ces

LAS VEGAS--I have independent confirmation that Danny DeVito is indeed a gadget hound.

Besides being one of the stars of "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia," and acting in, producing, and directing a litany of Hollywood blockbusters, including "Hoffa," "Romancing The Stone," and "L.A. Confidential," my cousin Rob (a movie costumer) says the trailer DeVito uses on location is always packed with the latest consumer electronics.

DeVito is going to be all over CNET's CES coverage today. First, he is scheduled to appear at the CNET stage to talk about … Read more

Samsung CEO Stephen Woo unveiled a new super 8-core micro processor during a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today.

The Exynos5 Octa is a processor that has two sets of four-core processors each. It's made to run intense apps while also conserving energy when handling basic tasks, Woo told the audience. He showed off a few demos of the new processor. The key function of the chip is to allow users to do several things at once while also making sure that the battery is not drained too quickly.

In one demo, he showed … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- If you want to be impressive, you have to make an impression.

Which is why I walked up to the United States Postal Service's booth at CES yesterday and felt involuntary tears well up in my eyes.

For here, in this vast cave of newness, was the USPS offering Marilyn Monroe.

Yes, I know it's Vegas, where everything fake is real and vice-versa. But when you already have an image of being slightly behind the times, it's a little odd to offer an image that is slightly before color TV.

I imagined that Monroe … Read more

LAS VEGAS--We've seen pistol-shaped screwdrivers before, but Black & Decker's Gyro takes the cake for cool weapon-style tools.

Shown off at CES 2013, Gyro looks like a ray gun and has a cutting-edge feature: it's billed as the world's first motion-activated screwdriver with variable speed and direction.

You grip it like a gun, then push a strip with the base of your thumb to activate the motor and an LED guide light. The more you rotate your wrist to the right, the faster it will turn clockwise. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Samsung. Panasonic. Sony. Intel. Qualcomm. All have big booths pitching smartphones, smart TVs, smart tablets, smart cameras -- you name it.

But my first day at CES 2013 was spent wandering around exploring things from companies you've likely never heard of. And there's some interesting stuff out there!

Most of my time yesterday at CES was spent wandering the South Hall. What I'll cover below are things that caught my eye. Not all of these are necessarily new products, and this will be far from a comprehensive roundup within product categories. But I hope you'll find it interesting. … Read more

Kensington has launched a system called Proximo that it promises will alert people when items like keys and iPhones are lost or stolen.

The Proximo kit consists of an iPhone app, a key fob for a keychain, and a third device to track something else like a backpack or car, the company announced at CES. If the items get too far apart -- people can specify the exact distances, which are measured wirelessly using BlueTooth -- they sound an alarm.

The fobs and app each come with buttons that triggers an audible alarm from a paired device to help locate … Read more

LAS VEGAS--No one likes typing on a touch screen. So what if your iPhone case had a very mini QWERTY keyboard?

That's just what Spike from SoloMatrix is designed to be. When we heard about it last year, the Spike TypeSmart keyboard was part of a Kickstarter campaign that proved successful.

The tactile keyboard swivels out from its case and its keys make contact with the iPhone's on-screen keyboard.

It doesn't require separate charging, docking, or an app, and it works with capacitive conductivity through the screens on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5.

Whenever a key … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Lenovo's big-screen K900 smartphone is one of the first to integrate Intel's first dual-core Atom chip for phones. And includes an impressive camera too.

By smartphone standards, the K900 has a massive 5.5-inch screen 1080p IPS display. So, no better time to tap Intel's new chip to manhandle all the pixels in that giant display.

The Atom Z2580 roughly doubles the central processing unit (CPU) performance of Intel's single-core Medfield processor used in Lenovo's K800 phone. The new Atom silicon also boasts an improved graphics chip.

A few more deets on Intel's … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Software usually isn't the flashiest category to show at CES, but FaceCake's 3D virtual dressing room might be an exception.

CNET previously covered FaceCake's Swivel product back in February 2011, when the company first introduced the idea of adding virtual dressing rooms to online retail sites. Now, the Swivel product is carried in select Bloomingdale's department stores. To be clear, augmented reality, the technology behind Swivel, is not exactly new, but FaceCake's implementation of it, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores, is certainly noteworthy.

Here at CES, we got a chance to try out … Read more