Technology news

CES is always a show about the future of TVs, and this year is particularly interesting. Not only are 4K HDR TVs better and cheaper than ever, but the software side of things is opening up in unprecedented ways. Not only are Google Assistant and Alexa control everywhere, but Apple’s embracing the TV industry for the first time: Vizio and LG TVs will support AirPlay 2 and HomeKit, while Samsung TVs will get an iTunes Movies & TV app, as well as AirPlay 2 support.
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The UK government has announced new powers for police to tackle illegal use of drone technology, including powers to land, seize and search drones.
This follows the recent Gatwick drone fiasco when, just before Christmas, a spate of drone sightings near the airport caused a temporary shutdown of the runway, and disruptive misery for thousands of people at one of the busiest travel times of the year.
“The police will have the power to search premises and seize drone

Samsung’s last few entries into its flagship Notebook 9 lineup have all been plagued by a similar problem: they looked and felt really, really cheap. The computers were fine, even great, with top-tier specs and performance, but recent models like last year’s Notebook 9 Pen felt and looked more like a $400 Chromebook than a $1,400 professional PC. At CES 2019, Samsung is trying to change that with the new Notebook 9 Pro, which actually looks and feels like a flagship laptop again.
Th

Samsung is announcing two new laptops at CES. The company is launching a pro-level laptop called the Notebook 9 Pro and a laptop for student called the Notebook Flash.
The Notebook Flash is an entry-level laptop with a textured design. It looks like fabric but it’s made out of plastic. The screen doesn’t look great to be honest — it has a narrow viewing angle.
And specs aren’t that great. 64GB of storage, 4GB of RAM and entry-level Intel CPUs. The good news is that it has

Last year, Amazonjoined the exclusive $1 trillion club. This year, it’s continuing to exude its stock market dominance.
Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce giant accumulated $797 billion in market value on Monday, ending the day trading up 3.4 percent at $1,629.51 per share and overtaking Microsoftto become the most valuable publicly-traded company in the U.S.
Microsoft, which shot past Apple to nab the title on Nov. 28, closed up .1 percent at $102.06 per share Monday with a

TV makers love to use CES as a launch pad for TVs that they don’t actually expect a ton of people to buy. This year’s “eh, why not?” swing from Samsung: a 98-inch 8K QLED TV.
“Wait, is there even anything to watch in 8K yet?”
Nope, not really. Hell, even content natively shot in 4K still isn’t as common as anyone would like.There’s always upscaling (Samsung says they’ve built some pretty fancy, machine learning-based upscaling here), but if n

Bixby took centerstage at today’s big Samsung CES presser. The company has been pushing to make its smart assistant a kind of connective tissue across devices, and the the fruits of that labor may finally be taking shape this year.
Third-party partners have been a long promised addition, and the company just announced a pretty big one.  Sure Google’s pushing its own assistant, but the company will also be bringing some of its top apps to Bixby. The list includes Gmail, YouTube,

Let’s face it, we love large numbers. We are obsessed with them, whether it’s Forbes list of wealthiest individuals or tech unicorns, if it’s a big number we can’t get enough. Such is the case with the somehow magical trillion dollar mark that Apple briefly reached last summer. We splashed the headlines and glorified it as though it mattered…but it didn’t.
It was just a number.
Sure it showed the tremendous value of the Applestock, but it was a moment in time

NASA’s newest planet-hunting spacecraft has already spied and confirmed a third world outside our Solar System — just three months into the vehicle’s science operations. This newly discovered planet, or exoplanet, is relatively close by, orbiting a small star just 53 light-years away. And that means we may be able to study this world more extensively, to figure out what its atmosphere might hold.
The discoverer of these worlds is NASA’s TESS satellite — a spacecraf

HTC has announced a new virtual reality headset called the Vive Cosmos. Based on a very brief appearance during the company’s CES presentation, the Cosmos is HTC’s bid at a relatively mainstream VR headset. It doesn’t require external sensors and uses fully tracked motion controllers, and it’s being pitched as a convenient device with “absolute comfort” and “easy setup,” intended for either home or mobile use. But we don’t know how much it c

Kohler,the company established in 1873 and best known for its plumbing products, has shown little restraint in the connected home era. The company debuted a connected appliance platform called Kohler Konnect at CES 2018, and the push continues this year.
Feast your eyes on the Kohler Numi 2.0.This is an intelligent toilet that uses surround sound speakers and dynamic ambient lighting systems to hopefully immerse you in an environment so tranquil, so idyllic, that you actually forget you’re

Samsung’s latest smart fridge is more proactive than what you might be used to. The company says it will troubleshoot issues and notify you via the SmartThings app. The new Samsung Family Hub 4.0 refrigerator will give you a smoother interface to use that builds on previous generations’ app improvements. You can still head to the grocery store and check if your fridge has milk, just like before. But now, the fridge can also let you know if you’ve left the door open.
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If your dream home involves a big screen on your fridge, then Family Hub is for you. Samsung has been developing some custom features to turn the fridge into a functional, shared display for all the family. And the company is announcing at CES an update to Family Hub with new features.
The interface has been completely redesigned from the ground up. Apps should be able to talk to each other better than before. And it’s not limited to the fridge anymore. You can start your oven from your fr

Google continued its unstoppable takeover of CES 2019 by announcing that Samsung TVs will soon offer Assistant compatibility. The feature, which is arriving later this year, will give users the ability to adjust volume, change channels and switch image input.Compatibility requires a separate piece of Google Assistant hardware — like a Home, Home Hub or third-party smart display or speaker. No surprise the announcement doesn’t include native Assistant support, but it’s still a n

Vive has seemed to be devoting a lot of attention to the enterprise, but the company teased their new consumer VR headset called the Vive Cosmos at CES today. The positionally-tracked headset boasts tracked hand controllers and can be interestingly be powered via PC or “other methods,” making it the first in a new class of hybrid VR headsets.
We’d like to give you a first look at VIVE COSMOS, the newest VR headset from VIVE. #HTCVIVECOSMOS #HTCVIVE #VIVEPORT pic.twitter.com/oP0

Accessories manufacturer Zagg announced a new line of keyboard cases for the iPad and iPad Pro today. These are some of the only iPad cases with dedicated storage for an Apple Pencil as well as multiple viewing angles that allow you to transform the iPad into a convertible tablet, similar to the Microsoft Surface.
There are three new cases in total — the Slim Book Go, Messenger Folio, and Rugged Book Go — all of which put an iPad case together with a keyboard and kickstand.
The Slim

Jake Paul is the latest YouTube celebrity to jump on the heavily criticized Bird Box challenge, taking it one step further by driving while blindfolded and walking out into the middle of a busy Los Angeles street. Even as a performed stunt, Paul’s video violates YouTube’s community guidelines.Bird Box challenges have become increasingly popular on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The idea is to walk around for a period of time while blindfolded, much like characters di

HTCis giving its high-end enterprise-focused Vive Pro VR headset a feature bump in the next few months that’s focused on eye-tracking.
The company has certainly been having some financial struggles recently, those issues have seemed to force the company to more firmly fix its VR efforts on enterprise markets while loosely aiming to court consumers that aren’t scared away by the higher price point.
What does eye-tracking in a VR headset enable? Well, a few things actually. The most ta

HTC and its software partner Valve have been steadily working on premium, desktop-grade virtual reality with the Vive for a few years now, while Oculus VR focuses on the mainstream consumer market and Sony targets PlayStation owners. Part of HTC’s push to capture that high-end VR market involves giving users more to do in VR besides just play some neat games, and today at CES, HTC said it’s partnering with Mozilla to make the Firefox Reality browser the default web browsing app for

HTC announced a new variant of its high-end Vive Pro virtual reality headset today at CES that comes with native, built-in eye tracking. The device is called the Vive Pro Eye, and it promises to bring higher-quality VR experiences, thanks to a technique called “foveated rendering” that focuses only on what the human eye is looking at in a virtual scene and reduces the image quality of objects on the periphery.In addition to higher-quality images, eye tracking in VR also opens up new

Several weeks after it was reported by the WSJ that two of the biggest investors in SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund vehicle were cool on its planned $16 billion investment in the coworking company WeWork, those plans have changed radically, says the Financial Times.
According to its sources — and confirmed by our own — SoftBankis now in “detailed negotiations” to invest a comparatively modest $2 billion more into WeWork, plans that could be firmed up as soon as the e

It’s not really CES until Samsung has taken the stage. The company’s annual keynote is one of the tentpole events for the giant consumer electronics show. Sure, the company keeps its mobile powder dry until Mobile World Congress rolls around, but CES is the time when the rest of company’s businesses can shine.
It’s hard to say for sure what will be on display at today’s event, but if past years are any indication (and they usually are), the event will be focused on

When Matrix came out with its first PowerWatch the watch world was enamored. The self-powered smart watch would suck energy from your skin by using the temperature differential between your skin and the air, allowing it to run indefinitely without charging. Now the team has added a solar feature to their latest PowerWatch 2 which lets the watch both steal energy from your soul and the sol.
The watch is on Indiegogo now for $199 and it’s already raised $445,000. It will ship in March.
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This is Bell Nexus, the “air taxi” concept from the company formerly known as Bell Helicopter. A hyrbid-electric propulsion aircraft, the Nexus will use six tilting ducted fans to take off and land vertically from a rooftop or launchpad. And more importantly, you may be able to hail one for a crosstown trip using Uber’s new aerial service in the not-too-distant future.Air taxis, or flying cars if you’re feeling saucy, are enjoying an upswing in popularity, and the Fort W

Corsair is known for RAM sticks, power supplies, and a line of rakish, FPS-friendly gaming mice, which have plenty of fans. Now, it’s adding a wireless mouse with a new proprietary frequency-hopping wireless technology, called Slipstream, to keep your gameplay lag-free. In fact, it’s a mouse of many connectivity options, including a 2.4GHz USB wireless receiver housed inside of the unit, Bluetooth support, and a fully functioning (data and charging) wired USB connection, as well as

Nvidia’s big announcement during its CES press conference yesterday — mobile RTX GPUs for gaming laptops — was an expected one. The company has always worked to find the balance of power consumption, heat production, and the delicate GPU-CPU dance required to fit a desktop graphics chip into the slim, portable package of a notebook. Yet with the RTX 2060 / 2070 / 2080 series, we’re starting to see the delta between what’s been considered “desktop” and l

Qualcommused its CES press conference today to announce the third generation of its Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform, its latest AI-centric platform for building in-car experiences that include everything from voice-driven interfaces to good-old navigation systems, all with modern visual interfaces.
The platform now comes in three tiers — Performance, Premiere and Paramount — for entry-level, mid-tier and high-end platforms. The core is the same, though, and it’s built on

Harley-Davidson dropped some important details about its forthcoming (and hotly anticipated) electric motorcycle, LiveWire. The motorcycle manufacturer announced it would begin taking preorders for its first electric two-wheeler, with deliveries expected later this fall. But it won’t come cheap: the LiveWire’s list price starts at $29,799.That’s significantly more than other electric motorcycles on the market today. Zero, which has been called the “Tesla of motorcycles,&

Next-generation Wi-Fi routers are all over the place at CES this year, and while Netgear doesn’t have one to debut right this second, it is promising a big launch for later in the year. The company says it’s working on a version of its Orbi mesh router that supports Wi-Fi 6, allowing it to take advantage of the improved speeds while spreading internet signal from different routers across a home.
Wi-Fi 6 is coming... throughout the year
Right now, details are borderline nonexistent.

Ahead of its announcements of new TV partnerships at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Rokutoday shared some new numbers about the growing traction of its overall platform. The company said the number of active accounts grew 40 percent year-over-year in 2018, to top 27 million by year-end. In addition, its total streaming hours grew 61 percent year-over-year to 24 billion hours of movies, TV shows, sports and more being streamed across its devices.
In Q4 2018 alone, Roku

Uberis expected to raise $10 billion later this year in one of the largest U.S. initial public offerings in history. The float will value the ride-hailing giant somewhere between $76 billion — the valuation it garnered with its last private financing — and $120 billion — a sky-high figure assigned by Wall Street bankers that’s had even early Uber investors scratching their heads.
A new report from The Information pegs Uber’s initial market cap at $90 billion. To dev

Let’s hope you’re not afraid of dogs, because if Continental gets its way, autonomous robot dogs are going to be delivering your packages. At the Consumer Electronics Show today, Continental unveiled its Black Mirror-esque vision for how driverless vehicles can autonomously deploy bots to facilitate last-mile deliveries.
But it’s not just to look cool while also horrifying you — it’s designed to increase availability, efficiency and safety in the realm of packa

Compared to the mostly plastic constructions of the Google Home and Amazon Echo, House of Marley’s new battery-powered Google Assistant speaker is pretty eye-catching. The Get Together Mini is made of a combination of bamboo and aluminum, and is wrapped in fabric made from cotton, hemp and recycled plastics. Combined, this creates what the company claims is the highest percentage of sustainable materials used to build any Google Assistant smart speaker.The inclusion of Google’s voic

The international electronics and medical device giant Philips is pushing further into pregnancy and childcare services by leading a $6 million early stage investment in the pregnancy-focused app-developer and device manufacturer, Babyscripts. 
The Washington, DC-based company works with hospitals and healthcare providers to distribute a medical device and mobile app for monitoring blood pressure and providing neonatal care information for expecting mothers.
According to Babyscripts co

LG’s CES keynotes have a habit of being all over the place, and that was true as ever this year. The company’s presentation opened on smart appliances, transitioned into a beer brewing gadget, and closed with an incredible TV that can roll up and hide when it isn’t in use. And there were plenty of awkward moments mixed in.
If you want to catch up, we’ve trimmed the 45 minute event into an 8 minute supercut that gets straight to the big announcements. You can watch the vi

A new company called Flexit lets you pay for gym time by the minute, allowing you to walk into a nearby gym when you’re traveling, for example, and slam out thirty minutes of sweet glute action before dinner. The service is like Uber for gyms in that you only pay for the time you are inside the gym and you don’t need to pay monthly fees or a flat rate per visit.
Created by Michael Rojas, the co-CEO of Iron Grip Barbell Company, the service already has 400 gyms in the United States an

As the world’s third-largest TV manufacturer, Hisense has a lot to live up to when announcing its 2019 lineup of TVs at CES. The headlining product is the Sonic One TV, a “self-contained” TV with a piezoelectric speaker that allows sound to be delivered from the panel to viewers sitting nearby. It’s a super thin television, measuring just 1.1 inches at its thickest point, thanks to the aforementioned speaker tech.
While some high-end TVs that deliver sound through the di

Corsair is known for RAM sticks, power supplies, and a line of rakish, FPS-friendly gaming mice, which have plenty of fans. Now, it’s adding a wireless mouse with 60 hours of battery life and new proprietary frequency-hopping wireless tech to keep things lag-free. There’s also a new ergonomic mouse suited for bear claw and palm-gripped users. Then there’s the M65 RGB Elite, a mouse you may have missed. (Tech sites started reviewing it just last month.)
Frequency-hopping isn&rs

The self-driving vehicle evangelists are uniting.
A number of major automakers, technology companies and organizations with a stake in autonomous vehicles, including Audi,Aurora,Cruise, GM, Mobileye,Nvidia, Toyota, Waymo and Zoox has formed a coalition to spread the word about advanced vehicle technologies and self-driving vehicles. Their message: this tech can transform transportation and make it safer and more sustainable.
The Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, or PAVE, coalition was an

AT&T has updated three smartphones from Samsung and LG to make them show 5G connectivity logos, even though none of them are capable of connecting to 5G networks.
Now, when the Samsung Galaxy S8 Active, LG V30, or LG V40 are connected to portions of AT&T’s LTE network that have received some speed-boosting updates, they’ll show an icon that says “5G E” instead of “LTE.”That “E” in the “5G” logo is supposed to tip you off that t

Technics has announced a new DJ turntable at CES 2019. Dubbed the SL-1200MK7, this is the first time the company has added to its legendary SL-1200MK series in nearly 11 years. Its most recent predecessors — the SL-1200MK6-K and SL-1200MK6-S — came out in February 2008 in Japan. Technics hasn’t said when this turntable will be available or what it will cost, but considering this is a turn back to the line’s heyday, it should be more affordable than some more recent model

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributorVenture capital, global expansion, blockchain and drones characterize African tech in 2018 IBM Africa and Hello Tractor pilot AI/blockchain agtech platform
Harley Davidson released new specs for its electric motorcycle and pulled the covers off the concept designs for its electric bicycle and scooter as the company’s push into electrifying its prod