Polaroid and Technicolor are known as trailblazers that grew into iconic American brands. However, both companies have gone through so much trauma over the last decade — bankruptcy, new ownership, and general identity crisis — that their modern incarnations bear little resemblance to the...
A tale of two dinosaurs
The controversial digital currency Bitcoin has a display at CES. It's a good-sized booth, featuring a giant picture of a smiling woman holding an iPhone running a Bitcoin app. Crystal Campbell, a waitress who works at an Orlando restaurant that...
Bitcoin cleans up nice
CES is not a games show, as Sony CEO Kaz Hirai pointed out to us in our interview with him last week. That's his reason for the dearth of PlayStation news at CES this year — the PS3 and Vita were hardly even mentioned at Sony's press conference. And of course, Microsoft didn't come at all, so we weren't treated to any Xbox hype at the annual Steve Ballmer keynote (which was replaced with a m...
I'm something of an electric skateboard veteran. Last year at CES I rode the Board of Awesomeness, an electric skateboard that uses a Kinect and a Windows 8 tablet to function. This year at CES I had the opportunity to ride the ZBoard; an electric skateboard that works like a Segway — leaning...
Samsung gave us a brief glimpse during it keynote today of its first phone using a flexible display, and now we've just had the opportunity to handle the device for ourselves. The phone, which is a nameless prototype, has a screen that falls off towards the rear edge of the device on the right...
Last week I found myself slouched on a couch, ten feet away from a pair of $107,000 speakers. I was on the 35th floor of The Venetian hotel, which towers over the tail end of the Las Vegas strip. I was listening to an overwrought piano cover of Joni Mitchell’s immortal “A Case of You.” I was unhappy.
Moments before I’d listened to a pair of $75,000 speakers. Moments before that, I enjoyed my second demo of the best-of-show favorite Oculus Rift VR goggles. Maybe I was still nauseated from the Oculus demo, or maybe I was just a little tired, but I got to wondering, “Is this all the pleasure that a $107,000 pair of speakers can...
Remember when we thought Microsoft was building a tablet designed for cataloging inspiration?
This year's CES has been the usual wild ride of product announcements and press conference mayhem, but for me it was about a lot more than just tablets or phones. Instead, I've been taking a personal journey into the dark side of CES 2013; the perfect dream portrayed by companies who want to own your life. That's right — I'm talking about home appliances. Last year's encounters with "smart" washers, closets, and windows convinced me that I'd found my new beat. And this year, I couldn't shake the feeling that my show experience had already been summed up best by my erudite colleague Nilay Patel when he covered Samsung's atypically relaxed...
"Evernote on your fridge, man, it's here." Nilay Patel
"'Tired but vaguely aroused' pretty much describes my CES experience."
2013 was the first time in many years that Microsoft didn't host the opening keynote for the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. Instead, the show went to Qualcomm and its CEO, Dr. Paul Jacobs. We weren't quite sure what to expect beyond...
We just met with the team behind the Oculus Rift, which started out as a DIY project that quickly morphed into into a Kickstarter success story. Oculus is here at CES showing off the dev kit it plans to ship out to backers in March, and got a chance to play with near-final hardware and software...
Friends, acquaintances, co-conspirators, everyone in between: thank you. It was a crazy week of newsgathering, photographing, video producing, showrunning, podcasting, binge eating, power-napping, and above all, storytelling.
What did we do? We lost ourselves in the Oculus Rift. We experienced...
Are news and reviews subject to different ethical standards? That appears to be the message from CBS in response to Dish's controversial Hopper DVR. Official CBS policy now bans CNET from reviewing products implicated in lawsuits, but claims CNET...
With Sony, Samsung, LG, and others all present at CES, smartphone announcements are in full swing. Newcomers to the smartphone game like Vizio are making their grand entrance in Las Vegas as well, while established companies like Huawei are doing...
Remember how ads in Minority Report were interactive? We've just played with a demo unit of such a system here at CES 2013; it's called Swivel digital signage, and it uses a Kinect sensor to place clothes and accessories onto passersby. The idea...
CNET has confirmed what we reported this morning: the commercial-skipping Dish Hopper had been chosen for its "Best of CES" award before being overruled by parent company CBS. In a post, Editor-in-Chief of Reviews Lindsey Turrentine describes the...
“I think most people feel that if you can find a way to beat the casino, more power to you,” says Arnold Synder, his eyes, those telltale features, hidden behind a pair of black sunglasses. “This place set up the rules, they provide the...
Microsoft might not have been at CES this year, but its partners and OEMs were out in full force. A quiet showing from Redmond at a time when the company is trying to push Windows 8 to the world could be seen as an unusual move, but looking around...
Now that Pebble has announced it's shipping to Kickstarter backers on January 23rd, the company is finally ready to show off the final hardware and software on its smartwatch. We spent some time putting the watch through its paces and talking with...
Huawei, Hisense, Changhong. These names are unfamiliar to Americans for now, but in a few years they will be as synonymous with consumer electronics as Sony and Samsung.
That’s the party line out of China, at least, where major electronics...
Microsoft didn't have a booth or even an official press event at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, but that didn't stop the company from jumping on stage twice. CEO Steve Ballmer joined Qualcomm for its bizarre opening keynote, and more...
Today I was lucky enough to experience driving the Mondo Spider, a 1600 lb, five foot-tall and eight foot-long mechanical spider powered by hydraulics. The spider was built in 2006 by eatART, a non-profit in Vancouver, B.C, and can move at up to...
Well, another CES is over and done with. The trailer is being dismantled and most of our team is in flight from Las Vegas or will be soon.
For us, CES isn't just about covering news, and writing features and reports, and doing liveblogs. Well, it...
Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the next in the series.
As LL Cool J took the stage at Sony’s massive exhibition space I was ready to pronounce this year’s CES dead on arrival. He was there to hype his regrettably-named music collaboration software...
First, the bad news: CES is ending. All the cool stuff on the show floor is being packed into crates, loaded into tractor trailers and shipped home. The television walls are coming down and the demos are being dismantled. By Tuesday, all this stuff will be somewhere else. And by now, it should be...
There were plenty of trends here at CES 2013, and we'd be remiss to overlook all of the activity trackers and other health-related tech devices that were shown off at the show. If you're looking to catch up, you're in the right place.
We first heard about Formlabs’s high-resolution Form 1 3D printer back in September. Where most mainstream printers use the equivalent of a hot glue gun to lay plastic down layer-upon-layer in order to build up a part, the Formlabs’s approach uses stereolithography: an approach that uses a...
We're a roving video team without a studio to call home. Nomads with a monopod and dream, our determination to bring you news knows no bounds or need for a lease / rental agreement / mortgage. Collectively, we know no bounds, and even in our more mobile state, we can't help but report the big stories. Any where. Any how. Anyway, here we go.
Goodbye Vegas, we'll see you next year.
There's no doubt about it — CES 2013 marked the point where fitness- and health-tracking devices became a legitimate affair. The category until now has been dominated by a few success stories — Fitbit, FuelBand, and so on — and true to CES...
CES introduced an entrepreneur-focused keynote this year called "Next Generation of Innovators," part of a larger strategy to pull in smaller startups to the trade show. Black Eyed Peas member-turned-techie will.i.am stole the show with his J...
So 3013
CES is winding down, and while we're furiously applying ChapStick and eyedrops to keep ourselves from drying up and disintegrating, we've taken some time to pick the best of the best from this year's show for the inaugural Verge Awards. From the Oculus Rift to the Samsung easel TV to the Qualcomm...
The original Clamcase was one of the most flawed iPad keyboards we tried in our roundup — since then, the company has gone back to the drawing board and is now debuting a much-improved new model called the Clamcase Pro. Aside from being iPad keyboard cases that feature a flexible, laptop-style...
