Griffin Technology Connected Mirror Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

CES has seen its share of smart mirrors, and this year, it’s Griffin Technology who’s hoping the idea finally sticks.

The Griffin Technology Connected Mirror.

Griffin Technology

Their product is called, simply enough, the Connected Mirror, and it’s a shiny, reflective surface that connects with your home Wi-Fi network in order to display the local time and weather and any missed notifications from your phone, as well as updates from any other Griffin gear under your roof (their catalog includes app-enabled phone chargers, a connected coffeemaker, and even a Bluetooth toaster).

Those updates will appear whenever you touch the mirror’s capacitive surface, then disappear when you’re done with them. You can also use Griffin’s app to connect with the mirror in order to choose the information you want it to display.

None of that will come cheap, though. When it arrives at the end of 2017, Griffin’s Connected Mirror will cost you a cool $1,000 (about £810 or AU$1,390, converted roughly). At that price — and without any notable third-party integrations to get people who’ve already bought into the smart home excited about it — it’s hard to see this as more than a luxury niche product.

Still, this isn’t the only smart mirror we’ve seen at CES this year, so perhaps this is an untapped category that’s ready to emerge. We’ll keep our eyes on it.

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Rokid Pebble Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Rokid Pebble

Rokid

If the Rokid Pebble works as promised, maybe the name Melody will become just as recognizable as Alexa or Siri. If not, this aptly named spherical assistant could be just another Amazon Echo wannabe.

Launching this summer in the US, the Pebble listens for you to say the wake word “Melody,” then responds to your commands. Much like the Echo and Alexa, you don’t have to touch the Pebble, just talk to it, and it’ll add items to your calendar, play music, and control your smart home.

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Playing Echo’s game

The Pebble looks capable as an entertainer — you’ll be able to stream music from Spotify and iHeartRadio — and as a smart home controller — it’ll work with Nest, Philips Hue, Wink and IFTTT at launch with a SmartThings integration in the works. The Pebble will chart its own course by being able to recognize your voice and customize its responses accordingly.

Forging its own path

Keeping score at CES

• The smart home scoreboard
• Google Home’s progress
• Alexa’s progress
• Siri’s progress

Because it can recognize voices, the Pebble should be able to beat the Echo as a personal assistant. You can train Melody to do different things when you greet it as opposed to when your significant other does. So simply by saying “Melody, hello,” it’ll set the thermostat, turn on the lights, and follow any other preset commands you’ve specified. If your significant other says the same thing, Melody can greet him or her by name and do an entirely different set of commands.

Rokid’s Melody also looks to be quite good at keeping your calendar organized. While Alexa, Siri and the Google Assistant are rudimentary at best at helping you manage your schedule, Melody will be able to sync all of your individual calendars, and all of the calendars for your entire family. Then, Melody can check them all and let you know when you’re all free.

Melody’s duo

The Rokid Alien

Rokid

The Pebble is the second assistant from tech startup Rokid. The first — the Rokid Alien — has been available in China since April. The Alien functions much like the Pebble, only it also has a screen and a camera. The camera can recognize your face and the screen can display additional context and info if you ask it a question.

Both the Pebble and the Alien will be available for purchase in the US starting this summer, though Rokid doesn’t yet have pricing information for either. Both also have a small battery that’ll keep them powered for around two hours, making them more mobile than the Amazon Echo — which always has to stay plugged in.

Outlook

Between the Amazon Echo, the Google Home and Siri’s HomeKit on your iPhone, you already have lots of options for a digital assistant. At CES, we’ve seen many more contenders that want to vie for that position, so the Rokid Pebble will need to be affordable and polished if it hopes to have a chance of standing out among tough competition. The promise of individualized assistance for multiple users is enticing, though, and if it can help you and your family organize your lives, Melody might well earn her way toward the front of the bunch.

Wacom Intuos Pro 2017 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Darren Higgins/Wacom

As much as I like a good tablet update, what really caught my attention in Wacom’s latest pro graphics tablet announcement were the words “finetip gel ink pen.” My biggest issue with the company’s smart notebook solutions has been the restriction to ballpoint pens. I hate them. Though its latest ink-on-paper digitizing solution is just a bundle of the new Intuos Pro tablet with a clip to hold a piece of paper, the aforementioned pen and software, rather than part of Wacom’s smart notebooks, it means that the technology is in place to fulfill my gel dreams. (Wacom’s electromagnetic resonance tech requires special ink formulations.)

The most notable change in Intuos Pro for 2017 is that it works with the Pro Pen 2 that debuted with the company’s MobileStudio line of Windows tablets and that supports 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity for a smoother and more responsive feel. The tablet has also been redesigned to be smaller than previous versions but retaining the same size active area. The pen stand is smaller as well.

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As for those smart notebooks, a new Bamboo debuted as well, a small version of the Bamboo Folio.

All are available this month. The Intuos Pro will cost $350 (that’s about £285 or AU$485 converted) for the medium and $500 (about £400 or AU$690) for the Large, while the Paper Edition medium runs $50 more for each size (about £40 or AU$70). The small Bamboo Folio is $150 (£105, directly converted AU$210).

Stylus development in general seems to be gaining some traction, at least with respect to interoperability; right now, active styluses for Windows tablets are proprietary to the manufacturers and software implementations. Wacom is close to releasing one that it developed in conjunction with Microsoft which will support both its own Active ES (PDF) protocols and Windows Ink. The Universal Stylus Initiative, founded by high-profile companies including Dell, Lenovo and Intel, also announced at CES the ratification of the first version of a specification for a standard way for a stylus and a touch-enabled device to talk to each other.

TCL C series (2017 Roku TV) Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

TCL

For the last couple of years our favorite Smart TV system has been Roku. It’s easier to use than any other, with more apps and more frequent updates, and works so well you won’t need to connect another box or stick, Roku or otherwise, for streaming Netflix, Amazon and all the rest.

Numerous TV makers use Roku’s system but the most popular, and best-reviewed at CNET, is TCL. The Chinese company has seen fast growth in the US market — just check Amazon’s best seller lists — and in 2017 it’s debuting 25 new Roku TVs, many with 4K resolution. They’re larger and more capable than ever, challenging the Vizios, Samsungs and LGs of the world for mainstream (pardon the pun) acceptance.

The P series (detailed here) focuses on picture quality, but two other series of 2017 Roku TVs, the C and S series, lean toward design/features and affordability, respectively.

The C series’ contemporary styling has a super-slim design similar to major-name TVs. It includes a 75-inch model, the largest Roku TV yet. It also supports both types of high dynamic range content, Dolby Vision and HDR10, and TCL claims they’ll be the first Roku TVs with Dolby Vision. Like the P series they have wide color gamut technology but they lack the Ps’ local dimming.

TCL C series Roku TV

• 4 sizes from 49 to 75 inches
• Ultra-slim design
• Dolby Vision and HDR10 high dynamic range (HDR)
• Wide Color Gamut (percentage DCI unspecified)
• 4K resolution
• Roku TV operating system
• Remote with voice search, headphone jack for private listening

Meanwhile the S series looks to be the workhorse of the line, with fewer features and a lower price than the others — much like TCL’s current popular Roku TVs. It lacks the styling chops, HDR capability, picture-enhancing extras and fancy remote of the C and P series, but comes in more sizes and still offers all that Roku TV goodness.

TCL S series Roku TV

• 18 sizes from 28 to 65 inches
• 4K resolution (on many sizes)
• Roku TV operating system

The C and S series start shipping in spring. Pricing was not announced.

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Whistle 3 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Whistle

Helicopter pet parenting seems to be all the rage these days as smart trackers don’t just let you locate your free-range Fido, but also micromanage his activity and make sure your dog walker isn’t sipping a latte in an outdoor cafe somewhere.

The biggest issue with trackers is that many of them are huge, rendering them unsuitable for most cats and NYC apartment-size dogs. So now that the Whistle 3’s shed half the bulk of its 1.5 by 4.2 by 0.8-inch (38 by 107 by 20 mm) precursor and it’s able to slide it onto a standard collar, that could make a big difference.

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To increase the accuracy of its tracking — and reduce the notification lag that some have complained about — the company added support for pretty much every network technology that can be used to pull a location. In this case it adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to existing 3G cell and GPS. You’ll also be able to create multiple custom geofenced locations, places where it doesn’t need to track, up from the single location of before. That’s part of the completely overhauled app.

Whistle 3 is shipping in January for $80 (about £65 or AU$110). That price doesn’t include a mandatory subscription that includes cellular data service managed by Whistle, which ranges from approximately $7 to $10 (£6 to £8 or AU$10 to AU$15) a month — per pet.

Casio Smart Outdoor Watch 2 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Casio’s Smart Outdoor Watch is back for a sequel, but don’t expect the battery to survive your whole hiking trip.

Casio

Casio is back at CES with another smartwatch. The company on Wednesday announced the second-generation of its Smart Outdoor Watch, known as WSD-F20.

The watch resembles last year’s model, but adds essential features for outdoor enthusiasts like GPS and support for offline maps. The Smart Outdoor Watch will also run
Android Wear
2.0, Google’s revamped watch-focused operating system.

Other features include a pressure sensor, compass, built-in microphone and times for sunrise as well as sunset. The watch is also water-resistant up to 50 meters and built to meet US military standards. All of these features would be appealing for hikers, but the Smart Outdoor Watch falls short when it comes to battery life. Casio only says it will last “more than a day,” but in reality it will likely be a lot less if you are using the GPS.

The Casio Smart Outdoor Watch WSD-F20 will be available on April 21. Pricing wasn’t announced.

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Samsung Notebook Odyssey 15 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Samsung has been making some pretty killer premium laptops for a long time, including the very slim Notebook 9 series, so it’s surprising the company has never done a full-on gaming laptop before.

At CES 2017, Samsung is launching its first dedicated gaming line, a new series called Odyssey. The initial lineup includes the Notebook Odyssey 15 and the Notebook Odyssey 17, which are (you guessed it) 15- and 17-inch laptops. It’s a new look for the normally very minimalist Samsung laptop line, with a bold backlit icon on the back, multicolored keyboard lights, and an angular decorative outline around the touchpad.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Flip the system over and the bottom panel stands out as well. It has a series of cooling vents across the bottom in a crosshatch pattern Samsung calls its “hexaflow vent” design.

Design aside, these are fairly standard current-gen gaming laptops. The 15-inch, about 5.5 pounds, offers the Nvidia GeForce 1050 GPU, which is a solid mainstream graphics chip for new games at high detail settings and full HD resolution. It’s not quite enough for VR, for which you’ll need a step-up Nvidia 1060. The GPU for the 17-inch model (8.3 pounds) hasn’t been locked in yet, but it’ll hopefully be an Nvidia 1070 or 1080, which are the current top of the line for laptops.

Some markets are also getting a white version.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Both Odyssey systems have standard 1,920×1,080 resolution screens. Some gaming laptops go higher, but I liked that these are antiglare screens, which I find useful for gaming.

Samsung Notebook Odyssey
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Interestingly, the Odyssey joins Lenovo’s new gaming line, Legion, in bold names for gaming PC brands. Your Legion can go on an Odyssey, because it had an ominous Omen (to work in HP’s existing gaming brand). These don’t have a final price or release date yet, but expect them in the spring of 2017.

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Samsung Chromebook Pro Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Samsung has a pair of new Chromebooks at CES 2017 that include some high-end features normally found only in traditional Windows systems, plus some rarely seen processor options.

Chromebooks — inexpensive laptops running Google’s limited Chrome OS — used to feel very cookie-cutter. Every brand made one or two, but they were all pretty much the same. With work and play shifting to online, cloud-based tools such as Gmail, Netflix and Facebook help Chromebooks feel less restrictive now, since all these online apps can be reached with the Chrome browser at the heart of the OS.

Sarah Tew/CNET

The new Samsung Chromebook Pro, and its sister product, the Chromebook Plus, take that a step further, and both were built in collaboration with Google to emphasize Google’s Play app store. Like a handful of newer Chromebooks, these can run Android apps from the Play store, and even run multiple apps at the same time. That gives you access to a huge software library previously unavailable on Chrome OS, including games and the Android versions of products from the likes of Adobe.

Samsung Chromebook Pro and Chromebook Plus
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Both the Pro and Plus are hybrids, with 360-degree hinges and a built-in stylus for drawing and note taking. Google’s Keep app is preinstalled for stylus-based notes and handwriting-to-text conversion. The 12.3-inch displays have a better-than-HD 2,400×1,600-pixel resolution and a Gorilla Glass top layer. The 32GB of internal storage and 4GB of RAM is standard for Chromebooks, but these are meant to be primarily cloud-based tools.

In my hands-on time with the systems, they had a premium feel both in design and speed, and the included stylus worked well for some quick sketching. Most Chromebooks are make of plastic — these have all-metal bodies, and feel closer to some of the ultrathin Windows laptops and hybrids we’ve tested recently (which are much more expensive).

Sarah Tew/CNET

The two versions — the Chromebook Pro and the Chromebook Plus — look identical, down to the USB-C ports on either side. The difference is in the processor. The Pro has an Intel Core M3, from Intel’s sixth-generation Core i-series, while the Plus has an ARM chip, typically found in phones and Android tablets.

The Plus version is coming in February at $449 (£365 or AU$620 converted), while the Pro version is coming later this spring and doesn’t have an official price yet.

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Asus ZenFone AR Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Zenfone AR’s cameras seem smaller than Lenovo’s Tango cameras on the Phab 2 Pro.

Asus

If you’ve ever wanted to try virtual or augmented reality, Asus has a phone that does both. It also might hint at where more phones are likely to be headed over the next few years.

Previously leaked by Qualcomm, the Asus ZenFone AR is indeed real and coming later this year (by the end of the second quarter, in fact — no pricing details yet). The phone is compatible with Google’s Daydream View VR headset and apps, but it also has a revamped tri-camera system that can achieve depth sensing 3D scanning and augmented reality through Google Tango.

The only other Tango phone in existence is the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, a huge 6-plus-inch monster phone we reviewed last year and had mixed feelings about. Tango’s AR is promising, but it’s a work in progress.

The ZenFone AR, however, has a little more going on under the hood. It has a faster Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, and boasts a “vapor cooling” system to keep the whole phone from overheating when running VR and AR. Or, maybe, both at once. According to Asus, the processor is optimized for computer vision and “six degrees of freedom” tracking, which refers to the motion-tracking and smart camera features that make Tango AR work.

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It’s also smaller than Lenovo’s first Tango phone, with a 5.7-inch screen. Part of that is due to a trimmed-down Tango camera design: a “Tri-Cam” system combines motion, depth-sensing and a 23-megapixel camera into a smaller housing on the back. It makes a difference. The Phab 2 Pro was heavy and thick; the ZenFone AR feels so light and slim, we almost questioned whether it had the battery inside (it did).

But our hands-on time with the ZenFone AR left us cold and unmoved. Asus hadn’t loaded the demo devices with any of the AR apps shown on stage during the phone’s unveiling. In fact, there were no AR apps at all. So while the ZenFone AR is remarkably slim and light, it’s impossible to say if using Tango and Daydream together on a phone broadens our experience using a phone — we’ll be forced to wait for a review unit to find out.

Bridging the gap

Still, we can speculate. The ZenFone AR could bridge the gap between augmented and virtual. Tango and Daydream were brought under one umbrella last year, and it seems like Google’s intent is to explore how both will involve each other.

Down the road, VR-ready phones equipped with position-tracking advanced cameras could enable further blending of virtual and real. For comparison, look at the Occipital Bridge, a mixed-reality iPhone headset that can do things like 3D-scan rooms and display them as VR experiences with virtual objects added. Google hasn’t announced any deeper plans for Tango and Daydream intersections yet.

There aren’t many killer Tango apps either, but there are a growing set of good Daydream VR apps including YouTube, Netflix, Street View and EA’s Need for Speed. Apps, along with Google’s support of both platforms, will determine how useful a blend of Tango and Daydream on a phone will really be.

Specifications and features

• 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display (2,560×1,440 pixels)
• Android 7.0 Nougat
• 6GB RAM
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor
• 23-megapixel camera (Sony IMX318 image sensor) with four-axis OIS and three-axis video stabilization, 4K video recording, improved low light mode

Update 2:12 p.m. PT: Added hands-on impressions from CES.

Activbody Activ5 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

I just squeezed the puck as hard as I could. That was all it took to get me a good pump. The Activ5 from Activbody is a small puck-sized device, on show here at CES, that responds to the pressure your hands, thighs or whatever put on it.

The idea is to use it for 5 minutes at a time, several times a day. According to Activbody, a clinical study found that users who did this experienced a 5 percent increase in strength per week.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

I haven’t looked too deeply into the study, so I’ve no idea how valid it is, but what I can say is that in the few minutes I used it, I got a pretty good pump — that is, my muscles got filled with enough blood to make them look and feel larger than normal — and the game-based strength challenges in the accompanying app were fun and challenging.

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Despite its touted effectiveness in increasing strength, however, the Activ5 isn’t meant to replace going to the gym or doing Insanity or a similar workout at home. It’s more an alternative to doing nothing at all, for people who don’t make time to workout as often as they’d like or you know, if you’re just really busy one day.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Personally, I’d need to test it out for more than just a few minutes before deciding it was worth the money. Maybe a couple weeks or so to really determine that it does what it promises to.

The Activ5 is available for preorder now and will start shipping at the end of January 2017 for $100 in the US, which converts to about £80 or AU$140.

Key Activ5 features:

• Measures more than 200 pounds (90 kg) of force
• Six-month battery life
• Companion app available on iOS and Android
• Can look really silly when done in public (trust me)