Lenovo K800: While Nokia’s been shut out of the U.S. phone market, Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, has been shut out of phones entirely. Its PC chips use too much power to go into a smart phone: They’d drain the battery in no time. That’s a big problem for the company, because PC sales are flat in the developed world, while smart-phone sales are exploding. Now, Intel says a new line of chips is ready for smart-phone use, and Lenovo Corp. of China is the first to take them up on it, with a smart phone to be sold in China in the second quarter. Outwardly, it’s indistinguishable from any other touch-screen phone, and it runs Android.
Motorola Mobility, the phone maker that’s being bought by Google, also committed to making phones and other devices with Intel chips. Without offering many details, the company said the new devices will be on the market in the second half of the year.
OLED TVs: Both LG and Samsung showed off 55-inch TVs with screens made from organic light-emitting diodes rather than the standard liquid crystals or plasma cells and said they’ll go on sale this year. They didn’t say what the TVs would cost, but analysts expect the price to be upwards of $5,000.
The sets are long-awaited. OLED TVs have been on the horizon for some time, but they’re difficult to manufacture in large sizes. They provide a high-contrast picture with highly saturated colors. They can also be very thin: LG’s set is just 4 millimeters thick, or one-sixth of an inch.
Ultrabooks: Intel created the “ultrabook” as a marketing term for thin, light, and powerful laptop computers. They’re essentially the Windows versions of Apple’s MacBook Air. PC makers have embraced the term enthusiastically. As a result, there were scores of ultrabook models on display at the show.
A few stood out, including the Lenovo Yoga, which has a touch-sensitive screen that bends backward to fold over completely, turning the device into a large tablet. It will launch with the new Windows 8 operating system later this year. The Acer Aspire S5 Ultrabook, which received Laptop Magazine’s “Best of CES” award, features a 13-inch screen and weighs less than three pounds. It boasts a unique “Instant On” technology for faster booting, as well as an “Always Connect” technology that lets users manage their multimedia and data on all their devices at anytime, anywhere—even from sleep mode.
The HP Envy 14 is a more conventional luxury model and goes on sale Feb. 8, but it has two details that set it apart: a sensor for Near-Field Communications Chips (which means you can transfer information from a similarly equipped phone by tapping it to the PC) and an audio chip that can communicate with some headphones to provide much better audio quality than Bluetooth. The Envy 14 will cost $1,400.
Bob O’Donnell, an analyst with research firm IDC, believes ultrabooks are “not a fad.” ”We absolutely see ultrabooks as being the future of notebooks,” he said. However, O’Donnell thinks ultrabooks will really take off once they are priced around $800, closer to the price of regular laptops.
Canon G1 X: The Japanese camera maker revealed a compact camera that pushes into professional camera territory. Its G line of relatively large compact cameras has been popular among enthusiasts, and the G1 X extends the range by including an image sensor that’s more than six times larger than other models in the range. Sensor size is the most important factor for a camera’s image quality, far more than the number of megapixels—14, for the G1 X. It’s the first camera to use a sensor of this type, which is only 20 percent smaller than the “APS-C” sensors used in single-lens reflex cameras, or SLRs (though some luxury compacts from other manufacturers use APS-C sensors).
The G1 X will have a 4x zoom lens that retracts into the metal body and will sell for $800.
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