung said I looked at was passive, meaning that you would have one set of glasses that would have polarized lenses that are aligned in one way, and then you have a second set of glasses that be polarized but aligned, uh like ninety degrees exactly that kind of thing. And normally with a three D set, you would have the same kind of setup, except you would have one lens polarized one way the other lens

polarized another way. So each eye accepts a different set of images, your brain combines the two that's what gives you the three D effect. In this case, the implementation was different. Both eyes got the same set of images, but it was a different set of images than someone wearing the other pair of glasses. So you could play a video game and you're looking at one screen and the person playing against you is looking at another screen.

So imagine playing a game like there's this thing called football that I've heard about that sometimes a guy named Madden likes to play. Anyway, if you wanted to set a specific kind of play, like a hail Mary pass is a thing, you could select that. And you're wearing your glasses so you can totally see everything that you need to do. Your opponent is wearing a different pair of glasses. They can't see what you see. They're seeing their side, so it keeps everything secret. Yeah. So so

there's there's virtually no way to screen look right. And also it would even allow you to do things like watch two different Theoretically you could watch two different programs at the same time, but of course that does require that you have your own individual audio feed in otherwise you would just hear a jumble of audio everything. Yeah,

that would be Yeah. So while my wife was watching the documentary series Supernatural, I could be watching something a little more akin to my tastes, like, um, I don't know that Mitchell and web look keep show both of it, which have David Mitchell and Rubbert Webb. Jonathan don't don't pretend that you don't like the documentary series Supernatural. We are dreaming. They are dreamy, dreamy boys. But yeah, that that kind of sums up. I mean, like everyone had

these different TVs. If you were to ask me who had the best TV out there, I could not give you an answer because we've reached a level of quality where it's it's beyond my ability to describe it to people. Also, you have to keep in mind that every single one of these companies spinds a huge amount of time calibrating

those televisions so that they look perfect, perfect in that environment. Absolutely, And you're talking about a big convention center where you know it's not going to have the same sort of viewing condition as you would in your in your house. Probably, I don't think your house would have the same lighting as the convention center, dead unless your house has one point nine, in which case, in which case, dude, hook us up will come for your barbecue. I will bake

you brownies. There we go. But yeah, that was beyond TVs. I guess the next category, a big one, would be computers. I guess. I guess computers are sort of a thing that people use. Computers and tablets. Yeah, computers, tablets together. Everyone had tablets everyone. There were a lot of different tablets out there, including a lot of Windows eight tablets, so people were starting to really start to show off the Windows eight user interface and tablet format, which you know,

including a gaming tablet which we'll talk about later. Uh. Yeah, it was pretty impressive. The big one, the big one that I heard of, and I literally big one was Microsoft's um no, not Microsoft, sorry, the Lenovo Yeah, the Idea Center table PC. Yeah, yeah, I want to say. It's twenty seven inches and it's an all in one PC. When it's vertical, it runs Windows eight, so you've got it vertically aligned where it's you know, like you could have it mounted. They had it mounted on like a

cart kind of thing. But when it was vertically aligned, it was Windows eight. So it's that touch screen user interface. It's running a full version of Windows eight. You could do all the things on it that you could do with the Windows eight machine, except for pick it up and move it into another room by yourself. It was it was was a bit of a bit of a hefty device, but then when you would tilt it horizontally, it would switch to Lenovo's proprietary user interface, and it

would become a surface for you to play on. In fact, surface is a great term. It reminded me a lot of the Microsoft Surface table top, which is now called Pixel since I think but um, you know, now, of course we think of surface as the tablet, but before it was this big table thing. Well, that's kind of what the Lenovo Idea Center becomes. It's multi touch and can detect up to ten points of contact at once. Yeah, it's been good for for games, gaming, sharing, media sharing videos.

You can have a bunch of people around staring staring at this table and playing with it. Um, I thought it was. It was interesting. It's and supposedly it's going to come out summer of two thousand thirteen. But there are a couple of things that kind of, I don't know, confuse me a little bit. One is that uh, Lenovo is really known for doing these kind of hybrid things, like they've done the hybrid to have what computer stuff before.

They've also been known to announce things that never quite make it out to stores, Like there was the Lenovo you won that I went crazy for like three years ago, and it never really came out actually happened. Yeah, Um so I'm a little cautious about this. Also, I don't know how how compelling or useful it would be to the average consumer. Um, it was interesting. I really thought it was an interesting implementation of touch screen technology. But um, I don't know. I can't think of a reason why

I would get one. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it sounds like a nifty toy, and I can see the just the sexy factor of of having something in your home that you can share something, you know, share share q YouTube video on without having to pull a phone out of your pocket and have it and be of a size that you would actually want to watch it. Yeah,

but you could do that with a regular computer. It's just interesting that when you mean, it makes it easier to share stuff, and it was very attractive to share stuff using the Lenovo user interface, But you can still do that on a computer without that, which is why I was like, oh, yeah, I mean, I just I would be afraid of the first time that, you know, one of my friends forgot that it was a really expensive piece of equipment and put their drink down on

top of something like hot coffee or something. Yeah, that I would worry about that too. There were other like a lot of Ultra books were still on display. We had Ultra books debuted at CS two thousand twelve. Um, there's still a thing. The sales for computers have not been great in two thousands. They weren't great in two thousand twelve, and I'm not sure that they're going to improve significantly over the course of two thousand thirteen. Do you mean do you mean computers in general or computers

laptops in general? Computers, yeah, like tablets not so are pretty good, but anything like a laptop or desktop does have not been doing so well. And but there were still quite a few on display, and some of them were very gorgeous that I saw, and a sous laptop that was incredibly thin. Of the edges, mean, when you got to the to the they would taper off, right, the edges tapered off until you got to the very end, like the base of where the keyboard is, and you

look like you could get a paper cut. That's how That's how thin it looked to the naked eye. But they also had some interesting prototype tablets out there, including four K resolution tablets. I remember there was one that my friend Nate said was five pounds and I said, that's a very reasonable price, and then he hit me. Actually was I Zactar? Who hit me? Is another name drop. I'm sorry, I'm just I can't hold onto them. They

just keep slipping out of my fingers. Well, you just you just have so many really important, popular friends that you can't really I don't know if they would call themselves friends. They're definitely popular and important though. Yeah, these are great people now. I met, I met and chatted with a lot of really great people while I was

out there. That was one of my favorite parts of CS was getting the the perspective of folks who also focus on very specific parts of technology because I look at everything, so to hear someone who really concentrates on one area, I hear perspectives that I never thought about. That's great. Absolutely beyond computers, let's see what else. Phones? Phones? They had some smart smartphones are there're a thing? Yeah? There were some some nice ones on the floor. The

Samsung Galaxy Note too was there. So if you like your phones the size of a small state, um. Now, actually, people give it all. Give the larger phones some attitude, they give them the business as I like to say, Uh, they are big, but I actually really like them too. I mean, the Galaxy Note was one of those devices that I debated on picking up. I ultimately did not, but I almost did. Um. It does bridge an interesting gap between smartphone and tablet, which is why we have

the horrible word of fablet. Oh no, no one say that. Don't know, dude, Let's strike that from the collective consciousness shell. I would much prefer tone yeah instead of a or a phone I like, I like, that's still better. Let's just well anyway, Sampson Galaxy Note two was there. That was nice. The Next is four they which has been available for a while. I should say, it's not like

the Nexus four is brand new. The Next is four from l G has been around for a while, but it was the first time I actually got to play with one, because those things go out of stock so

fast that they can never get hold of one. But that that's running the latest version of Android, and in fact, that's that's the big thing with the Nexus four is that it's you can actually buy it directly from Google, which makes it different from any other phone, and you can be fairly confident that as long as the hardware will support it, it will always run the latest version of Android. At least that's the assumption reality could play

out differently. Samsung also had a flexible phone that wasn't on display, but they showed it off of their keynote flexible phone. Huh I heard, I heard that Sony had a waterproof phone. The experience Z Yeah, very pretty phone. The experience phones were very very pretty to look at. And the experience Z was that they would Dunkleman too

aquariums and showed they were still working just fine. Um. Yeah, there were quite a few and and and tons and tons of phone accessories on the floor, so um, everything from special cases that have colorful designs on them. Two things like utter Box, which specializes in protective cases, including some that are you know, dustproof, shatterproof, waterproof, I mean

you're talking like mega protective cases. Uh. They had some other cases I saw on display where people were doing things like essentially dropping bowling balls onto devices and showing how the the cases were distributing the force in such a way to provide the maximum amount of coverage of protection with the minimum amount of damage. I say minimum because there still was some because it's still a bowling ball,

still a bowling ball and it's still a phone. And uh, the other big, big category that I wanted to say would be able though I don't know, smart appliance. This is smart I yeah, I keep I keep hearing about this Internet of things. Yeah, that's part of it, um, smart appliances. The definition is kind of tricky. Back in the day, we used to call it anything that connected

to the Internet was smart. Or if it ran widgets, it was smart, right, you know, if you can download applications and change the software, or if it connected to some other thing in your house, it was smart. And that's the thing is that there are a lot of different definitions for smart and no one has really become the the perfect example. So there are a lot of different implementations. At the end of the day's the marketing term, not not you know something FDA proof. There were some

interesting implementations. L g S approach was to include NFC technology that's near field communication technology, which is that same stuff that lets you use your smartphone to pay for stuff where you tap your smartphone against a little vendors receiver and then it transfers the payment. Sure, if you have a certain application, you can you can bump your phone against somebody else's and transformation. Yeah, like like like contact information or a message like stop hitting your phone

against my phone. Um, yeah, same sort of thing. NFC allows for this very near field communication. I mean, that's what it stands for. It It let's devices that are very close to one another exchange infote. It's usually very light as far as the data transfers considered. Well, in the case of LG, they had it where you could have a smartphone, you tap it against your various appliances, like say your washer and dryer, and you could even do things like update your washer and dryer with new

means of drying and washing your clothes. I didn't know that this was a thing. Yeah, I never I never thought about the firmware of your washer and dryer or updating it. Certainly, I'm still getting to the fact that I can update my Xbox. So yeah, you know, no, I'm right there with you, Lauren. I mean I sat there and I thought about, like, is this telling me that, hey, I know a better way to agitate your clothes. I mean, that's I'm sure there's a real use case for it.

It just seemed like it was a little bit of an interesting approach. Now, I should also say LG has built it in so that it makes registering your device is very easy, so that when when you tap your smartphone, it's registered because it's already got all the information. Yeah, so that's all you need to do. You don't You don't have to type in model numbers and all that

kind of stuff. And I'm kind of intrigued by by some of the They also have a touch screen fridge, I believe, and you can you can look up recipes and say your ingredient lists, and and send a shopping list to your cell phone, right, and you can do things like with some of these devices, you could do things like you have your let's say you have your list of ingredients in your refrigerator. You can say, all right, well, based upon what's in my refrigerator, what can I make

for dinner? And it will pull up recipe. Is that incorporate the stuff that it knows you have? Now, granted you have to you have to input what you have exactly. It doesn't automatically know when you put in a cart in the milk. That would be cool, that would Yeah. I want them to train the little elves whose job it is to turn off the light when you close the door to just write down what you've got in there. And those are my favorite elves. Yeah, they're great. They're

right there with the Keeblers. So who lived in a full house? As it turns out, the the the interesting thing is that you could also have an ecosystem where it sends that information, the recipe information to your stove. So you're stove like let's say that it involves that you're going to let's say you're gonna roast some vegetables because that's what you have in there, like, oh, you know,

roasted to rest in Vegas tonight. Fantastic, And you push that button and since the information to the stove, which immediately begins to preheat to the appropriate temperature. So this way you've got this kind of ecosystem. Now here's the problem. This is this is my problem with smart appliances. And I've said this before. Most of the require that you buy into one ecosystem. So you have to have all of your devices from the same manufacturer if you want

it to have this interconnectivity, uh to work. Otherwise they're just gonna be standalone devices. Now, most of these are fantastic standalone appliances anyway. Oh sure, well, I mean, you know they're putting their putting this kind of tech into the their highest end the highest ends. Yes, but if you want to have that connectivity, then you have to

end up investing in one ecosystem. My definition of smart is when we reach a level where you can buy your appliance from any of these vendors that are making these kind of devices and they all talk to each other. To me, that's what is smart, at least from a consumer standpoint. Also, I don't know that there are that many people who could buy into an ecosystem and change all of their appliances at the same time. That's expensive.

You know, you're talking about refrigerator, washer, dryer, stove, TV. I mean, TV is part of the too smartphone, but possibly, um, it's getting into that process. We're kind of like, that's expensive and and my worry is you would start to adopt something and then what happens if three years down the road, when you're about to upgrade the rest of your stuff, the company no longer exists. That's a problem. So there's some there's still some downsides to smart appliances. Um,

it will be interesting to see where this goes. I hope we get to a more open, uh standard for communication between devices, you know. I mean, I'm excited about the concept of being able to use your smartphone to to control anything in your house, from your television to your washer, dryer, to your light system to etcetera. Just just having a triquarter, you know, a glitch. For those of you who watched reboot, all ten of you out there, high, I love you, um and uh yeah, no I I

I'm looking forward to that too. And it's uh, I have some stuff that I can control with my smartphone actually with my tablet really, and that's most that's like the Xbox. I have smart glass on my tablet and and that's just a small of the type of stuff we can see in the future. And I agree, that's very exciting. So um yeah, it's that's the smart appliances.

But there's so much more to talk about, uh with c E. S. So, Lauren Jonathan, it turns out that there was a lot of stuff at the ES more than two things, more than two things, and uh and uh so doing a one episode about all the things I saw and experience to c S is a little much to ask our listeners to bear because it would be really long. I think an hour and seven minutes. Actually, do you think about that much? According to the estimate

that I kept going by asking Tyler. Yeah, So we decided we're going to split this episode up, as we sometimes do when they get so long that that's a thing, and um, we're going to conclude right here, but we'll be back in our next episode to conclude the stuff I saw at CES and some things that made the news while I was there, And so I highly recommend you guys tune in and hear how all this adventure concludes. Will there be a happy ending? Or did Jonathan get

left at Las Vegas? I think we know the answer. Yeah, that's not that's not a mystery. Okay, Well, anyway, if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, I highly recommend you let us know. Send us an email or I justus is tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, Drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled there is tech Stuff hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again about CS as it turns out really soon for more on this and thousands of

other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com