CES 2024: all the TVs, laptops, smart home gear, and more from the show floor – The Verge

How the smart home is finally getting out of your phone and into your home

2024-01-22T11:15:00-05:00

Controlling your smart home on your TV — something Samsung’s new SmartThing’s Map View lets you do more intuitively — could make it simpler for everyone in the home to use smart devices. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Smart connected devices like lights, locks, shades, thermostats, robot vacuums, and security cameras can make your home more convenient, safer, and sometimes kind of fun. But even if you're all in on connecting all the things in your home, there are two things that make the smart home a tough sell for a lot of households. You need your phone to control things 80 percent of the time, and getting all these devices to work together in smart home harmony through routines and automations is often confusing and complicated.

Thankfully, there's finally some real momentum toward fixing these two challenges through more and better interfaces for sma …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Leia is building a 3D empire on the back of the worst phone we’ve ever reviewed

2024-01-19T06:00:00-05:00

Leia co-founder and CEO David Fattal, with his Red Hydrogen smartphone.

A 200-person startup named after Star Wars' Princess Leia may have quietly cornered the market on glasses-free 2D to 3D screens - after clawing its way back from one of the biggest gadget flops of the past decade.

Remember the Red Hydrogen, the 3D phone that crashed and burned so hard its founder decided it was time to retire? Leia is the company that designed its "holographic" screen, and the company has been relatively quiet since that experience. Walking into its private hotel room suite at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, my expectations were not particularly high!

So you can imagine my surprise to find five tables full of Acer, Asus, Dell, Leno …

Read the full story at The Verge.

I literally spoke with Nvidia’s AI-powered video game NPCs

2024-01-18T15:31:38-05:00

Nvidia’s cyberpunk ramen shop is back. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

What if you could just… speak… to video game characters? Ask your own questions, with your own voice, instead of picking from preset phrases?

Last May, Nvidia and its partner Convai showed off a fairly unconvincing canned demo of such a system - but this January, I got to try a fully interactive version for myself at CES 2024. I walked away convinced we'll inevitably see something like this in future games.

Let me be clear: the characters I spoke to were effectively generative AI chatbots. They didn't feel like real people - we've got a ways to go before voices, facial expressions, and body language catch up to what's expected of a real-li …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This smartwatch has the tech that sparked the Apple Watch ban

2024-01-18T13:33:17-05:00

Masimo showed up with the Freedom (right), a prototype for a smarter watch featuring its blood oxygen tech. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

In the past few weeks, you've probably heard something about the Apple Watch getting banned. Something to do with a sensor, with some medical tech company accusing Apple of infringing on its patents. That medical tech company is Masimo, and it's known within the medical community for its pulse oximetry technology, used for measuring blood oxygen levels.

The company would also like to be known for something else: its brand-new smartwatch, which features the tech that got the Apple Watch in trouble.

Masimo isn't traditionally a gadget maker, but its new watch - the Freedom - is meant to be a true consumer device: something that looks stylish …

Read the full story at The Verge.

At CES, everything was AI, even when it wasn’t

2024-01-13T09:00:00-05:00

This year at CES was the year AI took over. From large language model-powered voice assistants in cars to the Rabbit R1, the technology you heard about everywhere was AI. It was a little too much.

It may be the year of AI at CES, but many of these "AI" features have been around for a while - it's just that companies are only now embracing the branding of artificial intelligence. AI has entered the public consciousness: it's cool and hip to place it front and center in a product, a sign that companies are ambitious and forward thinking. That's led the term to be adopted wherever possible, even when it's not strictly the AI most people know.

…

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Verge Awards at CES 2024

2024-01-12T15:00:00-05:00

We always look forward to CES. Not just because it kicks off the year, or because it brings nearly every major tech company under one roof, or because it means a flood of new products. We love it because of the surprises: every year, without fail, there is some strange and surprising new tech that captures our attention and makes us want to tell everyone, "come look at this."

This year was no exception. AI took physical form, screens bent and disappeared, car platforms morphed. Even some of the more practical stuff - common standards and simple spec bumps - made a difference.

But there were also a bunch of products that we simply couldn't …

Read the full story at The Verge.

CES 2024 was all about interoperability beyond the smart home

2024-01-12T14:00:00-05:00

The 8-1 Qi2 charger announced by Anker during CES 2024. | Image: Nathan Edwards / The Verge

Last year, you couldn't mention CES without bringing up Matter. It was a pivotal year for the smart home standard, as big names like Samsung, GE, and Amazon promised better interoperability between their devices and a world of sensors, appliances, and accessories. But that promise largely started and ended with smart home tech.

This year, things were a little different at CES: the idea of making products work nicely across ecosystems bled into other areas of the showcase and rippled across a range of different devices - even putting rivals on the same page to better serve users.

Google, for instance, revealed several updates to Android tha …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Screens keep getting faster. Can you even tell?

2024-01-12T12:30:00-05:00

Dell’s Alienware 27 QD-OLED gaming monitor (AW2725DF) has an outrageous 360Hz refresh rate. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

OLED monitors have gotten faster than ever. While LCD monitors have been pushing 500Hz for around a year now, CES 2024 saw similarly excessive refresh rates arrive on their OLED siblings, with multiple monitors hitting speeds of 360 and 480Hz.

Whenever we've written about these monitors, commenters have quite fairly asked what the point of this all is. After all, it wouldn't be the first time manufacturers have battled over specs with debatable benefit to customers, whether that's the "megahertz myth" or megapixel wars of the '00s or, more recently, smartphone display resolution.

Asus' CES 2024 monitor lineup. | Image: Asus" data-portal-copyright="Image: Asus">

It wasn't just one or two manufacturers that had such high …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Rabbit, Ballie, and the other gadgets of CES 2024

2024-01-12T12:03:38-05:00

The best gadgets at CES are the ones you'd never see coming. Not the iterative updates, where everything gets a little brighter and a little faster but nothing fundamentally changes. No, we like the E Ink toilets and the crab-walking cars and the rolling projectors that show you what's inside your fridge. Do you need all these things? Does anyone? Will they ever go on sale? Who knows?! That's the fun of CES.

On this episode of The Vergecast, recorded from the Kia Connected Home right in the middle of the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot, we discuss all the most important gadget stories from this year's show. We talk about the Rabbit …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This high-tech sex toy syncs its vibes with music

2024-01-12T11:02:02-05:00

The Oh! by OhDoki is the company’s second interactive sex toy. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

Every once in a while, you'll turn a corner on the CES show floor and see crowds flocking around a high-tech sex toy. This year, the one that caught my eye was The Handy, an automated masturbator - mainly because it was moving in a way I don't expect to see in polite company, let alone a public show floor. But right next to it was the Oh!, a $149.95 toy coming later this spring that had me also saying "Oh?"

Both sex toys are made by Norwegian sex tech company Ohdoki. The Handy, a motorized device that moves up and down to mimic masturbation for people with penises, is certainly the flashier of the two. At a glance, the Oh! is unassuming as …

Read the full story at The Verge.