2012

Forget touch. Forget gestures. Control your laptop with your eyes.

LAS VEGAS--At CES this year, Tobii, which has been making technology that watches what you're looking at on a screen, is showing off its gaze-controlled demo laptop and introducing its eye control interface for Windows 8.

I first met Barbara Barclay, general manager of Tobii North America, at the D9 conference last June, and we had a talk about my reservations over eye control. On paper, this technology is incredibly cool and sci-fi-ish, but my issue is this: We use our eyes to see, not to control. There's a big cognitive difference between looking at something on a screen and touching it (or mousing to it). Eyes are input devices, not output. That's why gaze tracking for analytics makes sense. But for controlling a computer interface? … Read more

CES Moment of Zen: The calm before the storm

LAS VEGAS--In case you didn't know, the Consumer Electronics Show is crazy. Like you-want-to-move-to-a-cave-in-Montana-and-become-a-hermit-when-it's-all-over crazy.

Since our entire staff is going to be running around like headless chickens nonstop for the next five days, I thought I'd take at least one brief moment each day to pause and feature something beautiful or interesting or just completely bizarre.

On this, the eve of Press Day (or what we've taken to calling Day Zero), the sun is down. We have one live blog behind us (only 21 more to go!). Most of our writers are either at the … Read more

Toshiba's new tablet is thinnest yet, but does its price kill it?

LAS VEGAS--Touting a thin product draws lots of attention and not to be outdone by the Transformer Prime in the svelteness department, on Sunday, Toshiba introduced the thinnest tablet yet, its Excite X10.

Compared with the now previous skinny champion, the Transformer Prime, the Excite X10 is a full 0.6mm thinner, measuring 7.7mm, compared with the Prime's 8.3mm profile. At 1.2 pounds, it's also the lightest tablet to date, coming in at 0.4 pound lighter than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

The X10 will come in both 16GB and 32GB varieties, at $… Read more

Toshiba teases a 14-inch ultrabook prototype, we go hands-on

LAS VEGAS--While Toshiba usually has a flood of new laptops every year, the company surprised us this CES by highlighting a single model.

Even more unusual, instead of a ready-to-ship product, it is a still-unnamed 14-inch ultrabook prototype. The unit we saw had a Satellite logo on it, rather than the Portege branding we saw in last year's Z835 (a 13-inch ultrabook currently available for a rock-bottom $799).

Otherwise, it looked very similar, with Toshiba's standard business/consumer crossover look of a gray brushed-metal lid, rounded corners, and an inset screen with a too-thick black plastic bezel.

The keyboard was a standard island-style design, with Toshiba's custom row of page navigation keys along the far right side. We haven't had a chance to use it more than briefly, but the large clickpad looked interesting, with small left and right clickzone indicators etched into it. … Read more

Sony puts screen resolution in the CES spotlight

Sony kicked off its CES press conference this evening by unveiling a prototype "Crystal LED display" that uses miniature light-emitting diodes in place of pixels. The technology, which uses 6 million LEDs mounted on the front of the display, is superior to LCD and plasma and promises "super contrast and superwide color gamut," Sony CEO Howard Stringer told those assembled.

While Sony has this 55-inch prototype on display at the conference, it is no where near production or consumers' hands. (CNET staffers at the show are going to give it a look and report back on … Read more

Acer's cloud strategy too late, too copycat

Acer kicked off the International Consumer Electronics Show with an ultrabook heavy lineup--no surprise--and a proprietary cloud service, which is a bit of a head-scratcher.

CNET's Roger Cheng was on scene for that Acer press conference and reported the following on the cloud strategy (Techmeme).

Acer hopes to set its products apart through its proprietary AcerCloud service, which is designed to let customers sync files across multiple Acer products. In doing so, Acer is trying to emulate other major technology players such as Google, Apple, and Amazon, which rely heavily on cloud services themselves.

Acer demonstrated the three services … Read more

Leak Week makes CES better (opinion)

LAS VEGAS--Will there be any news left to announce on CES 2012 Press Day?

Yes, of course there will. Tomorrow's CES lineup of press conferences is as impressive as ever: CNET will be covering 22 live events by tech headliners by my count. But at least six of them have already lost some thunder. So far, tech media has leaked news from Vizio (now with ultrabooks!), Sprint (4G Galaxy Nexus), Nokia and Windows (Nokia "Ace" 900), Nikon (leaks prompted Nikon to release D4 info early), Acer (more, more, more ultrabooks), and even the toy manufacturer Parrot got … Read more

Thunderbolt strikes LaCie anew, this time 2big

LAS VEGAS--If LaCie's Little Big Disk Thunderbolt is, well, too little for you, get ready for this!

LaCie announced today at CES 2012 that its new LaCie 2big external hard drive now features a Thunderbolt connection. Originally, the 2big series only offered USB 2.0, FireWire, and eSATA for Macs. There's also a version that offers USB 3.0, which is geared toward Windows users.

The fact that the LaCie 2big features dual-volume, allowing for RAID 1 and RAID 0, means that Mac users now have another option, other than the Promise Pegasus, to have a fast external storage device that also offers data security. LaCie's other Thunderbolt drive, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt, only comes with a single internal drive, hence it's susceptible to disk failure.… Read more

Samsung targets technophobes with 'simple' Wi-Fi surveillance camera and baby monitor

LAS VEGAS--Along with introducing its InTouch Skype HD videophone for TVs, Samsung Techwin America today rolled out two new consumer video-monitoring cameras, the WiFi IP SmartCam and WiFi Video Baby Monitor.

Both cameras are designed to be very simple to set up and both will hit the market in March for $149.99.

Samsung claims the set-up is basically a no-brainer, requiring a single button push (or really two).

"Users simply locate the WPS [WiFi Protected Setup] button on the device and their home router," the company says, "and with a click of each, the two will automatically sync and the camera will be added to the network in less than 30 seconds."… Read more