The Verge - CeBIT 2012: ultrabooks, tablets, eye-tracking devices, and more!

Roccat demos Power-Grid iPhone companion app for PC gaming (video)

2012-03-09T02:58:01Z

After announcing his company's new Power-Grid app for iOS earlier this week, Roccat CEO Rene Korte spent some time with us showing off its capabilities. Power-Grid will offer extended gaming controls alongside your traditional keyboard and mouse setup. The free app consists of three pre-installed control grids: Incoming Center, Stats Control, and Sound Control. The Incoming Center pulls in voice and text from TeamSpeak, Skype, Twitter, and more, and displays all the text from the services in a scrolling feed. It's pretty flexible, and you're free to remove anything from the app on the fly. The Stats Control brings up your system information including CPU stats, RAM usage, network traffic, and hard drive space. The final pre-installed...

Tobii introduces next-gen eye tracking at CeBIT (video)

2012-03-08T16:07:10Z

Tobii has announced the second generation of its eye-tracking hardware at CeBIT in Hannover, with the promise of better performance in a smaller package. We tested the old hardware with limited success back at CES, and although the company wasn't demoing its replacement it has implemented some software improvements which led to a much better experience this time. Nicolas Pezzarossa, the General Manager of the Tobii's German division, took some time to talk with us about the improvements the company has made to its product since January.

The new sensor is roughly half the size of its predecessor, and is the first suitable for mass production. Although this generation is unlikely to find its way into mainstream consumer products, Tobii...

Caterpillar launches CAT B10 rugged smartphone (hands-on)

2012-03-08T13:20:10Z

Caterpillar has announced the CAT B10, a new IP67-certified rugged Android smartphone that it hopes will contend with the likes of the Motorola Defy+ and the Samsung Rugby Smart. We spent some time with the B10 at CeBIT and attempted to put its ruggedness to the test. Caterpillar is better known for its construction equipment than for making phones, but we weren't able to find out who actually makes the device. The phone will certainly look the part next to a bulldozer: it's around an inch thick and covered in rubber apart from its 3.2-inch display, which has Asahi (a competitor to Corning) strengthened glass. The device was on display under a stream of water, so it's certainly water-resistant, but we weren't allowed check on...

Viota M970 tablet has Android 4.0, 1.5GHz processor, and Mali 400 graphics for $120 (hands-on)

2012-03-07T16:30:27Z

Viota? We've never heard of the company either. It's been at CeBIT showing off its M970 tablet to retail buyers and journalists alike, and we decided to take a closer look at this mysterious device. The M970 we saw has a 9.7-inch LCD display with 786 x 1024 resolution, a uni-core 1.5GHz Cortex A8 processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB of storage and a 6000mAh battery. There's also a five-megapixel rear camera and two-megapixel front-facing unit. While the specifications are a little uninspiring, the tablet runs Android 4.0, has a Mali 400 graphics chip, and in this configuration has an MSRP of $120. Viota tells us that production models will have up to 1GB of RAM, a microSD slot, and optional 3G connectivity accessible by a (at the moment empty)...

Intel: ultrabooks aren't 'a price and volume exercise'

2012-03-07T16:24:47Z

Ultrabooks are Intel's strategy for building a new ecosystem of software, services and ultraportable hardware around its chips. They are the physical embodiment of an effort to bring "more emotional content" to the idea of mobile computing. They're slim and they're sexy. The one thing they're not, however, is cheap.

Acer has been trying hard to change that by selling its entry-level S3 ultrabook at cost and making it publicly known that it's targeting a sub-$500 price point for 2013. Such actions might appear to be the harbinger of a new race to the bottom of the pricing scale, but Intel thinks differently. Today I spoke with Dave Rogers, Intel's marketing manager for Europe, who told me that "how little it will cost is not really the...

Intel touchscreen ultrabook prototype: the future, today (hands-on video)

2012-03-07T12:37:11Z

We've found our highlight of CeBIT 2012: it's Intel's 13.3-inch ultrabook with a capacitive touchscreen. Just one prototype laptop is making its way through the vast dungeons of Hannover this week, but we tracked it down (thanks, Chippy!) and it's an absolute delight to use. Intended to show how OEMs can enhance their ultrabooks with touch, this machine is running Windows 7 and doing a splendid job of navigating through the Zinio digital magazine app. The experience of using it is identical to what you'll already be used to with your smartphone or tablet — it's just that capacitive screens have up until now tended to be limited to form factors of 10 inches and below.

Of course, Zinio is just a demo platform for the touch...

MSI launches GT60 and GT70 high-end gaming laptops (hands-on)

2012-03-07T12:25:23Z

MSI has introduced a pair of new gaming laptops at CeBIT this week and we're here to test them out for ourselves. The GT60 and GT70 both include Full HD displays, with the 60's measuring 15.6 inches and the 70's 17.3. The matte screens have great viewing angles and the sort of rich colors usually reserved for glossy models. Inside, a quad-core Core i7 Ivy Bridge processor will be joined by up to 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 600 series discrete graphics card. Also included is support for MSI's "SuperRAID" technology, which pairs two SSDs in RAID 0 and adds an HDD for storage.

The company has collaborated with PC peripheral maker Steelseries for the laptops' keyboards, which in typical gaming laptop fashion light up in a wide array of...

Acer: $799 ultrabooks make no profit, aiming for $499 price nonetheless

2012-03-07T02:06:01Z

Acer Global President Jianren Weng has been quoted at CeBIT today reiterating something he said at the beginning of December: ultrabooks will drop to the crazy-low price of $499 in 2013 and compete directly against Apple's iPad. This consistent (and aggressive) proclamation prompted us to go and speak with some of Mr. Weng's product managers at the Hannover trade show and gather their perspective on how realistic his ambitions are. As it turned out, attitudes on the ground are a lot less optimistic.

Speaking with Christoph Pohlmann of Acer's laptop team, we learned that the current $799 / €699 price for the Aspire S3 is too low for Acer to actually generate any profit from it. The company is merely breaking even when selling its...