The best of CES 2013 – The Verge

The Verge Awards: the best of CES 2013

2013-01-11T14:44:55-05:00

best of ces 2013 lead

We came, we saw, we got lost in a virtual world. And now we're back. The show that was supposed to be the last of the biggest - the end of the best - actually turned out a little differently than the critics predicted. A show that could have limped instead leapt in places. A show that could have declined seemed to rise instead. But it rose in all kinds of interesting directions. Towards hardware startups funded by the crowd, towards connected devices that actually seem to make sense, to televisions that offered a logical next step instead of a gimmick. This year's show offered a glimpse of what may not just be the New Thing at this CES, but …

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Westinghouse’s $300,000, custom-made 110-inch 4K TV isn’t for everyone

2013-01-10T18:35:47-05:00

Westinghouse QX110

Westinghouse showed up at CES this year with a bit of a surprise: a 110-inch Ultra High-Definition television. We met up with the company here at the Las Vegas Hotel (don't ask us how they managed to roll the set into a suite) to get a look at this monster of a television for ourselves. After stepping into the room, the TV completely overwhelmed us. However, unlike nearly every other massive TV we've seen out there, the QX110 was not disappointing to look at. While 1080p doesn't suit a gigantic TV very well, 4K does fill out the display with enough pixels to make a pleasurable viewing experience. However, the model we saw had some other issu …

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Ke$ha and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad CES corporate afterparty

2013-01-10T17:47:51-05:00

ces kesha trent

Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the latest in the series.

For two years in high school I was a cashier at Whole Foods. We were at a busy intersection right in the middle of three fancy prep schools, so we maintained a pretty steady flow of soccer moms doing wheatgrass shots or going really hard at the salad bar with each other all day long. My supervisor, the Front End Team Leader Eric, was one of those smart middle-aged Whole Foods dudes who seemed like he could be doing much more but had gotten fucked over in life somehow and was now a powerful combination of grateful that he had any job at all and murd …

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How Kickstarter stole CES: the rise of the indie hardware developer

2013-01-10T15:12:03-05:00

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They said the wristwatch was dead, but they were wrong. Forward-thinking watches are making a big splash at this year's CES, the largest technology trade show in the country, and two watches stand out: the ultrathin, ultrasimple CST-1, which looks like a metal slap bracelet with giant numbers, and the Pebble smartwatch, which interfaces with the owner's smartphone and can also run apps of its own.

Those two watches have something else in common: the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Pebble raised $10.2 million from 68,929 people, making it by far the largest Kickstarter campaign to date. Pebble held a press conference at CES this week to a …

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First! Episode 04 with Frog Design’s Paul Pugh

2013-01-10T10:16:06-05:00

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Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Snooze.

The week is almsot over, and CES is on the v-… erm, on the cusp of dying down. It's about time to look to the future - not just of CES 2013 but of the industry as a whole. Months, years, decades, centuries into the future. We'll get to that eventually. Join hosts Joshua Topolsky and Ross Miller as they break down the top stories of the day in the most relevant and irreverent way possible - and set the tone for the day(s) to come. Wake up, tune in, and hav …

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We Found Fur In an iPhone Case: How a little bunny brightened a dark day at CES

2013-01-09T18:38:06-05:00

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Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the next in the series.

As LL Cool J took the stage at Sony's massive exhibition space I was ready to pronounce this year's CES dead on arrival. He was there to hype his regrettably-named music collaboration software Boomdizzle, throwing around generic technology terms with all the panache of a door-to-door vacuum salesman, the performance nowhere near as nuanced as his Special Agent Hanna in NCIS:LA's. There was precious little actual information about how his international jam sesh enabler would perform differently from the myriad of programs already available that do the …

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4K at CES 2013: the dream gets real

2013-01-09T17:59:58-05:00

4K TV report

Almost exactly a year ago, upon these parched steppes of Nevada we know as Las Vegas, Vizio told us it was keen to get into the 4K TV market, but the timing wasn't quite right yet. Vizio asked for a year's worth of patience and, atypically for an electronics company, it's back at CES with the delivery of its 4K promise.

Even Hisense is getting in on the Ultra HD action

The US TV maker isn't alone in stepping up to the higher resolution in its new flagship models. Sony, Panasonic and Sharp, Japan's traditional big-screen TV leaders, are all attending this year's CES with proper retail products - replete with long alphanumeric model names and …

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Top Shelf CES, Day 03: Surface Pro, Pebble, and more!

2013-01-09T17:44:19-05:00

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The show floor has now been open for a day and a half, and mercifully no one on The Verge's staff has caught the dreaded CES Plague yet. But we have seen gadgets, gizmos, whozits, whatsits, and everything in between. On today's show, David and Dieter Bohn break down everything we've seen from Microsoft, Pebble, watches, other watches, and everything else cool going on at CES. We'll be live at 3PM PT / 6PM PT, so tune in!

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Samsung shows off flexible OLED phone prototype (hands-on)

2013-01-09T14:09:37-05:00

via cdn0.sbnation.com

Samsung gave us a brief glimpse during its keynote today of its first phone using a flexible display, and now we've just had the opportunity to handle the device for ourselves. The phone, which is a nameless prototype, has a screen that falls off towards the rear edge of the device on the right side. Samsung hasn't quite figured out yet what to do with this extra screen real estate, but for now the phone displays landscape-oriented notifications along the edge. The idea is that you'll be able to read text messages, stock tickers, and other notifications from the side of the device even if you have a case covering the screen.

As you would ex …

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The Pebble smartwatch keeps it simple (hands-on)

2013-01-09T12:15:06-05:00

via cdn2.sbnation.com

Now that Pebble has announced it's shipping to Kickstarter backers on January 23rd, the company is finally ready to show off the final hardware and software on its smartwatch. We spent some time putting the watch through its paces and talking with CEO Eric Migicovsky, and we've come away more impressed than we expected with the Kickstarter phenomenon.

Smartwatches are a big theme theme here at CES, but few have garnered the kind of interest that the Pebble has. One reason is that it is simple and straightforward: watchfaces, notifications, and music control are the headline features with only a few other odds and ends thrown in on the side. …

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