CES 2018 Headline Releases

THE PHONE WITH THE TECHNOLOGY OTHER PHONES NEEDED:

 

 

When Apple released the iPhone X earlier this year, it did so without a physical fingerprint scanner and tried to convince people facial scanning tech was better.
But many wondered if Apple wasn’t able to figure out the technology needed to have an on-screen fingerprint scanner.

If this is true, the tech giant should speak to Chinese smartphone maker Vivo which showcased on-screen fingerprint technology successfully on a pre-production model.

The fingerprint sensor — made by sensor company Synaptics — lives beneath the six-inch OLED display and uses an AI processor that’s trained to recognise 300 different characteristics.

Using light from the screen, an optical image sensor beneath the display receives your fingerprint and the phone unlocks.

Synaptics claim the fingerprint reader won’t suck up more battery by illuminating your finger, promising its power management will be on par with industry standards.

If all this holds true, I would expect to see all the major flagships move toward the technology in the coming years.


LG's TV RANGE:

Last year LG unveiled a “wallpaper” TV that is thinner than your smartphone and could sit flush on any surface.
This year they took things further and showcased a 65-inch flexible television screen that rolls down into a small tube like a poster.
Even more impressive is the rolling feature is controlled by the press of a button, with the screen capable of only partly rolling out so you can check information like weather.
While that is only a prototype, all of LGs traditional OLEDs and UHD LCD TV line-ups have received significant refinements and have a large focus on the company’s ThinQ artificial intelligence platform.
Part of this improvement has seen LG also adding both Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa to both of the ranges.

The ‘wallpaper’ TV is so flexible that it can be rolled down into a small tube.

The exciting thing is the Google Assistant doesn’t require commands like with other products, instead it’s summoned with the press of a button.

Using the assistant will allow you to find out more information on who is in a movie you are watching, show photos from your Google Photos or even ask the TV to turn off when the program you are watching ends — we all know someone with a partner who needs that.

For the high-end OLED models, an improved software and image processor means the screen deliver even more accurate colour and “enhanced image rendering” — especially helpful when up-scaling the quality of your free-to-air image.

Also new to the 2018 LG line-up is support for high frame rates (HFR) up to 120fps, which makes for a smoother picture.

SAMSUNG’S “THE WALL”:

Meet Samsung’s “The Wall”.
The product is a giant 146-inch TV with a micro-LED display — each one of the vast array of microscopic LEDs emits light, which eliminates the need for backlight.

Removing backlight gets rid of the illumination spills that occur when light moves past the targeted pixel, which means the screen is able to produce contrasts of lush colours and deep blacks.

Usually this is only something reserved for similar OLED technology, although micro-LED is pitched as a superior alternative because it offers both deep blacks and bright highlights.

The products will be pricey because it’s expensive to individually place LEDs.
As far as the design goes, the ‘module-based’ display has removed all bezel and “can be used to create a wall-sized display, or simply let consumers increase their traditional screen size to suit a new room in the home”.

Samsung was reserved about how this concept will work commercially and with pricing, but it looks impressive nonetheless and puts the company in direct line with some of its competition using OLEDs.

RAZER PROJECT LINDA: 

Hot off launching its first smartphone pitched to gamers, computer hardware company Razer is angling to make that phone your only device. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week the company introduced Project Linda, a shell of a laptop powered by the company’s smartphone.

Razer isn’t the first to try to pull off the phone/laptop combo; Motorola had a similar concept in 2011 called the Atrix Lapdock, and Samsung has tried to have the smartphone adapt into a desktop computer, with the help of a dock and screen.

But Razer’s attempt differs. The laptop looks almost identical to Razer’s Blade brand of gaming laptops, except for a smartphone-shaped well where a laptop’s

trackpad typically sits. To use it, you drop your Razer smartphone into the gap, and press a button in the upper-right of the laptop’s keyboard. A USB-C mechanically slides into the phone, and the phone screen’s contents are shown on the laptop screen. Since the phone naturally has a screen, the touchpad also becomes a second display for anything; I could imagine it showing wallpaper or even a file browser when summoned.


The laptop shell doesn’t have the standard internals of a laptop, instead being mostly a case for a 1080p display, 53.6 Whr battery, and a hard drive to extend the phone’s storage.

Razer showed three laptop/smartphone combos on the CES floor, and stressed that the devices are early prototypes. The unit that I tried required me to use a mouse to control the laptop’s cursor, because the touchscreen of the phone still couldn’t be used as a trackpad.

Apps like the Google Chrome browser quickly snapped on screen, and on its surface the device acted a lot like Samsung’s DeX, which I reviewed last year. To circumvent the phone’s low compute power compared to a gaming PC, Razer has partnered with Shadow, a company that runs games on their own servers and then streams them to low-power computers with very little lag (depending on the internet connection).

The phone is still a “project” rather than a full product, and Razer hasn’t said if it plans to actually make these devices and sell them in the next year.