The food- and body-scanning phone
At CES 2017, we checked out the Changhong H2 phone. It can "see through" objects using a special sensor to scan to see if fruit is fresh or measure your body fat percentage.
On the back of the phone in the top corner is a near-infrared spectrometer. The handset also has a 16-megapixel camera and fingerprint reader.
The H2 comes preloaded with apps that can analyze different things. Scanning only takes a few moments, and the apps have easy-to-use interfaces.
Here, the phone scans an apple to see how sweet it is. It does this by shining a light onto objects (like fruit, medicine and your skin), which penetrates the surface.
Molecules from the object then send back light in different ways and this information gets beamed up to a database in the cloud where it's processed and analyzed.
The device can also scan medicine for known active ingredients.
Here, a Viagra pill (which may or may not be real) is put to the test.
In this case, it is authentic.
The phone can also scan your bicep to determine body fat. But be cautious: there is no perfect method to determine body fat outside of getting a medical body scan in a lab . And you should avoid any batch of pills you're suspicious of anyway, regardless of what a sensor says.
Changhong H2
Pricing information for the Changhong H2 hasn't been announced yet, but the standalone sensor cost $250. Add the cost of an Android smartphone and it'll likely be much higher than that. The device will hit China in the first half of this year and the US in late 2017.