This year’s CES unveiled a ton of new gadgets, but most of them
aren’t that interesting. Here are the ones that we liked the best — just
the most interesting gadgets and gear that we looked at.
The thing about conferences like CES is that there is a ton
of stuff to wade through — mountains of bluetooth speakers, phone cases,
and all sorts of random things that nobody would ever want. There are
also a lot of great products, but we’ve managed to narrow down the list
to just ten of the most interesting things that we saw this time.
Steam Boxes and the Steam Controller
The biggest news at CES this year was the introduction of the Steam Box,
a gaming console designed to fit in your entertainment center and bring
PC games to the TV in your living room. Sure, you could always connect a
PC directly to your TV and play video games, but this isn’t quite the
same thing. To confuse things a little further, there are at least 13
different Steam Boxes of all shapes and sizes. Confused? Keep reading.
Valve, the company behind Steam, the game distribution platform on
Windows, Mac, and Linux, decided a few years ago that they weren’t happy
with Windows 8, so they created SteamOS, a version of Linux that
basically boots directly into the Steam client, so you can play your PC
games easily. A Steam Box is just a PC that runs SteamOS and is designed
to look good in your living room, and there are at least 13 different
manufacturers that have already signed up to make their own Steam box in
all sorts of different designs and specs.
What makes all this work is the Steam Controller, which uses touch
pads instead of analog sticks for movement and looking around in the
game. The left pad is used for moving around in a game, while the right
pad is used to mimic using a mouse in a PC game, and it works
surprisingly well. It’s the first time that somebody has figured out how
to bring the PC gaming experience to the living room with the accuracy
of a mouse, but in a console-style controller more friendly for the
living room.
We’ll be writing a lot more about SteamOS and Steam Boxes in the near future once our review units get to HTG HQ.
Playstation Now Puts Gaming into the Cloud
PlayStation Now is
a cloud-based streaming game service that brings you PS3 games on a
variety of devices like the PS4, PS Vita, PS3, new Sony TVs, and in the
future, on a lot more devices. The only thing you need to bring to the
party is a DualShock controller.
How does this work? It’s simple: Your TV or PS4 or PS Vita will need
to have the PlayStation Now app installed, just like having the Netflix
app today. That will connect to the internet and the games will actually
be played in the cloud and streamed to your TV — obviously this requires a pretty decent internet connection, but for those that have one, it works well.
In our testing, the games work almost like you were playing them
locally, with no lag between pressing the controls and seeing the action
on the screen. One would imagine they will continue to refine it, and
over time the internet will grow to handle that type of thing, but it
was so fast that using it in person we didn’t know that the actual game
was being played on a cloud server somewhere.
What makes this such an impressive feat, beside the obvious fact of
PS3 games being played off a cloud server with nothing but a controller
in your house, is that it brings backwards compatibility to the PS4, in a
way. The games will be subscription-based, and you can login anywhere
to play your games, assuming you have a controller.
The Pebble Steel is a Really Stylish Smartwatch
We’ve already talked about the Pebble, the smartwatch that just works,
and now they’ve decided to launch a new version that does all the same
amazing things, but looks great at the same time. You can still get your
notifications from either iPhone or Android, you can customize the
watch face to look like anything you want, and you can look good doing
it.
The new Pebble Steel is
made of either black matte or stainless steel, comes with leather or
metal bands, and costs $249, a full hundred bucks more than the regular
Pebble watch, which you can get on Amazon for $149, but it often goes on sale for even cheaper. And no, the original model isn’t going away.
Curved and Bendable 4K TVs Everywhere
Everybody’s got a super high resolution 4K TV these days, and
everywhere we went they were on display in all their glory. It doesn’t
matter how close you get to the TV, you aren’t going to see any pixels,
though you will get a weird look from the rep when you’ve got your face
planted half an inch from the screen. How else are we supposed to see if
there are pixels?
There’s nothing really new with 4K TVs this time around, other than
everybody having one. What is new, though, is the plethora of curved TV
models, some of which bend on command. You can literally press a button
and the TV curves towards you to give you more of a feel of being
immersed in the content, almost like 3D without glasses. As if we
needed to inject Geico ads into our brains more easily.
The one thing that you really are going to need to watch out for is
the refresh rate on monitors and TVs — some of the vendors are pushing
models that drop down to a 30Hz refresh rate when using the 4K
resolution, which is different than the usual 60 or even 120Hz. You
don’t want to go cheap on the refresh rate.
While the 4K TVs are amazing and beautiful in person, when viewing 4K
content, it’s probably not worth even thinking about upgrading to one
at this point since there isn’t much, if any, content for them, and they
are going to be really pricey.
The Crazy AORUS X7 Dual-GPU Gaming Laptop
Just like the previous item in the list, we covered this announcement the other day,
but any time you put two NVIDIA graphics cards running in SLI into a
single laptop that measures less than an inch thick, you deserve to get a
second mention. This thing is a beast of a laptop, with a blazing fast
i7 processor, up to 32 GB of RAM, dual SSDs, and support for 3 external
monitors. The AORUS X7 is a crazy laptop
that is much more than most people would ever need to use, and with
pricing at well over $2k, is more than most people can afford.
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