The first virtual CES ever has kept us busy all week, and we have done our best to spot the most outstanding products and companies. As the show comes to an end, here are our “Best of CES,” the products that left an impression and that everyone should know about if you only had a few minutes to catch up with all things CES.
CES has managed to bring the Samsung Galaxy S21 launch within its gravitational pull, and what a launch. The Galaxy S21, S21 Plus, and S21 Ultra are a great trio of smartphones span in price from $799.99 to $1199.99, and they are very competitive and rounded smartphones.
Gaming laptop often rimes with “heavy laptop,” but in 2021, things are evolving for the better. Among the various thin & light gaming laptops we looked at, the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE caught our attention, with its 3.75 Lbs weight, NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU, Intel i7-11375H CPU all loaded in a modern and stylish chassis.
Another light gaming laptop we absolutely loved is the Asus ROG Flow X13. At 2.9 Lbs, it is lighter than many simple office-productivity laptops despite packing a full-on NVIDIA GTX 1650 graphics processor and an AMD Ryzen 5900HS CPU with 16GB of RAM. It’s going to be hard to find a lighter gaming laptop than this, but at $3000, we don’t expect the masses to afford it.
Qualcomm keeps improving the ultrasonic fingerprint scanning every year, and this new 3D Sonic Sensor Gen 2 is 50% faster than last year’s model. The increased sensor size will reduce false-negative reading when placing the fingertip a little bit off the mark. Since we unlock our phones more than 150 times daily, this technology will make our lives that much better.
How high-tech can a lipstick pod get? Well, consider this: the YSL Lipstick Pod blends three base colors to obtain any possible in-between shades the mix allows, like a printer would. Currently, available color sets are red, nude, orange, or fuchsia, but technically, more could be created (photo above: the cartridges being loaded from the bottom).
The Honor MagicBook Pro is a $1000 16-inch that brings a lot of value to the table. It is lighter than most competitors (3.75 Lbs) but comes with a discrete NVIDIA GPU, which vastly increases game compatibility and offers better performance than integrated graphics. The overall design looks modern, and is much more premium than its price would suggest.
Klaxoon has impressed us with Board, their next-gen virtual workspace. There is an incredible number of dashboards and collaborative space, and we’ve seen (and tried) so many, but Board is head and shoulder above the crowd. You can watch the video demo (follow the link), but even Microsoft uses it internally, so the Klaxoon folks are definitely onto something.
The ThinkReality A3 smart glasses are everything you would not expect from an enterprise AR product: small, sleek, and potentially widely useful. One of the things it can is to replace five PC monitors, and if it is as good as it sounds, it will fulfill one of the Augmented Reality promise to virtualize displays.
The moto one 5G ace is the most promising affordable 5G phone we have spotted at CES 2021. With its Snapdragon 750 5G it is a very capable multimedia and gaming handset. In the back, it has a good camera array, and at $399, it is a must-see 5G smartphone. It’s hard to ask for more.
A few years ago, curved displays were all the rage because they can bring a superior sense of immersion for a single user placed at the center of their curve radius. However, flat screens made a come back because they don’t protrude from the walls and are more group-friendly. The LG 48-inch bendable OLED display brings both as you can decide and change the curve radius from totally flat to various levels of curvature. Who said we could not have it all?
We haven’t been this excited about the robot vacuum cleaner for years: the Roborock S7 is built on top of one of the smartest, most-performant vacuum robot platform. This model can vacuum and mop in a single pass, potentially reducing the time it takes to fully clean the floor. One of the downsides of cleaning robots is the noise they make while cleaning. This could possibly cut the length by half. Well done.
As phones got more powerful, I have not seriously used an iPad for a while, but the Kensington Studio Dock could change that. Its design is superb and it holds the iPad Pro ergonomically and elegantly, so create what seems to be the cutest all-in-one computer. Its base even has a wireless charger for your phone. Apple should have made that one, but we’re glad Kensington did.