CES Highlights: Day One & Two

The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga takes a 17mm thick Ultrabook and gives it a screen that can flip back on a pair of double hinges. It’s a neat design that turns the 13.3-inch laptop into a rather large tablet. While the system is thick and heavy by normal tablet standards, it’s a lot thinner and easier to carry than any convertible notebook we can remember.

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Sensics tries to take gaming to a whole new level with its SmartGoggles. These goggles (why not just call it a helmet?) literally put your head in the game. That is, you have to put your head inside a bulky contraption (the SmartGoggles) before you get to play anything. We took a look at Sensics SmartGoggles at Pepcom's Digital Experience event at CES Monday evening, and let's just say they're definitely still in prototype form.

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PC gamers are a fickle bunch who prefer the superior mouse and keyboard combination for navigating games and dodging bullets. But Razer’s tablet concept, called Project Fiona, aims to appeal to the mouse/keyboard crowd by bringing portable PC gaming to a new tablet form-factor - as you can see to the left.

The Project Fiona prototype, on display here at CES, is a Windows 7 tablet running on a Core-i7 Intel Ivy Bridge processor. Razer is aiming at a target price that’s under $1000, and having the tablet running on Windows 8 when it's released sometime around the end of the year.

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Swivl is a nifty little camera stand that you can use to keep yourself in a shot without guiding it by hand. The device by Satarii has a stationary base with motors that allows it to tilt and spin to keep a remote marker in its sight.

While you iPhone, Android phone, and other mobile device records your video, the stand acts as your own personal robot cameraman.

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The HP Envy Spectre edition coming out this year will have numerous improvements over the previous models. To begin with, it’s dramatically smaller than last year’s Envy 14. At 12.8 by 8.7 inches, it’s not nearly as wide or deep as the 14 by 9.3-inch Envy 14 of last year. It’s much thinner as well, at 0.78 inches. Best of all, the Spectre sheds close to two pounds from the 5.6-pound Envy 14 - it tips the scales at 3.79 pounds. The Spectre’s screen is half an inch smaller than the 14.5-inch screen on the old Envy 14, but the resolution has actually improved to 1600 by 900.

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The Burst is a smartphone with a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, 16GB of on-board memory (expandable to 32GB), a dual-core 1.2GHz processor with 1080p video playback. The 5-megapixel camera can capture video in up to 720p resolution and there’s a VGA camera for video chat. The 4G LTE-capable Pantech Burst will cost a low $49 with a two-year contract; when bundled with the Pantech Element Honeycomb tablet the Burst will be free.

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What’s better than a thin, light smartphone or tablet? An even thinner and lighter smartphone or tablet, of course. Corning unveiled Gorilla Glass 2.0 at CES 2012 and the new glass is 20 percent thinner, but has the same scratch resistance and endurance as current Gorilla Glass. Aside from making devices thinner and lighter, Gorilla Glass 2.0 brings some other benefits for mobile gadgets; a press release from Corning also touts "brighter images, and greater touch sensitivity.”

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The Sony Xperia Ion is Sony's first smartphone, and has some pretty drool-worthy specs. Not only does it hook into AT&T’s LTE 4G network, but it has a 4.6-inch display, HDMI-out with a TV launcher interface, and a super thin design. Oh--and a 12-megapixel camera. Yep, you read that right--a 12-megapixel camera. And it is pretty darn good.

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Some of the best commercially available 3D printers are made by MakerBot Industries, and they're taking 3D printing to a new level.

MakerBot Industries says that this will be “the first” model to print in two-colors simultaneously with “Dualstrusion” (other consumer-grade 3D printers can typically only "print" using one color at a time). The machine is essentially equipped with two extruders (which are used to form objects layer-by-layer) that will allow it print in multiple colors and with different materials.

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Kodak has launched the EasyShare M750, which allows users to upload images to Facebook by pairing the camera with a smartphone. At the same time it is suing Apple and HTC for infringing on patents related to technology for transmitting images in a similar way.

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The Droid 4 is the follow-up to the Droid 3, which launched on Verizon last July. You still get a roomy 4-inch display to fool around on, as well as a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard for faster typing. Inside the Droid 4 is a dual-core 1.2GHz processor (no word on whose chips are inside), and it has 1GB of RAM to help with multitasking.

The Droid RAZR MAXX has all the same features as the original Droid RAZR, save for a massive boost in battery capacity. Verizon claims that the Droid RAZR MAXX will offer a rather impressive 21 hours of continuous talk time.

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Sphero is about the size of a baseball and it has a multi-color light inside it. You can control it using apps on your iOS or Android device--you can make it roll around, speed up, slow down, and change color. So while it's not very useful, it is kind of fun to play around with.

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The XPS 13 is as thin as most Ultrabooks at around 0.7 inches, tapering down to 0.24 inches. The main body is a mix of mag-alloy, and aluminum along the lid and keyboard deck, with a primarily carbon fiber body. Thanks to a bonded edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass display with an extremely thin bezel, the 13.3-inch screen fits into a chassis considerably less wide or deep than most 13-inch laptops.

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Lenovo recently announced the Android 4.0-based K91 Smart TV, a 55-inch 3D 1080p HDTV that also includes television apps, Lenovo cloud services, and a natural language voice control function for the remote.

Also, Ford is expanding its voice-controlled SYNC AppLink application platform for cars. The automaker revealed a new version of the SYNC Destinations smartphone app for Android and iOS created by traffic information provider INRIX. The app can send turn-by-turn directions to an in-car navigation system and provide real-time traffic information.

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Signa Chemistry, working with partners, has developed a recharge system that requires just a tablespoon of water, a small metal tin the size of a snuff container and a plastic container about the size of an eyeglass case.

The system produces about the same amount of power as 4 AA batteries and will give you about 10 hours of phone battery life.

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The Nokia Lumia 900 is a LTE 4G Windows Phone for AT&T. Of course, the Lumia is a Windows Phone and comes with a few included apps like Tango for video chat, ESPN, CNN and Nokia Drive (Nokia’s navigation app). The ESPN and CNN apps subscribe to Windows Phone's "metro".

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Polaroid will launch its new Android-powered Smart Camera in April. The device sports a three times optical zoom and snaps 16 MB images.

Netgear announced that it plans to release a device to stream Netflix and other similar content. Netgear's NeoTV set-top box doesn't have the hype of Roku or Apple TV, but Netgear is trying to make up for it by packing in more features at low prices. Skripic argues that NeoTV is a better choice than Roku because it has apps for YouTube and Vudu, which Roku does not. However, Roku's base model, the Roku LT, is $20 cheaper than the NeoTV, and it has some key apps of its own, including MLB.tv and HBO Go.

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The big new feature bragged about with the HTC Titan II, other than its LTE connectivity, is the fact that it has a 16-megapixel camera with a f/2.6 wide-angle lens and autofocus.

The phone's 4.7-inch super LCD screen is the largest display yet on a Windows phone. Powered by a 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S2 processor, you can watch the latest TV shows and movies via HTC Watch, and game-on-the-go with Xbox LIVE.

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Intel on Tuesday announced its first smartphone customers, signaling the arrival of Intel Inside smartphones after years of uphill struggle by the chip maker. Intel's Medfield smartphone reference design has a 4-inch screen, 8-megapixel video camera and can handle high-definition video.

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Credit- IDG News Service

CES 2012: The Hottest Smartphones