WD Black PCIe SSD Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The WD Black PCIe solid-state drive.

WD

WD announced today at CES 2017 the availability of its new WD Black PCIe solid-state drive, which is the first WD-branded PCIe SSD since the company bought SanDisk in 2016.

More from CES 2017

• LG’s amazing ultrathin OLED is wall art that happens to be a TV
• All the smart home products at CES 2017 (so far)

WD says the new drive supports the PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe standard and has a top sequential read speed of up to 2,050MBps and a write speed of up to 800MBps, many times faster than any SATA SSD, such as the WD Blue it announced late last year.

Keep in mind that this drive requires an M.2 slot, which is a new upcoming interface standard that’s expected to replace SATA completely in the future. Many laptops and new desktop motherboards now have an M.2 slot built in. Some existing desktops can be upgraded to it via a PCIe add-on card.

WD says the WD Black PCIe SSDs will be available in 256GB and 512GB capacities in the first half of 2017 at a suggested price of $109 and $200, respectively. That converts to about £90 and £160 or AU$150 and AU$275. The drive will carry a five-year warranty.

See all CNET’s CES 2017 coverage here.

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Sony MDR-XB950N1 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The MDR-XB950N1 comes in multiple color options and is due this spring.

Sony

Sony’s Extra Bass line of headphones may not appeal to audio purists, but it’s popular with mainstream consumers who enjoy their music with an extra helping of bass.

At CES 2017, Sony announced four new Extra Bass headphones, including the new flagship MDR-XB950N1, a Bluetooth model that features active noise-cancellation, and its step-down sibling, the MDR-XB950B1 that’s wireless but leaves off the noise cancellation.

There’s a wired on-ear model, too — the MDR-XB550AP — and a wired in-ear sports earphone, the MDR-XB510AS, that has a water-resistant design.

The headphones fold up and come with a carrying pouch.

Sony

With the wireless models, you can tweak the sound (adjust bass levels) with Sony’s Connect app for iOS and Android, as well as turn the noise cancelling on and off in the MDR-XB950N1 (it has 22 hours of battery life).

All the new Extra Bass headphones are due out this spring, but sadly Sony hasn’t provided any pricing yet. I suspect the MDR-XB950N1 will cost around $250 (which roughly converts to £202 or AU$434) because the current Sony MDRXB950BT costs $200 and doesn’t feature active noise cancelling. The MDR-XB950B1 (18 hours of battery life) should list for around $200 (the rough conversion is £162 or AU$274).

As soon as I get more info and some hands-on time with the products I’ll update this preview.

The new MDR-XB510AS wired sports headphone is also due out this spring.

Sony

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Sony UBP-X800 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Sony

4K Blu-ray was a long time coming but when it finally arrived it came with a murmur not a shout. Companies such as Sony and LG decided to hold off on the first wave of players until the format matured.

Sony’s UBP-X800 will be the company’s go-to player when it’s released in Spring 2017 and includes a host of features including a Sony developed Precision HD drive for what the company claims is enhanced playback of most disc types as well as support for 4K streaming services.

The three high-end players from Sony announced recently share the same design forged by the “premium” 1080p UHP-H1 player, with a squat, blocky and yet attractive look.

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The player will also playback digital music with support for high-res audio up to 192 kHz/24-bit and DSD 11.2MHz in addition to streaming Bluetooth to headphones for private listening.

Sony already announced the high-end UBP-X1000ES last year for release at the same time, but that model is designed to be only sold through custom installers — you won’t be able to barrel up to your local Best Buy and expect to walk off with one. The differences between the 800 and 1000 aren’t yet known, we have asked Sony for clarification.

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray is the latest disc-based standard and includes features such as a 4K resolution (3,840×2,160 pixels), high dynamic range (HDR) and better color depth (BT.2020).

Pricing and availability is yet to be announced.

Sony X930E series Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Sony

If a great TV ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Last year one of our favorite LCDs was the Sony X930D, which delivered excellent image quality, great style and plenty of useful features. The new X930E/X940E series looks to continue the winning tradition, with a couple of welcome new extras.

More from CES 2017

• LG’s amazing ultrathin OLED is wall art that happens to be a TV
• All the smart home products at CES 2017 (so far)

One of the most important is support for the Dolby Vision HDR format, expanding the range of HDR content the sets can access, coinciding with the release of Dolby Vision 4K Blu-ray players and discs coming later this year. Of course the sets can still access the other major HDR format, HDR10.

The X930E uses an improved version of Sony’s Slim Backlight drive, a version of edge-lit local dimming that produced excellent results in our tests last year. The 75-inch X940E, meanwhile, has a full-fledged full-array local-dimming system, which should deliver even better picture quality. Sony also talks up its processing, which is generally very good.

New for 2016, the X930E and X940E will also work with the Google Home, so you can use that device to control the TV via voice commands. Like previous Sony sets, it uses Android TV’s operating system.

Pricing and availability were not announced. See all CNET’s CES 2017 coverage here.

Sony X930E/X940E specifications

• 55-inch and 65-inch sizes (X930E), 75-inch size (X940E)
• local dimming (edge-lit on X930E, full-array on X940E)
• HDR-compatible (Dolby Vision and HDR10)
• Works with Google Home
• Android TV operating system

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Sony SRS-XB40 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Due out this spring, Sony’s new XB Series Bluetooth speakers feature lighting effects and can be linked together.

Sony

Sony’s upcoming Bluetooth speakers may be under its Extra Bass brand, but they aren’t all about the bass.

Three of the four new speakers — the SRS-XB40, SRS-XB-30 and SRS-XB20 — have special lighting effects, with the two top end models delivering “club-like lighting effects with an LED perimeter line-light, a strobe flash and speaker light.”

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The line-light creates multicolor patterns, ranging from pure white to rainbow, and you can have the lighting synchronize with the rhythm of the beat, matching the music’s mood.

You use Sony’s SongPal app on your phone or tablet to start music playback, turn on/off the speaker lighting and add a speaker (you can link up to 10 speakers, mixing and matching models, and pair two together is stereo mode). The Fiestable app, for the SRS-XB40 only, gives you DJ-like controls for lighting and colors. Sweet.

The flagship SRS-XB40.

Sony

The grenade-size SRS-XB10 is the smallest and basic of the new speakers but Sony is touting its ability to play loud for its size and its long battery life of up 16 hours (that’s a lot for a tiny speaker). It’s the only one of the speakers that can’t be linked up to the other speakers in the line.

All the speakers are splash-resistant with a IPX51 rating and have speakerphone capabilities. The XB40, XB30 and XB10 can be stood vertically or laid down horizontally.

The new speakers are due out this spring and Sony hasn’t provided pricing information yet. As soon as we flush out more details, we’ll add them to our preview.

The compact SRS-XB10 comes in multiple colors, as do all the new speakers.

Sony

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Endless Mission One Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Mission Mini and Mission One.

Endless

You and I have a nearly limitless array of computer choices, from massive desktops to slim laptops to entire computers build into something the same size as a USB stick. But in emerging markets, the options are much more limited, both in the hardware available and even in the availability of internet access.

That’s why I liked the Endless Mini desktop PC we reviewed last year. It was a $79 (approximately £54 or AU$110) desktop in a charming spherical red plastic case, running a custom Linux-based OS. More importantly, it included a ton of educational content pre-loaded, making it a useful tool for students, even without reliable or fast internet access.

Now, the company behind the Endless Mini is bringing some of these ideas to the US, it said here at CES, with a pair of new mini-desktops that have a more refined look, and new software packages that can help teach kids about coding.

The new Endless Mission Mini and Mission One both run the same Endless OS operating system as the original, but have modern, much more premium-feeling designs, highlighted by bamboo (sustainably harvested, according to the company).

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The $129 Mission Mini (£105 or AU$180) runs an ARM processor, has a small 64GB of storage and 2GB of RAM. The $249 Mission One (£200 or AU$345) is a bit of a step up, with a 500GB hard drive and an Intel Celeron processor, which should offer greatly improved performance. Note that you still have to supply your own mouse, keyboard and display.

Because they run a custom non-Windows operating system, standard Windows programs won’t run on these, but as with the original Endless Mini, many web-based apps and services will work just fine.

A closer look at the Mission One.

Endless

The systems will also work with the company’s latest software initiative, which it calls Endless Code. A pre-installed package of tutorials and tools for teenage-level prospective coders, Endless says it’s, “The world’s most immersive, barrier-free platform for learning to code.”

Endless Code is coming in stages, starting later this year, but with a robust user beta program. The Endless Mission Mini and Mission One will be available on Amazon and directly from the company on January 16.

ZTE Blade V8 Pro Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

After hitting markets in Asia, Europe and Mexico, ZTE’s Blade series of phones is finally making its US debut with the V8 Pro.

The phone, which we checked out here at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, features a 5.5-inch display with Android M and two rear cameras. it’s available for preorder today in the US for $230.

For that relatively affordable price, the V8 Pro offers a lot of hardware goodies. For one thing, the two rear shooters are both 13 megapixels, one of which is a monochrome camera that can shoot in black and white. We’ve seen dual cameras before in other high-end phones like the LG V20, the Lenovo ​Phab 2 Pro and even ZTE’s own 2015 flagship, the ZTE Axon Pro.

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Depending on the phone, dual cameras are used for different reasons. In the V20, the second camera is for wide-angle shots, while the Phab 2 Pro uses its camera setup for measuring depth and distances for augmented reality.

In the V8 Pro’s case, the cameras can take photos with a bokeh effect, which blurs the background for an artsy, dramatic look. (The Apple iPhone 7 and the Axon Pro before, do this too.) Extra software allows you to switch up the point of focus from the background to the foreground (and the degree of blurriness). There’s also a fun tool that uses the monochrome camera to turn photos into a black-and-white sketch that reminded me of the classic A-Ha “Take on Me” video.

When I checked it out, the tools worked pretty well and smoothly. The bokeh effect worked a tad faster than I had recalled with the Axon Pro, and the sketch filter rendered quickly.

The phone also has a fingerprint reader, expandable memory and dual-SIM capabilities — the last of which is useful for anyone who travels frequently or who has two numbers.

ZTE Blade V8 Pro specs

• 5.5-inch display with 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution
• 6.14×3.03×0.36 inches (156x77x9.1 mm)
• Android M
• 2.0GHz, eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor
• 3GB RAM, 32GB of internal storage, expandable memory up to 128GB
• 8-megapixel front camera, two 13-megapixel rear cameras
• 3,140mAh battery with Quick Charge 2.0 technology

Other similarly priced phones include the Sony Xperia XA, which has a sleek bezel-less design, but half as much built-in memory as the V8 Pro. The Motorola Moto G4 Plus is one of our more favorite budget phones of 2016. It has comparable specs to the V8 Pro at the same price. Though it doesn’t have dual rear cameras or NFC, it does have a water-resistant design.

Click here for CNET’s complete coverage of CES 2017.

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New Balance RunIQ Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Intel

Sports footwear and apparel giant New Balance unveiled its new RunIQ smartwatch on Wednesday at the annual CES trade show in Las Vegas. The watch, which was originally teased at last year’s show, was built in collaboration with both Intel and Google.

RunIQ is powered by Google’s
Android Wear
operating system. As the name implies, the watch is designed for running. It include GPS for measuring pace and distance, an optical heart-rate sensor, onboard music storage for phone-free listening, and it can display notifications when connected to a smartphone.

Intel

You can expect up to 24 hours of battery with what New Balance calls “typical usage,” or up to 5 hours with a continuous GPS signal and heart-rate tracking. Battery life is on par with other smartwatches, such as the Apple Watch Series 2, but falls short compared to running watches from Garmin and other companies. The Garmin Forerunner 235, our favorite running watch, will last up to a week with normal usage, or 11 hours with a continuous GPS signal and heart rate tracking.

Other features of the RunIQ include a dedicated Lap button, waterproofing down to 50 meters, and the ability to sync with Strava, a popular tracking app and social network used by runners and cyclists.

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Preorders start January 5. The watch will be available online and in New Balance stores on February 1 for $300 (about £240 or AU$420).

Specs

• Android Wear
• 1.39-inch AMOLED display
• 4GB of internal storage
• 512MB of RAM
• Waterproof up to 5 ATM
• Optical heart-rate sensor
• GPS, accelerometer and gyroscope

This article will be updated with my hands-on impressions later this week.

LG Gram 14 (2017) Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

LG claims the Gram 14 laptop can last 24 hours on a charge.

LG

If you built one of the lightest laptops in the world, but critics complained about poor battery life, what would you do?

Would you build a laptop with a bigger, longer-lasting battery? Or would you pretend the same tiny laptop now has more battery life than any other laptop ever made?

LG just did both. At CES 2017, LG announced that its new Gram laptops can last an unprecedented 24 hours on a charge. The moment I read that, I knew there must be some funny business going on.

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The truth: LG measured that 24 hours with a decade-old benchmark.

A terrible benchmark, too — a benchmark so bad at measuring laptop battery life that Computerworld wrote a scathing story about it eight years ago. It’s a benchmark that assumes you’ll be barely using your laptop at all, without Wi-Fi, and with the screen set to very low brightness.

But apparently, LG can get away with saying “24 hours” as long as it uses a picture of that benchmark, “MobileMark 2007,” next to each pseudo-lie.

The new LG Gram.

LG

Mind you, these are LG’s numbers — we haven’t tested it yet.

LG

Thing is, LG’s laptop probably will last quite a bit longer than the previous version. The company says it used carbon nanotube technology to create a 60Wh battery — nearly double the capacity of the previous 34.6Wh pack, and bigger than the one in Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro — without increasing the laptop’s incredibly light weight of about 2.1 pounds (about 0.9 kilograms).

They’re a little bit thicker (0.61 inches for the 13-inch model, compared to 0.5 inches for last year’s 14-incher), but it sounds like a feat.

And LG does say that when it used a newer benchmark (MobileMark 14), the company still got as many as 17 hours on a charge — which sounds pretty great. But we’ll still need to test it. Don’t know about you, but I have a tough time trusting companies that use decade-old benchmarks.

Aside from the battery life, the new 13-inch, 14-inch and 15-inch LG Gram laptops feature:

• Intel’s new Core i3, i5 and i7 Kaby Lake processors
• Up to 512GB of solid-state storage and up to 16GB of RAM (each has two RAM slots, one user-accessible)
• 1,920 by 1,080-pixel resolution IPS touchscreen displays with extremely small bezels
• Two USB 3.0 ports and a full-size HDMI video jack
• A MicroSD (not full-size SD) card slot
• A USB-C port that can charge the laptop, and/or output data and video (or Thunderbolt 3, in the 15-inch version, according to Microsoft)
• 802.11ac Wi-Fi
• HD webcams in the center of the hinge, so they point up your nose (also see: Dell XPS 13)
• Fingerprint readers for one-touch Windows login (according to Microsoft)
• An extra USB 2.0 port in the 15-inch version
• Fast charging (LG claims 3 hours of battery life for a 20 minute charge)

The LG Gram is still a very light laptop.

LG

LG hasn’t yet confirmed when or where the new Gram laptops might arrive outside its native South Korea, or for how much, but a Korean press release suggests they’ll start at 1,420,000 won (roughly $1,200, £965 or AU$1,630).

It also mentions a second set of ultra-light Gram laptops which will come with a smaller 34Wh battery.

Asus ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

An impressively built laptop with a sleek design.

Xiomara Blanco/CNET

Asus announced an update to the ZenBook line with the ZenBook 3 Deluxe. It’s a super-thin 13-inch laptop with a 14-inch screen.

Wait. What?

Yep. You heard right. Asus fit a 14-inch display into a 13-inch chassis. It sounds impossible, but it’s not.

Impossibly, Asus fit a 14-inch screen inside of a 13-inch notebook.

Xiomara Blanco/CNET

The size of a laptop doesn’t necessarily mean that its screen is that big. In fact, due to the extra space that a screen’s bezels take up, a laptop’s display is usually smaller than its advertised size.

Knowing this, Asus outfitted the ZenBook 3 Deluxe with supremely thin bezels (7.46 mm wide) to give the notebook the biggest possible screen area.

It has three USB-C ports for all of your Thunderbolt 3, charging or high-speed data transfer needs.

Xiomara Blanco/CNET

That’s not the only impressive thing about its design. It has an elegantly thin 12.9 mm profile and weighs only 2.42 lbs (1.1 kilograms).

The ZenBook 3 Deluxe will be available May 2017 for $1,699 (which roughly converts to £1,380 or AU$2,330).

• Three USB-C ports (two Thunderbolt 3)
• seventh-gen Intel Core i7-7500U processor
• 16GB RAM
• 1TB SSD
• A resolution of 1,920 by 1080 pixels with Corning Gorilla Glass 5
• Comes in blue and grey
• Backlit full-sized keyboard
• Quad-speaker Harman Kardon audio
• Optional fingerprint scanner (Windows Hello compatible)

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