The Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest consumer electronics shows in the world, has come to an end in Las Vegas. As always, she shocked with her ambiguity: despite the fact that CES is primarily addressed to consumers, it is difficult to imagine someone in of sound mind who will buy something from what was announced at the exhibition. On the other hand, CES traditionally features a lot of startups that show absolutely crazy things and technologies. prepared own list strangest products since the first major event of 2017.
Wild, wild CES
In Las Vegas, the minds of CES visitors tried to stir up the creators of completely unexpected gadgets with support for the designated functions. For example, the Simplehuman company did not reinvent the wheel and boasted of a wastebasket, which differs from its counterparts in the support of voice commands. Simply called Sensor Can with Voice Control, the basket responds to both voice control and user movements. You can buy it already in March 2017 at an undemocratic price for a trash can of $180.
Representatives of the Withings company, which is part of the large Nokia and specializes in wearable electronics, have not lagged behind in creativity from their colleagues. This time, French pros from the Finnish holding delighted the guests of the exhibition with a smart comb made in collaboration with L "Oreal.
It differs from a regular comb by the presence of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules, a gyroscope, a microphone, an accelerometer, a pressure sensor and other services. At retail, smart Hair Coach combs for $ 200 apiece are promised to be shipped as early as mid-2017.
Last but not least, the Willow Smart Breast Pump, which syncs with a smartphone app, lets you pump (and track) milk in real time. The innovative breast pump fits right into your bra and works wirelessly. By the way, the container into which milk is filtered is attached to it, and Willow can work without recharging for up to two days.
The developers assure that analogues to many of the developments presented at the exhibition do not yet exist in nature. But it is worth considering: are the originals needed?
Go yourself
The Consumer Electronics Show 2017 gave a whole galaxy of interesting newsbreaks to lovers of unmanned vehicles. NVIDIA introduced the Xavier supercomputer, which can be equipped with almost any car.
The system is based on the 512-core Volta GPU, and its action showed on the example of an unmanned vehicle Lincoln. The developers called the main advantage of Xavier artificial intelligence capable of learning and subsequent autonomous decision making.
NVIDIA will create its own drone in collaboration with Audi. Already in 2017, the Audi A8 equipped with Traffic Jam Pilot will appear on the market, and by 2020 it will be launched in mass production a full-fledged drone: it will look like submitted at CES concept car Q7.
Not all presentations of unmanned vehicles went like clockwork: Faraday Future, which positions itself as Tesla's main competitor, excelled. They plan to put their unmanned vehicle FF 91 into mass production as early as 2018, and a presentation of some of its functions was to take place at CES.
Everything went wrong almost immediately: after pressing the button, the FF 91 should have automatically parked, but this did not happen. After some time, the car nevertheless performed the long-awaited maneuver, and the hitch was explained by poor signal transmission.
The exhibition showed a lot of concept cars of the future: Toyota, Nissan and Chrysler were especially powerful. The concepts presented by them are distinguished not only by artificial intelligence, but also by futuristic design. Before serial production all these concepts are still far away, which does not prevent them from looking beautiful in the pictures.
The most realistic and interesting innovation in the world of cars was the head-up display from Navdy. The device is mounted on a torpedo behind the steering wheel and displays a holographic projection of various indicators and can act as a navigator. By the way, this is not a novelty: it has been sold in the USA since the end of 2016.
After the end of CES, he spoke in his usual manner on Twitter: he promised install new version autopilot on Tesla today. And you don't have to wait for this autopilot - just buy a Tesla.
Gaming laptop frenzy
Acer opened the parade of wild laptops with its Predator 21 X, which was presented at IFA 2016 in Berlin. It is worth recalling here that we are talking about a 21-inch curved laptop. Apparently, the company sensibly assesses the potential of this machine and does not refuse to release it, so at CES they announced the price of the Predator 21 X and the release date: in February it can be bought for nine thousand dollars.
The laptop has a resolution of 2560 x 1080 pixels, seventh generation Intel Core i7 processors and two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 in SLI mode. In the top configuration, it will receive up to 64 gigabytes of RAM, up to four 512 gigabyte SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration, and a 1 terabyte hard drive. Do not forget about the full-size mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX switches and the ability to replace the number pad with gaming keys.
All this has gigantic dimensions (568x314.5x83.25 millimeters) and a weight of eight kilograms.
Following Acer, Razer introduced its new product. Concept laptop Project Valerie received as many as three displays with a diagonal of 17.3 inches and a total resolution of 12K (11520 x 2160 pixels). The manufacturer did not disclose detailed characteristics, we only know that Project Valerie has one NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 installed. The release date of the device and its price are also still unknown.
Samsung also jumped on the gaming laptop train in 2017 with its first gaming laptop, the Samsung Notebook Odyssey. In general, it is no different from any other representative of this segment, only the very fact of the announcement is interesting. The Notebook Odyssey will be available in 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch versions with the same specs as every other 2017 gaming laptop (and exactly the same appearance). Price and release dates are still unknown.
Surface and iMac clones
Quite a lot of strange and unusual devices were presented in the monoblock segment. For example, HP announced the Envy Curved AIO 34, which has a stand that hides a Bang & Olufsen soundbar. It has a 34-inch curved display, an i7-7700T quad-core processor, an AMD Radeon RX 460 graphics card, and 16GB of RAM. The computer will go on sale at the end of February for $1,730.
In addition, HP has released the second generation of the Sprout Pro G2 monoblock with a 3D scanner. It has its own projector, touch area and Intel RealSense cameras, which, in fact, scan objects. Compared to the Envy Curved AIO 34, it has a worse 23.8-inch Full HD display and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M graphics. Its sales will begin in March 2017, the price is still unknown.
Distinguished at CES 2017 and Dell, which released its own clone of Surface Studio - however, in the form of a graphics tablet, not a monoblock. The manufacturer calls Canvas the world's first horizontal smart work surface, but in fact it is a large touchscreen IPS display with a diagonal of 27 inches and a resolution of 2560x1440 pixels.
In addition, Dell has equipped Canvas with a Surface Dial analog called Totem, which allows you to change the size and color of brushes while drawing, flip through pages of documents, and perform other actions. Canvas has a starting price of $1,800 and will go on sale in March.
According to the classics
It was not at all interesting to watch the announcements in the field of ultrabooks. Each manufacturer considered it his duty to make a transformer a la Surface or a “shifter” in the spirit of Lenovo Yoga. This is how the HP Specter x360, the Dell Latitude 5285, the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, and many other faceless devices with terrible naming were born.
Smartphone manufacturers did not bypass the exhibition either. But since all the big names are getting ready for MWC, Asus, ZTE and other companies have performed at CES. For this reason, budget and simple phones were announced. The "sticky" ZTE Hawkeye, created in collaboration with members of the Z-community, stands out among them. It has an eye tracker that allows you to control your smartphone by moving pupils and can stick to surfaces. As a bonus, you can add Xiaomi Mi Mix in a white case, but nothing else has changed in it.
TVs at CES are another story altogether. Since they are very popular in the West, companies are constantly showing something new. So, LG announced the flagship OLED TVs Signature W7 with a thickness of 2.57 millimeters. The price and start date of sales is unknown, but there is a feeling that they will be very expensive.
Samsung continues to develop the technology of metal quantum dots (Metal Quantum Dots) and released a new generation of QLED TVs. They show brightness in the range of 1.5-2 thousand nits, while last year's models this figure was only 1000 nits. Sony's A1E series TVs are the company's first models to use an OLED matrix. In general, the big players have been less focused on curved screens and technologies like HDR and are making just good 4K OLED TVs.
We always wanted to go to Las Vegas one day for the CES consumer electronics show, which is a cult show that was first held in 1970. It was here that a CD-ROM, a sound card, a tablet, a netbook and other devices familiar today were presented. This year, 50,000 people came to CES, 3,500 companies participated in the exhibition, and 3,200 journalists covered it.
Our company is the largest manufacturer of autonomous service robots in Russia, Northern and Eastern Europe. Our robots work as administrators, promoters, hostesses in Europe, the USA and China. At CES, we wanted to find new customers.
Stand
First of all, to become a member of CES, you need to apply on the official website. Everything is standard: you specify the details of the contact person, the name of the company and its specialization, product description and indicate the section in which you want to exhibit.
Furniture rental is the biggest expense item. A cabinet costs $600 a day, a plastic chair costs $50 a day.
When registering, we indicated the Robotics Pavilion. All the robots that were taken to CES gathered there, but by the time we applied, there were no more places in it. The organizers promised to contact us if anyone's booking was canceled, they were very friendly, but they were in no hurry to help. Several times we asked to offer us alternatives, but received polite replies. Then we started calling other numbers listed on the CES website. We called the managers to work with participating companies, but they did not answer us. Then they began to call on general phones and ask what sections there are in general, where there were places left. So we found out that free space remained in the section of audio systems for cars and the SmartCity pavilion - technical solutions for the urban landscape, smart home systems, electric transport, security systems and video surveillance systems were supposed to be presented there.
We asked to book a place in SmartCity and provide us with an invoice. Our robots work as promoters, hostesses, museum guides in various crowded places such as cinemas, museums, shopping centers, business centers, so that they are part of the infrastructure of smart cities. So we received an official invitation to CES.
In the section, we were offered to book 10 square meters for $4400 or 60 square meters. for $44,000. We chose a smaller area, but if the delegation is large, it is more profitable, of course, to take up a lot of space.
Infrastructure
After paying for the booth, we had to negotiate with all the suppliers. At CES, there are no show managers or an interface for booking all the necessary services. You need to equip the stand yourself. We received a list of links to equipment suppliers, their contacts and a price list from the organizers. I'll warn you right now: the prices are high. Internet access for three days costs $550, and that's just the cost of the cable. If you need a router, that's $4,000 plus. Electricity during the show is $300, each additional outlet is another $100.
Furniture rental is the biggest expense item. A cabinet costs $600 a day, a plastic chair $50 a day. Again, rent. In a day. The furniture was cheaper to buy, but we were afraid of losing time and therefore paid $735 to rent a cabinet and three chairs for three days of the exhibition. Although we still bought a TV for broadcasting promotional materials at a nearby Walmart for $150. Renting the same TV would have cost us $550.
After counting the number of applications for robots, we realized that the amount of potential contracts is about $10 million
When our data appeared on the site in the participants section, we began to receive letters with offers of promotion services several times a day. American marketing agencies wrote, which promised media coverage and a lot of TV cameras. The CES administration offered partner packages that provided coverage and traffic.
The price of such services starts from $ 10,000. We could not check the quality and results in any way, so we decided to do it on our own.
IN personal account exhibitor has a Medialist section. It is a database of all accredited media and journalists, more than 3,200 correspondents from all over the world, including contacts from FoxNews, TechCrunch, The Guardian and many others. Each had a name, e-mail, links in in social networks and even mobile phone. Using this database, we sent out invitations to our booth with a description of the product and the company. When we saw a person with a “Press” badge or operators with cameras, we simply called them to the booth and showed the robot. Promobot was discussed in the WSJ and in a number of other media.
It is worth noting that we were lucky with the location. At CES, there were only three places where participants were registered. One of them is in our SmartCity pavilion, the other is next to our pavilion, near the stands of Google, Hyperloop and other big companies. A gigantic flow of visitors constantly passed through our pavilion. This also played into our hands.
Polygraphy
We prepared all promotional materials in Russia and carried them in our luggage. The luggage is lost. We were left without everything, and we had to re-order booklets, but this time in the USA. In one of the million letters with offers from partners, we found the contacts of the printing house. We are very lucky that its founders were emigrants from Russia. They got into position and already in the evening of the same day we had all the materials. It turned out to be more expensive than printing in Russia, but cheaper than other printing houses in Las Vegas.
CES is held at the beginning of the year in the US, and it is for it that companies usually prepare announcements of those goods and services that they will promote in the US market.
The exhibition is very large-scale - this year more than 170 thousand people from 150 countries of the world and over 3.9 thousand companies took part in it.
Despite a certain American priority, CES is an important event for the entire industry high technology.
Focus on technology
This year CES was a lot of fun - in addition to new interesting devices, the exhibition met the guests with abnormally heavy rains in the desert, due to which the electrical substation of the LVCC exhibition center was temporarily out of order, depriving the event of light.
Separately, I would like to note that the focus of CES in recent years has shifted from purely consumer electronics towards the IT and telecom industry.
Very typical for understanding what happened at CES 2018 was the presentation of Samsung, one of the main headliners of all technology exhibitions in recent years. Usually Koreans just show off their new devices, but this time it was different.
Most of the presentations by Samsung speakers were devoted to the Internet of things, 5G networks, artificial intelligence, Bixby smart voice assistant and the ecosystem of smart devices that the company plans to create. By 2018, Samsung wants to consolidate all its IoT solutions on the basis of a single SmartThings cloud platform, and by 2020 connect all of its new devices to SmartThing.
But do not think that only Samsung is moving in this direction. At other events held as part of CES, this was also clearly visible - at presentations, NVIDIA, and other presentations, the focus of speeches was also directed not to specific products, but to technological solutions. For the same IoT, robotic cars, voice assistants, computer vision, artificial intelligence.
8K: there is something to see
Of course, there were just interesting devices at CES. For example, LG showed a flexible OLED TV that slides out of a small stand, which is mesmerizing in itself. This solution is very convenient for viewing different formats. We watch TV broadcasting 16:9 - we put forward the screen completely. We watch a movie with an aspect ratio of 2.39: 1 - we do not extend the screen to the end.
LG Display / @mspoonauer
Samsung introduced the modular TV The Wall based on new technology microLED. Its main feature, in addition to 4K resolution and MicroLED matrix, is that the user can order a TV in any proportion and size. The screen is assembled as a constructor from small blocks. It is theoretically possible to upgrade the screen to a size of 146 inches.
The Wall / Dmitry Bevza
All three major TV vendors - LG, Samsung and Sony - have shown new 8K TVs. There is no content with such a resolution in nature yet, but this advance is normal, otherwise the studios simply will not have incentives to make films, series and make games in this format.
Of the other CES 2018 exhibits, the Yamaha smart electric motorcycle equipped with a gyroscope was also memorable. Not only can he not fall - he can park himself or drive up to the owner.
Yamaha / Dmitry Bevza
A universal unmanned aerial vehicle was also presented vehicle Toyota e-Pallet. It does not look like a car at all - it looks like a container on wheels - and is intended for independent movement on roads and delivery of goods and passengers. Also, e-Pallet can be converted into a mobile office, outlet and other objects.
Segway showed its "smart" suitcase on two large wheels, equipped with a gyroscope and capable of moving independently after the owner, which can be useful for those who spend half their lives traveling or business trips.
It should also be noted great amount external batteries for smartphones shown at CES by Chinese companies, including in the form of such exotic formats as belts for trousers, bags and backpacks.
Here one can only sarcastically recall that both users and IT journalists wrote a lot about the fact that saving on smartphone battery capacity in favor of “thin design” is a bad idea. But demand creates supply. This state of affairs has created an entire industry of manufacturers of external chargers.
Belt-batteries / Dmitry Bevza
Looks great, but not sure why
It is possible to discuss various technical innovations shown at CES for a long time, but it should be noted that a significant part of the solutions, and how large companies, and small startups, was connected with the Internet of things - voice assistants, "smart" household appliances and home electronics, "smart" transport, "smart" homes, "smart" cities, as well as 5G networks for connecting billions of devices with each other and artificial intelligence to manage all this splendor.
Listening to presentations, visiting keynotes and company stands, you get the feeling that you have already entered a bright future, but, alas, this is a very misleading impression.
Despite the optimism of the speakers, it seems that IoT and the 5G networks that come with it and artificial intelligence are just a tool to increase sales and increase the margins of classic product categories (TVs, refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers, air conditioners) or a way to get new contracts to upgrade the infrastructure of enterprises and cities.
If we talk about the consumer market, then the scenarios that manufacturers offer household appliances look flimsy to say the least. “Hi, I have ham, three eggs and tomatoes, they can show you recipes for them and turn on the stove,” the refrigerator tells me, although most of us already know how to cook scrambled eggs on the stove.
And so in everything. It seems that engineers think faster than marketers, and they simply do not have time to understand the new possibilities of technology and come up with really useful user cases. There are almost no scenarios when IoT devices cover really important needs.
Too far future
With the introduction of industrial IoT, problems of a different kind arise. On the client’s side, there are professionals who understand very well where and how IoT solutions will increase productivity, create additional profit and help save money.
In the meantime, the implementation of integrated solutions based on the Internet of things on the scale of an enterprise or city is quite expensive. This also applies to the cost of equipment, and the cost of highly qualified specialists in the installation, commissioning and maintenance of such systems.
As a representative of the municipality of a small American city told a Gazeta.Ru correspondent: “It's all great, but we simply don't have the money to implement the smart city lighting management solutions presented here.
And given that electricity in the United States is not very expensive, I think we will not even look in this direction for another five years.”
Another thing that really annoyed the journalists at CES is that the developers presented their technologies as almost ready for implementation, which is obviously not true. Most of the most exciting solutions, whether smart cars or smart homes, will be ready for deployment in five or seven years. It is clear that long-term projects need to maintain interest, including investors and management, but an element of speculation on the topic of a “beautiful future” at CES 2018 was clearly visible.
The Consumer Electronics Show is an annual trade show that has traditionally been held in Las Vegas since 1967. Manufacturers of consumer electronics come to this exhibition from all over the world to “show themselves” and “see others”. Initially, CES until 1990 showed mainly VCRs, optical discs, video cameras and sound cards, but over time, the arsenal of technical innovations has grown significantly. Now at the most advanced exhibition for lovers of technical devices, everything from smartphones to televisions is shown.
The beginning of each year for many connoisseurs of high technology is, first of all, those novelties that are shown to the public during this largest technology show. LG has once again managed to show something unusual - a huge high-definition TV that rolls up. Almost simultaneously with this, a message was received about another new product from the company, showing the level of a budget smartphone in 2018.
Every year, the number of orders for a variety of goods through online stores is increasing significantly. At some point, we will come to a situation where the current infrastructure and people will be unable to cope with this task. Already, many technology companies, including large online retailers (for example, the same
