[MUSIC]
Welcome to CES In-depth.
This is a very special edition.
This is the last edition for CES 2017.
Can't tell you I did that for you.
I'm Brian Kuli joined again by CNET senior editor, my personal position, Scott Stie.
Happens to be an [UNKNOWN] physiologist, told you I'll talk about my life.
We've been in Las Vegas for, don't worry, the joke's over after this.
[LAUGH]
You can go back to normal life.
I feel like I want to go to sleep after this.
[LAUGH] We've been in Las Vegas for five long days.
And today we reveal our top picks for the best products of the show.
This is the ones that won us over here at CES.
But that have real legs, not just?
to them, so when we come to this a year from now and look at with you, and when we come back here next January and say you know what, those products all did pretty well, and after wandering in the hall, taking briefings of lots of strange and sometimes bad smelling hotel rooms, and out in parking lots even, we are now here to distill it all for you.
First up, laptops Scott, and we have Dan Ackerman here with us.
Hey.
Hi.
Mr. Ackerman.
Top.
Mr. Laptop.
And you are sitting in front of the most amazing, this is not three discrete monitors, this is one unit.
This is one laptop, this is the Razer Project Valerie.
And it's a concept piece, it's a prototype, and it's a big 17-inch gaming laptop and the The lid is extra thick because there's two extra monitors inside.
And the way it would work in the final version is you'd press a button or you'd use a software command, and these two screens would come out from the side and arrange themselves.
And you have multi-monitor display built into a single laptop.
That's pretty amazing.
It's pretty wild, it's got an Nvidia 1080 in it, so high-end graphics.
I played some games on one of these the other day, and it played a game just fine.
And you just have this gigantic, super-wide view of what you're playing.
You know, this is the closest I've been to it so far.
So it's actually really cool to see how the screens work, it reminds me very much On the Razer laptops, but with that added.
It's funny, at the show, somebody was mentioning how they immediately thought it made a lot of sense to them.
And then at first I thought it was crazy, but then, yay, we're connecting monitors all the time.
You're connecting tons at the labs and you're doing multi-screen gaming, there's those setups.
And maybe it's an alternative to VR.
And you know where my head went on this, which is odd.
Being a non-gamer I looked at this and thought, if they did a little more articulation of those screens so they could also have one of them fold back all the way, it becomes a great business tool.
So you can do a quick PowerPoint at a conference table with people you do an ad hoc meeting with.
Just putting that out there Razr.
It's not your core market by any stretch.
But you know, it's an idea.
Put your email on one and the spreadsheet on another and a photo editing thing on another.
Yeah, great great machine for, not just gaming, but everyday use.
I mean people thing three monitors is some huge luxury until you use them.
And then they become Indispensible.
[CROSSTALK] I just want to unfold this on an airplane
[LAUGH] Right.
Especially with all the extra legroom.
They'll make you buy an extra seat.
Yes.
Believe me.
Yeah.
I want to see that with like peel-off OLED screens that become the wallpaper.
See.
Now, you're really going out there.>> They'll bend.
They're all wireless.
Yeah.
You stick them where you want them.
Like a shoot a post it not.
You just kinda,
That's the mind of Cnet working for you.
Now here's another one Dan that you brought over, and let me get this guy back awake.
This is the Dell Inspiron i5 7000, right?
It's run 15 7000.
15, there's a weird space there, okay.
What-
And the opposite of that this is super prototyped concept high-end.
This is super practical.
You can go out and buy it, if not now very soon.
Very inexpensive.
It's Dell's basically entry level gaming laptop and they added a little bit of game reflare to it, just some red highlights to it.
And they've got the new video 1050 graphs card which is a new card It's main [UNKNOWN] if they're kind of less expensive one but still really good and they pack then with a new Sevens Gen Intel Corei5 chip for 7.99.
Really?
And if you wanna go get a gaming laptop it will play pretty much any new game at pretty high detail levels, at full
Full 1920 by 1080, and you don't want to spend more than 800 bucks.
I want to turn it around here, it looks so badass from the back, with these-
It's pretty much a [INAUDIBLE]
Where they chiseled it and they got the cooling outlets here.
Yeah, it doesn't look like a budget laptop but it's so much less expensive than that level performance last year would have been.
They mimicked what a lot of car designers do these days.
This looks like the exhaust outlets on a lot of hot cars.
There's no way that's a coincidence.
Yeah, of course.
And they bring up a lot of stuff from the Alienware, the XPS line, the more high end lines.
Of course, yeah.
And they bleed it into this Inspiron line, so it doesn't look like your budget mid-priced laptop.
Yes, absolutely.
Nice build quality.
Feels nice, okay, good.
Laptops were actually pretty exciting at this show.
Yeah, and a lot of cool gaming stuff, which I always like to see.
I know.
Thank you very much Dan, good deal.
All right, Dan Ackerman there, getting us excited about laptops in two very credible ways.
One, futuristic, prototypical, don't know the price yet, really want one.
And the other one, a great value, ready to rock.
Ready to go right now, and available, so it's great.
And way under four figures, love that.
Practical
Next up, TVs.
LG really wowed us, that means him, this year, as well as me.
But Scott Stein's been in love with the product we're about to show you now.
Our own Brian Tong, the inimitable BT is standing by at the LG booth in the main hall here at CES to tell us all about the LG W7.
For the first time at CES The show is about a thinner TV, not just a bigger TV.
BT.
You have heard about LG's W7 OLED TV, this Wallpaper TV here, ad nauseum here at the show.
But every time we see it, we do not get tired of it.
This thing is still just amazing, it is the most beautiful TV we have ever seen during the entire course of CES.
And again right, this is their Wallpaper TV.
It's 2.57 millimeters thin and then to really add a structure to it, right, they had to get that frame on it.
That made it 3.88 millimeters.
Now in a second, you'll see it peel off, right.
We have this ribbon, there you go, ugh, that is your TV.
You can put it on the wall minus.
It only Weighed 18 pounds.
Even my scrawny little body could put this up on a wall, right?
You don't have to mount it anymore.
[INAUDIBLE] connecting down to the sound bar on the bottom, Dolby Atmos sound bar.
This television supports 4K, HDR, Dolbyvision, HDR 10.
This is the TV to get and really the standard that we're gonna see.
It's set the bar now for all television manufacturers Moving forward, this is the hottest thing here at CES.
I love it so much and again, just look at how beautiful that thing is.
There's a reason why we have called this the best thing we saw.
And again, LG dropped this On day one, the first keynote of the show.
So, I'm gonna throw it back to you guys.
You guys can gabble a little bit more.
But one thing that I wanna leave the show for with, is this guy.
[LAUGH] BT, thank you man.
$8,000-
Yeah.
We've learned will be the price.
Now, that's for a 65 inch, I think.
Mm-hm.
And they make several sizes.
I think they make a 60, 65, and 70, if I recall.
They have a few in the large size range.
Not cheap.
No, but actually not, in a way, not super expensive-
Right.
As some people might expect.
$8,000 is not ultra insane, it's just Insane.
It's in the normal insane.
It's one percent, but it's not prototype pricing.
Right.
It's not $30,000.
Yeah, it's real product pricing.
And I dunno, maybe it's just cuz I hung a TV in my house recently.
Or I didn't, I had someone else do it.
So that's the P right there.
Yeah, and so, and it was like 40 pounds.
And you have that pass-through and you have to deal with it.
Although I had the Samsung one with that little breakout box but not as nice as that.
But you've got to find a stud to mount the mount thing on.
Right.
Put those screws in just right.
And that holds a lot of people back from doing a really elegant mount of any TV they buy They end up often using a table stand, cuz it's just easy.
Or they have to hire someone for a couple hundred bucks to come in and do all that work, which is an impediment.
This kind of thing here, I mean, that magnetic background frame where it just clips on to the wall.
And from what I can tell, you don't need to find a stud.
You just put this thing onto a sheet rock wall and just click.
I think if you really [INAUDIBLE] even imagine that in smaller sizes.
Like, we didn't even talk about that, but what if you start making monitors and other things that you stick on walls.
Yeah.
So then you put something at the office, or you're travelling here and you just create your little space.
Stick things on an, back Airline seat.
There's a market for that too.
Yeah.
And we are, oddly enough, with all this talk about finitives we are leaving out the image quality which is OLED.
[LAUGH]
And that, which is amazing.
[LAUGH] It's as good as a TV gets.
This is the son of the best TV we've ever reviewed.
Or the best we like right now the current LG OLED, and this is just more amazing and dramatic.
It's coming off of great DNA.
And great lineage.
Let's continue-
I'd be afraid of bending it though.
I wouldn't tweak it too hard.
Once you hear that little [SOUND] crack sound, you go, there goes eight grand.
That's true.
Staying with LG for a moment, they had a new refrigerator as well, the Smart InstaView fridge.
A follow-on product to last year's which had, remember this video door that you would knock on and it would suddenly go clear?
Right, right.
They've got
That they're gonna super charge the information abilities of what goes on when it's not clear and it's an actual interactive screen.
And we kinda rolled our eyes a little bit about fact that they went to make it webOS now.
Yeah, it just ties with [LAUGH] coming back all the time.
And we're joking, webOS, here it is-
We can't kill it!
Fridge now.
[LAUGH]
We can't kill it!
[LAUGH] It's gonna be a family member next.
Right!
[LAUGH]
Those are robotic ga-
We're all fiber-
webOS-
As it is.
Yeah.
You know.
Wherever it might be.
[LAUGH] That's true, it's going to get custody or something, you know.
So, that was really cool, but it's also Alexa-compatible.
So that was the really important news, like everything here except my left shoe.
It's all become Alexa-compatible here at CES, so this was another one of those products.
But that makes absolute sense.
To make everything at least compatible with Alexa as well as multiple other platforms.
Right, and I was giving one of the tours here around showing that off and my first thought is, I wouldn't want to get one of these fridges.
And then I got a lot of people who disagreed with me.
Because there were a couple, at least, who were passionate and said that, first of all, the idea of going shopping and reordering things Which they didn't really go so much into but that is something that would be intriguing.
And then, if you're going shopping, they'll have the snapshot inventory.
For some reason I didn't think about that.
I thought about going to the fridge and turning it into a screen.
But it's when you're away from it.
Knowing what's in your fridge and inventorying, going why did I buy more milk?
That was ridiculous.
They've added cameras to this one for this year, is that right?
Yeah, so it can show-
They didn't have it last year.
Samsung beat them with that first.
Yeah, it has a snapshot of the contents of your fridge.
Okay, so it's got the snapshot.
That's right, you can actually see the contents As video on the front door without opening the door, but also you can do a translucent door.
Right, like your magic window.
Yeah, two ways to look into the glass door now.
With your eyes, or with a camera view.
Right, right.
So I think it's intriguing and I think it's like the idea of, I mean not liking our cold dare show but really the idea of it's like a monitor for you.
The baby monitor for your food.
You're starting to laugh now.
I know.
I'm like no come on.
I'm with these features, I'm with
You try to justify it and I'm like what am I talking about.
Some of these features on this fridge start to be a little bit gilding the lily, but the core features here make sense.
And if I understand it right, being Alexa compatible doesn't mean you can just drive it through Alexa But it can form, it can operate as an Alexa, is that right?
Or as an Echo?
It's Alexa connected but I wasn't sure about that.
But you can talk to it primarily to control your home, is that right?
I don't know, I'm not sure about its capabilities, that's a very good question.
And I'm not sure it's ever really, we're talking about connected devices, that is an important distinction.
In terms of whether it's gonna hook in as a device, or-
Is it gonna be a hub, or is it gonna be a spoke?
Is this an Echo, right?
Is this my Echo [INAUDIBLE]?
Exactly, is this your Echo?
[CROSSTALK]
Okay, let's stay with the appliances for a minute.
This was very interesting.
We were doing the press conference coverage on this.
The Samsung FlexWash and FlexDry, a new washer, a new drier.
They have large central Front loading chambers, but as you can see here, they both have an auxiliary top loading chamber.
That is the washer that has, what about a quarter the size of a main chamber, maybe a fifth, for doing either delicates or doing small And then we'll see the dryer in a minute, which has something on top as well.
And you can set them separately.
And so, if you have laundry with different, you know, requirements, you can run four things.
And we were totally joking about this one too, because you have to joke about having a washing machine in a washing machine, and a dryer in a dryer, nested, you know.
But, but on the other hand, it's an accomplishment because you don't have to set up a separate system And it all runs through one source for water, our smart home editors were very impressed with this.
It's an appliance innovation, more than putting smart in.
It seems like it's.
Yeah, it's an actual physical engineering innovation and we tend to see a lot of software innovation here.
Yes, exactly.
But in the appliance category you see a lot of real heavy iron engineering.
And this is, it looks very well done, and it seems to have a practical purpose.
I think a lot of people would say, why do I have a light load knob?
Why isn't there just a light load chamber?
That's much more efficient than just using a big tub a little bit.
Absolutely, and as much as you might think it's silly, I would think if it got you an affordable price where it was
Feature on many models, most people would go for it.
Because if you're doing a load of laundry and then the machine is taken, then the first thing you wanna do is say, well, what about-
Let me start to back up.
Yeah, what about this thing I have to do, this little extra thing?
Yeah.
We always have one little extra thing that needs special care.
You put that at the top, do it at the same time so save time.
So [CROSSTALK]
It's connected.
Chrysler, let's go to the cars now.
Completely different area.
From the garage where the washer lives to the driveway out front where the car usually sits.
And this is the Chrysler Portal concept.
This kind of opened the show.
This went out on Monday, early in the week.
They had one of the earlier press conferences.
What they've done here is You could say it's minivan like, I think more of kind of large urban utility.
It has got those doors you see there that split open like an elevator door.
That's kind of interesting innovation I hadn't really seen before they kinda go out and wide.
That's never gonna make it to production.
But what you do see interesting here is that it obviously got full autonomy with all kinds of censors, light door Ultrasound, radar, the full kit of every sensor made.
And then inside we'll see in a moment, the interface is extremely, I think, well integrated without being too futuristic that you just don't believe it.
You're gonna see a big strip of OLED across what we call the eyebrow display.
There it is, the top of the dash.
That's one huge long narrow Wide eyebrow display.
Of course, Chrysler's really big on utility.
They were the ones that invented Stow and Go.
There's that OLED eyebrow display, another huge one is down in the center sort of a la Tesla.
It's electric as well.
Now, it's a concept.
But it shows how we're starting to see a lot of things come together in a mature way and not necessarily in extremely fanciful manners.
The road show team was very impressed by this one, gave it their nod.
Those doors the way they open, make me feel like the [UNKNOWN] report car.
It give that feel->> Don't be caught when they close and there's a software bug.
Right.
[CROSSTALK]
Like an elevator going nuts.
[CROSSTALK] Give me my Arm back.
Well I'm always afraid of those with the New York City, the cab doors that do that, that slide open.
Yeah, yeah.
But sometimes they're automatic, sometimes they're not automatic and-
And no one ever knows.
Yeah.
And you pull them out, and the driver says stop, I've got it.
And then you go back and forth like on a cell phone call.
The Nvidia Shield, this is interesting.
This is in the category of Rokus, and Apple TVs, and Amazon Fire Sticks but it does a whole lot more.
This is a more powerful box than any of the streaming devices.
We've got gaming and streaming here, right?
Yeah.
And it plays games locally.
It streams from your PC.
Also streams from the Cloud.
NVIDIA has a Cloud gaming platform.
So there is three different ways to stream.
If you have a gaming PC, there is a third.
And it has all these connected streaming video game apps and services.
And it connects with Google Assistant now.
So it connects with
Right.
Smart [INAUDIBLE]
And that's a crazy good package.
It already was one of our very favorite streaming boxes.
David Caspar has been about this.
I used to use Shield a lot and I always thought it was great.
And you add all of that in.
It's $200 bucks, I think.
Think is that right?
Yeah, and you can get one with [CROSSTALK] With extra storage if you want.
That's right.
And they really use like a [CROSSTALK]
Do you wanna get your 500 Giga I think of the two storage level and you can get->> Or get [UNKNOWN] almost just like a basic no storage.
You stare at Apple, TV, [UNKNOWN].
And then you go for the larger one for storing lots of game and apps.
Okay, so one has almost no storage.
One has, that's the 5, that's the half a terabyte.
Right, yeah.
Okay.
I feel like a gamer, you get the other one.
And-
And as I understand, a SmartThings dongle to make it a SmartThings compatible device aswell.
Yes, it does, and the controller now is always listening, if you want it to, to become a microphone to talk to, and they have plugs that will go throughout your phone they're gonna sell later, that will add listening capabilities.
So, they'll make a smart home network around the NVIDIA shield So really, that would be all you need.
Yeah, it's an interesting.
It did make me smile.
It's an interesting hybrid.
It's an interesting hybrid of a lot of functions that we haven't really ever seen mashed together in one thing, from a credible company.
Right, and it also does 4K HDR so
Yeah of course.
It's gonna have to now.
Yeah, and it supports a lot of apps like Plaxo is an exciting one.
So, it's a really great one that's coming out now and I think existing shield owners get a lot of these updates, too.
So.
So, I'll accept some of the hardware upgrades, obviously.
Exactly.
They're gonna push it out.
When this goes live, the software update will go live for those of you Who have the existing shield to get almost all these functions.
Yeah.
Which is a nice thing.
That's good corporate citizenship.
Great.
Awesome upcoming real pay.
Let's go put something in our ears.
Doppler Labs.
Yeah.
Stuck in BT's ear.
They have something called the Here One which you see here.
That's the case it comes in.
There's one of the ear pieces there.
They're cool.
I got to try these too.
And I'm excited about this product.
Because these go in your ear, and what they do is they don't just
Give you the ability to have wireless hi fidelity earbuds, that's nothing new.
But they also digitize the world around you, so that normal pass-through earing becomes part of a manipulable digital stack of signals
Yeah.
So they can also do a mix of the real world, which would otherwise be really hard if you left that analogue.
But they redegitize it on the fly and say, now I can mix, I can do anything.
I can mix game, streaming, alerts and me talking to you.
Yes, and they wanna create some sort of ambient, augmented reality for audio, but on what is that really level.
It's interesting, audio.
And so then now there's an array of microphones.
So there's spatial, it's like an array of micros around you so you can listen behind, in front, and all around.
And you can start listening behind you if you want to.
And start listening to people.
It's actually a little creepy.
[CROSSTALK]
Yeah, exactly and it works.
You can listen forward, you can create different sound effects.
They had one that was just audio filterings last year, now they mixed in music.
They're like AirPods in the sense, you put them in a pack and recharge them.
Music battery life, look, it tests a little bit less, but And it costs more, but they do so much more.
What did we hear about a price?
Do you recall?
I think three.
In the threes.
Yeah.
$300 we're told.
I think.
I remember the selling point [INAUDIBLE]
That seems about right for something that powerful and doing that much work.
And it appears to be very nicely made.
Looks like there's really good build quality?
Yeah.
They feel good.
They're good build quality.
I tried to prototype, so Wanna make sure what they look like when they
Only get better though, yeah.
When they come out.
They're coming out soon.
And that idea is going to be echoed a lot of different places, is smart hearing and enhancing hearing.
And the idea of building, I mean you're gonna see Apple do that eventually in things like the AirPods.
You're gonna start seeing more intelligent noise canceling and filtering.
And I think they're leading the way in where, you'll call them hearables or headphones.
Are going next, and that's an exciting trend.
Yeah, bring us some really multi-mode DSP to things, as opposed to just plain noise cancellation.
We had that for years in headphones.
Now let's do some more creative things that can also involve mixing signals, having signals pop up with With certain priority it'd be AR for audio ike you talk.
That'd be a very good way to describe it.
And then you mix it with AR and that could get really interesting, 3D audio is important for that stuff.
Okay that was very interesting.
A lot of folks would say, what's so interesting about an ear bud?
Those have a lot going for them.
Here's one that we have never seen I don't think ever on our show stage before, a high-tech breast pump From a company called Wilo.
Neither of us know a whole lot about this directly anyway.
No.
But [LAUGH]
But it is our one wearable tech.
[CROSSTALK] It is a wearable tech, yeah.
And so the big win here, the mothers tell me, is that it is very quiet, it doesn't have that loud [UNKNOWN] motor going.
And notice what you see right there on the right that is an integral reservoir for the breast milk.
So you don't have this separate reservoir with a tube going on, all this stuff you have to do, and it's worn underneath a nursing bra.
So, people might not even know that a new mother is wearing this thing.
As I was walking around they have some of those lactation chambers here, where you can go and get some privacy,-
Right.
And do the breast milk.
And I thought, no one's ever gonna know.
That you're even doing this process if this product takes off and does well.
And it's able to sense and I think what's really interesting is wearables, you're talking about needing to push them where health directions, medical directions.
That's the [CROSSTALK] And find other use cases beyond your smart watch, better fitness tracker, which we don't have in our lineup because it's been a really quiet year for that.
Well not a year for that, but a week for that.
It'll come.
This is coming out in the spring I'm told, $429 will be the MSRP on that one.
One of the most lovable products here, and we don't often have lovable products at CES, this one was.
Was a robot, Called Curi.
Not the only robot, part of a major trend of humanoid-esque robots.
Now, it doesn't even have arms.
It doesn't talk.
It does hear you, though, with excellent quality.
It had very interesting personality.
Limited functionality even though it's still coming out a year from now.
But right now it's basically an audio-video home patrol robot.
To run around and recognize what's going on, alert you to it.
Which is interesting, cuz it doesn't talk.
But it makes little bleeps and bloops, R2D2-esque.
It gives you a lot of indications of what it's trying to tell you.
It's kinda like when you watch an old Lassie episode and the dog barks.
And somehow they know what the dog means, Lassie, so-and-so is in the well?
I'll follow you.
It's kinda like that.
[LAUGH] It looks like those little patrol robots in the first Star Wars movie that ran around the Death Star.
The little things that skitter around.
I'm not a Star Wars encyclopedia guy.
People know what the names of those are.
But it's like that.
It's suggesting how you could communicate beyond voice.
And we were talking about this before, I think there are other payoffs there.
Alexa and others are voice controlled, but I think you need more than that.
Maybe you're gonna start developing ambient ways Of recognition.
I think so.
You could put in other technology.
Maybe it's not a head that blinks or eyes that blink, but ways that could incorporate that.
Winking headlights or who knows what, that make you feel.
Yeah, do that in automotive.
Cars are developing minor ways to talk to you without literally talking to you.
If you're like a pedestrian, let's say, the car will signal to you.
And as we were talking earlier, sometimes that makes more sense.
If you're trying to be literally human, if that goes bad it goes bad wrongly.
Yeah.
We're assuming like this it's a little more new ones and a little more pulled back.
Its got its own domain so who said it's doing it well or not, it does as opposed to you [UNKNOWN] like an idiot when you're talking right now.
I'm losing the allusion Right.
And you pay attention [UNKNOWN].
You don't expect it to respond to you in the way your family all does.
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah.
We were really blown out.
It sounds probably underwhelming, unless you get up close to it and actually interact with it a little bit.
So I won't blame you if you're thinking well these guys are idiots.
If you get a chance to check out theory, I think you'll be impressed.
Part of the trend here absolutely human [UNKNOWN] helper robot.
Okay, that was a good run there.
I think we had
That was good, yeah.
A meaty show.
We had a big show.
Not so much for VR, AR, we didn't even talk about that.
Nope, not that, not mobile.
But you know what, that is gonna come.
Tons of stuff.
Not so much that was truly exciting here, sorry, those people that shows up.
But they know the stuff is coming later, and it's all gonna integrate.
So that to come soon, this is not, I don't think this is the show for that.
But it's a show for a lot of other technologies at this point.
That will begin to all dovetail together.
We turned out to have a pretty good shopping bag coming out of Las Vegas.
So there are our top ten product picks for CES 2017.
Thanks for joining me and my personal physician, Dr. Scott Stein.
You'll never have to listen to that stupid line again.
[LAUGH] I love, my mom loves that.
[LAUGH] Your mom loves that, [INAUDIBLE] to keep doing it.
Okay, for Mrs.
Stein.
We'll see you again next time at CES 2016.
Thanks everybody.
