The Verge - CES 2013: The Verge reports

A modern gaming ecosystem emerges, with Microsoft gone and Sony silent

2013-01-17T19:45:04Z

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 mind trip from Qualcomm).

And yet, this sure was a great CES for gamers. We got the new high-powered Tegra 4, Exynos 5 Octa, and Snapdragon 800 chips, which are exciting in their own right, and Nvidia's Shield handheld gaming console to make use of this new-gen ARM power directly. Ouya makes a home console out of Tegra 3, and people seem to love it....

Ultrabook, round two: can Intel control the future of the laptop?

2013-01-16T19:45:03Z

There aren't many companies that can set a new direction for the entire computer industry. Right now, three come to mind: PC manufacturers march to the beat of Microsoft's Windows drum, and many follow Apple's design. The third is Intel, which influences the market behind the scenes with ever more powerful processors and aggressive marketing campaigns.

In 2011, Intel told every PC manufacturer that it needed to have an answer to Apple's MacBook Air, and offered $300 million, among other persuasions, to help OEMs develop and market new designs. Intel called it the ultrabook, and specified a set of ultrabook requirements in terms of thickness, responsiveness, and battery life. The manufacturers complied. While some PC vendors champed at...

Microsoft just teased the next Xbox at CES

2013-01-14T17:32:04Z

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 importantly Microsoft’s Chief Technology Strategy Officer, Eric Rudder, joined the Samsung keynote to showcase the IllumiRoom technology. Based on a combination of a Kinect for Windows camera and a projector, IllumiRoom combines the virtual and physical worlds of a TV and living room for true augmented reality.

The Chinese Electronics Show: can China's biggest brands buy their way into America?

2013-01-13T20:43:46Z

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 makers seem to have simultaneously decided that this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would be their coming-out party.

When Microsoft decided it was too cool for CES and abandoned its anchor booth this year, Chinese megabrand Hisense jumped at the chance to take its place. Hisense’s prominent display easily cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, doubling the square footage of last year’s booth and featuring a giant circular stage, a cultural musical performance, and...

Microsoft's partners fly the Windows 8 flag, but the future is Surface

2013-01-13T13:35:05Z

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 the show this week it made a lot of sense. Why waste millions of dollars on a CES booth to promote Windows 8 when your struggling PC OEMs can do it for you?

Heading home: here's what it takes to leave CES

2013-01-12T16:57:30Z

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 painfully clear that there's a lot of stuff at CES.

In the next three days, it's all coming down

Here are a few numbers to put everything in perspective. Before the first booth has been installed, the show floor has been equipped with 130 miles of electrical cable distributing enough power to light up over a thousand homes. There are electrical drops, massive tension-fabric signs and 30 miles of carpet roll. All of it was put up for CES —...

I rode the ZBoard in Las Vegas and it changed my life

2013-01-11T23:10:19Z

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 forward makes you accelerate, and leaning back slows you down. The ZBoard is yet another Kickstarter success we've seen here at CES 2013, and it blew my mind.

Invasion of the body trackers: take me to your leader

2013-01-11T23:00:52Z

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 form we're seeing a lot more companies attempting to cash in. After all, "people in America, frankly, are really fat" as Fitbit CEO James Park told The Verge in an interview yesterday; the obesity problem has been a hot-button issue for decades, and companies and startups are now attempting to leverage the rise of smartphones to capitalize on the epidemic. According to Travis Bogard, VP of product for Jawbone which produces the Up fitness band, these devices make sense because "people know more...