Honor View 10 goes international Jan. 8, brings the Honor 7X in limited-edition red

The first AI-centric smartphone from Huawei’s more affordable brand will cost about $460 U.S.

Honor — the affordable offshoot of Chinese manufacturer Huawei — tonight at CES announced that the new Honor View 10 will see international release starting January 8.

The View 10, as you’ll recall, is the non-U.S. version of the Honor V10. It’s Honor’s first phone to launch with Android 8.0 Oreo and is powered by Huawei’s Kirin 970 processor — the first with built-in AI via a Neural Processing Unit. On top of that, it’s got 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, all pushing a 5.99-inch display at 2160×1080 resolution.

Read our full Honor View 10 preview

Honor also announced that the venerable Honor 7X will get a limited edition launch in red. Only 20,000 units will be available, and you’ll have to snag them in either United States, Russia, India, or Western Europe (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain). Honor also says the first 100 people to purchase the red model in each of those countries will get red co-branded Honor-Monster AM15 headphones as a special gift.

HONOR DELIVERS THE FUTURE OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGY WITH THE AI-POWERED HONOR VIEW10

Las Vegas, United States, January 7th, 2018 – Honor, a leading smartphone e-brand, today announced, on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), that the AI-powered Honor View10 will go on sale in overseas markets from January 8th, 2018 and released a limited edition Honor 7X Red. This follows the successful launch of the Honor 7X and Honor View10 in London last month.

In 2017, Honor was the number one smartphone e-brand in China by sales, and its sales grew significantly on Black Friday in the United States and Europe.

“As a leading e-brand, Honor aims to become the most loved smartphone brand for people young and the young at heart,” said Mr. George Zhao, President of Honor. “With a unique Internet-powered business model, unrivaled product and unbeatable value, we are taking our successful business model from China to the global market. Our aim is to become a top-five smartphone brand by 2020.”

As part of the strategy to bring a better experience to users, Honor works with partners such as Microsoft, Monster and Snapchat to optimize applications and services for its smartphones.

Honor View10: Revolutionary AI and ultimate performance appeal to consumers worldwide

As part of a drive to make AI technology accessible to consumers worldwide, Honor is among the first to power a smartphone with a Neural-Network Processing Unit (NPU) to deliver AI features and performance that far surpasses any CPU/GPU powered architecture. Integrating with the dedicated NPU, Kirin 970 chipset enables Honor View10 to deliver up to 25 times better performance and 50 times greater efficiency.

For the Honor View10, Honor worked closely with Microsoft to optimize Microsoft Translator. The AI Accelerated Translator software in Honor View10 delivers instantaneous translation without the need for an internet connection. The new Kirin 970’s powerful NPU makes the translation 500 percent faster than other smartphones running the same app.
Mr. Xuedong Huang, Microsoft Technical Fellow in AI and Research said, “Microsoft is thrilled to be collaborating with Honor to bring the benefits of AI, through Microsoft Translator, to more users through the Honor View10. Together, we will continue to work towards building a more integrated and connected world.”

During China’s “Double 12” Shopping Festival after its launch in China for a week, the Honor View10 became the top selling smartphone product priced over RMB 3,000 (US$ 460). Consumers in India and Western Europe (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) can purchase Honor View10 starting from January 8th online at: http://www.hihonor.com/global/products/mobile-phones/honorview10/index.html. The new smartphone will also be available in Malaysia and Russia later this month.

Honor 7X: Unmatched price-performance makes it the ideal gift for the loved one

As the first smartphone to feature the Honor FullView Display, the Honor 7X 18:9 screen delivers an impressive visual experience, especially to the gamers in the midst of the action. The smartphone also doubles the efficiency and fun with its Screen Split function. The dual-lens 16MP + 2MP rear camera with large aperture (F/0.95 – F/16) and Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF) ensures professional photo quality and a professional shooting experience. Users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and India have given the Honor 7X a 4.2+ star review on Amazon.com since its global launch in London on December 5th, 2017.
In addition to black, blue and gold phones, a new limited edition Honor 7X Red of 20,000 units will be available for Valentine’s Day in the United States, Russia, India and Western Europe (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain). Honor 7X Red can be ordered soon at the Honor online store: http://www.hihonor.com/global/products/mobile-phones/honor7x/index.html.

Honor 7X Red with Honor-Monster AM15

Honor is partnering with Monster, one of the world’s largest headphone manufacturers, to give the first 100 purchasers of Honor 7X Red in each country/region the red co-branded Honor-Monster AM15 headphones as a special gift. In addition, from this year, Honor is bringing the partnership with Monster to a new strategic level. More details will be announced later.

Sniffy Market will let you smell products as you shop

If you’ve ever wanted your retail shopping experience to include more smells, well… get excited about Sniffy. It’s a prototype product meant for stores that want to let their customers smell their products as well as see or touch them — the obvious examples are food and drink retailers, good for smelling products like spices or coffee. Perfume is another obvious example, but I’m struggling to come up with other situations in which this makes sense.

Regardless, here’s how it works. The Sniffy Market has a touchscreen display and camera as well as a carousel that retailers will load various scents into. Once that’s set, curious passers-by can use the touchscreen to pick a product and then get blasted with the scent in question. Another bizarre but intriguing thing about Sniffy is what the camera is for: it captures people’s reactions to the scent and analyzes it to see if that reaction is positive or negative. It’s not meant for the consumer to see, but it’s data that can help inform how desirable the product up for sale is.

Given that the demo device we saw here at CES was just a 3D-printed prototype, there’s no telling when this might be an actual device you see in stores. It’s a bizarre idea, but it might just be weird enough to work for a certain set of retailers. Sniffy’s creators said they’ll build the hardware, software and even help create scents for the company; it sounds like they want to have a piece of the whole pie. But as far as seeing Sniffy in a store any time soon, well, I’m not holding my breath.

Cosmo’s bike helmet light will alert others when you fall

Cycling can be dangerous, especially if you ride at night or in busy metropolitan areas. To help, a startup called Cosmo Connected is working on a smart light that clips onto the back of your helmet. Eight LEDs — four red, four yellow — are positioned in an oval shape. By default, they’re set to an “always-on” position so that you’re clearly visible in the dark. An accelerometer inside will know when you’re braking, however, and warn fellow cyclists, drivers and pedestrians with a more intense light.

Cosmo’s bike light works with a companion app on your phone. Here, you can trigger a flashing “emergency alert” or make left and right signals by mashing the screen or pressing the company’s optional, handlebar-mounted remote control. It will also be possible to enter your journey beforehand and trigger turn signals automatically via GPS tracking. Finally, Cosmo Connected says the accelerometer will double as a fall detector, notifying friends and family in the event of an accident. All of these features are free, though an optional service (it’s not clear if you’ll have to pay for this, however) can be set up to notify emergency responders too.

The Cosmo Bike light will launch in September for $60. It follows the Cosmo Moto, a connected brake light for motorcyclists that was funded on Kickstarter last November. The helmet accessory has a similar feature set and is available in glossy black, glossy white and matte black for $119.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Lussya is a $300 baby lotion dispenser disguised as modern art

Massage is good for adults and great for babies, who use the stimulation to bond with their parents, calm down and work out their gas. It’s why French startup Caressa is building My Lussya One, a massage oil heater and automatic dispenser that’s designed to ensure that rubbing sessions are always a pleasure.

The device has been created by Frenchman Sébastien Fauconnier, who was inspired to build it with his wife, a pediatric nurse. He wanted to craft a gadget that not only made massage time easier, but encouraged it simply because of all the positive benefits baby massage offers.

Looking like a Henry Moore sculpture, users begin by placing their hands on the head-esque top dome, which is warm. Lifting up the head exposes two slots for massage lotion and aromatherapy oil capsules that look like slightly cuter Keurig pods.

Once your hands are warm, you place them beneath the head, where up to three squirts of massage lotion are fired out, much like an automatic soap dispenser. All the while, the aromatherapy oil is warmed and diffused to give the local air a pleasingly calm scent.

Connect the device to your phone, and it’ll show you video tutorials on the best way to massage your kid, depending on their age. While you conduct the massage, the device can play soothing music through its built-in speaker, and offer up a pleasing gentle light show through its belly.

Finally, Lussya can pull duty as a nightlight, and you can even record yourself (or a relative) reading a story to be played through the speaker. That’s assuming you don’t run down the battery, which can let it operate for a short amount of time when it’s not plugged in to a wall outlet.

The startup is accepting pre-orders right now, and the first production run of the units are expected to arrive for French customers between April and May. Should you be located in the republic, you can put your name down for one if you have €250 ($300) on hand, with US pricing and availability still in the works. In addition, there’s no word on how much the capsules are likely to cost you, but it’s likely to be a couple of bucks per go.

Assuming, of course, that you need your very own automatic lotion warmer and dispenser.

Nicole Lee contributed to this report.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

The Sgnl wristband is almost ready to turn your hand into a phone

We’ve seen Innomdle Lab’s Sgnl wearable at CES a few times before, but it’s worth revisiting because a) it’s an absolutely crazy idea that works and b) it’s very nearly ready for the masses. In case you missed it the first time around, the Sgnl is a sleek, understated wearable that lets you have full-blown private phone conversations by simply touching your finger to your ear.

The wearable — which was originally developed as a concept for Samsung’s delightfully nutty C-Lab — transmits sound through your handmeat as vibrations that eventually come out of your finger as sound. In theory, this sounds absurd. In practice, though, it actually seems to work as advertised. Even though Innomdle Lab’s body conduction technology isn’t specifically meant for music playback, a demo track streamed from a tablet via Bluetooth was piped into my wrist, up through my hand and came out surprisingly audible on through my finger.

There’s no way you’d want to listen to an album this way even if it were possible, but the system is theoretically clear enough to keep conversations intelligible. We’re told the Sgnl can store up to five contacts, which you can sift through using a set of slightly-too-gummy navigation buttons.

The Sgnl also doubles as a fitness tracker because, well, why not? Good thing it’s relatively comfortable to wear. The prototype units I’ve tried in the past were considerably more bulbous and hack-y, but the final product is actually remarkable restrained in its design. The actual body conduction bits are housed in a a soft-touch plastic body, while a dark stainless steel strap runs around the rest of the wrist. My biggest concern so far, though, is how clumsy the clasp seems — you have to stick the tiny metal tab on one end into the slot on the other, and it can be very, very difficult to do with just one hand.

Even now, with Sgnl production in full swing, the wearable leave us with questions. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait too long for answers: the first units will be delivered to Kickstarter backers in March, and general sales should follow soon after.

Coravin’s smart wine opener doesn’t remove the cork

If you’re not familiar with Coravin, the company makes wine openers that allow you to pour a glass without removing the cork. The devices pierce the cork with a thin needle that doesn’t remove any material, so you can have some and then continue to cellar the bottle. So-called Coravin Capsules (similar to CO2 cartridges) filled with Argon gas push the wine out of the bottle and into your glass. At CES 2018 though, the company took its wares to a whole other level with the Model 11.

Coravin calls it “the world’s first fully connected and fully automated wine preservation opener.” In addition to pouring wine like its other models, this unit syncs with the Coravin Moments app. With the added bit of software, you can keep tabs on how much gas is left and other valuable info. It also offers suggestions for a specific event or food pairing based on what you have in your cellar. As you might expect, it can also suggests wines that you make not already own, but that might go well with eating Mexican food and watching Stranger Things, for example. Wines are pulled in from database that powers Delectable’s wine app.

The Model 11 also has an aerator attachment that Coravin says creates the same effect as the wine sitting in a glass for an hour. It also produces a quite fancy-looking shower stream when you use it. Of course, if you don’t want to aerate a bottle, you certainly don’t have to. That all sounds pretty sweet, right? Well, the only downside is the smart gadget costs $999, so this definitely isn’t for casual wine drinkers. If that’s much too extravagant for you, the already available Model One and Model Two retail for $200 and $300, respectively. If you really want to splurge for the Model 11 though, you can do so in September when the device goes on sale.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Aveine takes the wait out of aerating wine

Aerating wine can dramatically improve the taste by just letting it sit in a glass or decanter for a while. However, sometimes you don’t really want to wait an hour (or several hours) to have that first sip, so Aveine developed a gadget that nixes that wait time. With its $200 connected device of the same name, the company says it can offer up to 24 hours of aeration as you pour the wine. No more waiting until the perfect amount of time has elapsed to have a glass.

The gadget attaches to a wine bottle and features a touch panel on the front for adjusting the aeration level and displaying the wine’s temperature. There’s a companion app that allows you to scan the label of your bottle so the software can provide a suggested aeration time. The company says that if the app’s database doesn’t recognize what you’ve scanned, you can manually add it. Based on a few questions, it will still give a suggestion for aeration — even for those bottle you have to add yourself. And yes, if you already know you like that 2009 Pinot Noir aerated for 4 hours, you can skip all the app stuff and manually adjust the time period.

If you’re ready to commit, Aveine will be up for pre-order in March and it’s slated to ship in June.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Google uses GPS and smart locks to secure wayward campus bikes

Google is well-known for offering free bikes on campus to help its employees get around, but those bikes frequently don’t stay on campus. Up to 250 go missing per week — and that’s rather ironic for a company that built its reputation on finding information. At last, though, the search giant is putting technology to work to solve the problem. Google has been adding GPS trackers to its bikes as of late 2017, and has been testing smart locks that employees can open with their phones.

The company tells the Wall Street Journal that about a third of its bikes have GPS trackers so far, and they’re offering insight into just how far the two-wheelers will go. While many tend to stay around Mountain View (some locals treat them like community rides), others have been taken as far as Alaska and Mexico.

In many ways, the trackers and locks represent Google’s ongoing loss of innocence. Free-to-ride campus bikes might have sounded great in Google’s utopian early days, but that’s at odds with a reality where people will routinely borrow or steal anything that isn’t nailed down. Even though the company can easily afford to lose bikes, it doesn’t look good to waste money and resources for the sake of maintaining a company tradition.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Moodo’s smart fragrance box adds a hint of vanilla to your home

It’s no secret that not every Kickstarter or Indiegogo project becomes a reality. Often times, these ideas get crowdfunded but don’t get turned into an actual product, but thankfully that wasn’t the case for the Moodo smart air freshener. The project was funded on Indiegogo last year, and now Moodo is showing it off at CES 2018. It works exactly as advertised, letting you use your smartphone or tablet to select and activate different scents in your home, such as Orange Sunrise, Precious Spices, Grandma Vanilla and Midnight Trill.

The Moodo box consists of four scented capsules, which you can mix and preset them to turn on via the companion app. If you’re someone who likes to have scented candles in your home, this could be the perfect device for you. It’s available now for $189 with 12 scented capsules, and each pack of four after that will cost you $29. Yes, using your phone to make your house smell good is kind of pricey.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Dreamlight’s smart eye mask is designed to help you sleep

For everyone but the journalists covering the show, CES is all about catching up on, and improving the quality of, your sleep. One company with an eye on getting you well-rested is Dreamlight, which is building an eye-mask that, so its founder claims, will help you get some more shut-eye.

The chunky foam eye mask wraps around your head and is secured by velcro, with special inserts to ensure no light can peek in around your nose. Inside, however, are flexible circuits that house a quartet of speakers, infra-red sensors, an optical heart-rate monitor and LED panels in front of your eyes. It’s comfortable, and the darkness that the eyemask offers is certainly better than the shades you can buy from a corner store.

The LED panels are for the sleep program, and will gently blast you with 15 minutes of orange light in order to stimulate melatonin production. After that point, you’ll be shut off from the outside world with the eyemask that’ll keep you in a dreamlike state until you set a wake-up time.

When it’s time for the new day to begin, the mask will blast increasingly-light green hues toward your eyelids, which is more apparently invigorating than the traditional blue. In addition, the device can play a number of sounds, from your own tunes through to white noise.

Of course, the presence of both the optical heart-rate monitor and the accelerometers and gyroscopes in the eyemask means that it can also track your sleep. Using the companion app, you can learn how long you rested the night before, and find out the quality of the shut-eye you received.

The company has partnered with 23andMe, and apparently can craft custom sleep profiles that are tailored to your genetic makeup. One such profile is “Da Vinci’s Sleep,” and should you have the requisite profile, the company claims you can train your brain to require less sleep and still be productive. In addition, Dreamlight will offer up a six-day jetlag plan to help you get over that special fatigue you feel when you’ve traveled across several timezones.

Battery-life wise, founder WIll Wu believes that the eyemask will last for up to four nights on a charge, depending on use. If you use the built-in headphones to stream music from your smartphone, for instance, then you can expect that figure to fall.

Dreamlight is preparing to launch on Indiegogo later this month, with prices expected to begin at $100, although there’s no word on when you can expect delivery.

Nicole Lee contributed to this report.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.