Hello, everybody, we are at CES 2019, painfully early for a Thursday, coming to you live from the CNET stage at Tech West.
I'm Ashley Esqueda, and sitting right next to me is Morgan Little, the man in charge of our social media at CNET.
So when you're a trash goblin on the internet, To the at cnet handle, this is the human you are abusing.
Just breaking my heart everytime.
It's directly breaking Morgan's heart every time.
So be nice, be kind.
Morgan, we're here to talk about Maybe my favorite part of any technology event which is spicy hot takes on social media, I love a good spicy hot take.
These are like CES is a grand buffet of takes, and these are some of the spiciest meatballs that we have available in this whole buffet That the trash goblins love to dine at.
There are some very clever trash goblins as well.
Okay, so let's kick things off.
We got benwood@benwood who tweeted about the flexible display devices and has this video Of the Royale FlexPai foldable smartphone / tablet, and not quite seamless, not quite seamless.
No, so-
Says we are in the Stone Age of flexible display devices.
Yeah, so we got our hands on with this device earlier, and this is kinda the first time that a broader kind of set of the public and of the press have started to look at it.
And Foldables are predicted to be really big this year, but the problem is, that as you can see, once they kind of start folding, they kind of break.
At least in this one.
They kind of, it's a little yikesy.
You know?
Yeah, they have their own, it's kind of a forked version of Android.
It's called Water OS.
And a ton of folks who have gotten their hands on with this have reported, I mean, basically it just breaks when you fold it.
Apps will run concurrently in weird windows as it's folding.
It's a little bit of a hot mess of a phoning device.
It's rough.
Yeah.
It's rough at best.
It's getting there.
It's still early technology.
Sure.
And Samsung is having their device, a lot of anticipation That we still haven't gotten our hands on, but>>Fair.>>Stone age.>>Still, still pretty early.
Then we've got Loradicarlo_hq>>Yep.>>There was, I don't, we did a sex tech chat yesterday about, and there's a little bit of controversy that's been happening where this product
Got an award, and then the award was rescinded or revoked.
And then the product was completely banned from CES.
So this has been kind of all over the place.
Yeah it's one of the stories from CES that's really broken beyond the tech community, and has really kind of spoken to a whole bunch of falks whether they're Focused on women's rights issues and the kind of diversity that we have at events like this.
Sure.
Or it's just folks looking at the hard tech angle and thinking like, hey this is a device, it's a consumer good.
This is a show for consumer electonics-
Yeah.
Why wouldn't we allow this, if.
Especially given that they [UNKNOWN].
Yeah, and considering none of us would be here without having sex.
I mean, it seems like a pretty normal thing technology-wise that you'd wanna have to show it's not a big deal.
But Laura-
Well, and especially given the other side of the equation is given.
Right, exactly.
And Laura [UNKNOWN] says we're not really sure what it is about empowered women and the products that scare
CES so much.
We need more diversity across the board at the show, and in tech in general.
#CESGenderBias.
#FemTech.
#SexTech.
So that's.
And then the account goes on to talk more about that.
It is, this has really kind of gotten legs over the week.
People are really talking about this.
Cindy Gallup got into it, and said she wanted to give a key note about how people view the sex-ed category.
Turned down.
Because Cindy Gallup is kind of a She's a big name.
Yeah.
She's a big deal.
Especially in that vertical.
So this is pretty interesting stuff and also pretty dissapointing.
Yeah, I mean we'll see what happens through the year.
I mean obviously this is drummed up a lot of Conversation around this topic and maybe CTA will change in 2020, be a little bit more inclusive, given all the bad press that has been surround this.
Really, it even has gotten to the level where Reddit is not the Onion, Subreddit is now.
It's at that part of the news cycle where people are now just pointing out the ridiculousness.
It is ridiculous, so yeah, the Subreddit, not the Onion, which is One of my personal favorites, everybody is I love this, I can't believe they banned me from CES is the top comment which is my favorite right?
And then we move on to VR, so we have some conflicting things about VR at show this year.
Yap.
There are some folks who are VR is great, It's doing a great job.
I really love stuff like Oculus quest coming out and then HGC has their Vibe Cosmos headset, but our very own Mark Serils.
Our resident spicy meatball of a man.
Our resident crab Mark Serils, not impressed.
Not impressed at all.
He wrote a entire article about How he feels like VR is a dream unfulfilled and a promise not kept compared to the first time he tried it.
Yeah, I was talking to him about this earlier in the show and it's like seeing a kid be dissapointed at Christmas.
There's all that anticipation, there's all that buildup.
His heart was really in it when it first came out.
And then slowly over time, VR just hasn't had its perfect moment.
It hasn't had that killer app.
It hasn't had that [CROSSTALK] yeah, that killer app or that killer, honestly, that killer platform.
Yeah.
I think that's a really important thing that people miss, is that we really should have some killer platform that Entices people so much, it's so good.
This platform has so many great exclusives, so many great games that I have to buy.
A VR headset, and we're not great at that point yet.
I mean don't get me wrong, we have some amazing VR games out there.
I mean Beat Saber is so much fun.
And there are a good handful games that are Incredibly fun, very engaging but also VR is still difficult.
Like, it's kind of a pain sometimes.
As we saw with ACC's press event, they're announcing multiple devices that's on top of multilpe devices that already exist in the market.
The interest is there.
There just isn't the You know, it's hard to convey how to get into VR.
Because as you said, it's fragmented ecosystems that's a ton of different platforms that have a ton of different ranges, a ton of different requirements.
Is this a stand alone headset, do I have to have this plugged into a computer, does this work with my phone?
It's a lot of moving pieces and you know, it's so far disappointing.
There's still a ton of potential out there,-
Yeah.
And so we're seeing during the show, just Both sides of that fragmented reaction.
So folks who are still really excited about the hardware.
Sure.
Unlimited potential.
But then folks who are very disappointed about the way it exists.
Who maybe have been waiting a little longer or who have tried it maybe a little earlier.
Yeah.
Perhaps.
And have said I've been waiting a little longer for that.
Some of us who are ancient and were alive in the 90s, and remember going to weird little arcades and having weird ancient VR.
I do, I do.
The county fair, it was a good county fair.
So another take that a lot of people have been talking about this year has been the Impossible Burger 2.0, which apparently is much improved over the original.
It's delicious.
Is it?
Did you try it?
It's excellent, they're giving it away over at the main convention center hall, so they're right there a little bit west of where Google is.
Okay.
I can say that it's fantastic.
Our own Joan Salzman actually had an interesting reaction to it.
She's a vegetarian.
And they have the burger version of it but they also have a tartare version of it.
And that's what we're seeing in this picture right here.
This is the steak tartare.
And so it's so Realistic, and so life like, that she had a very visceral reaction to it, the burger, she loved it.
Negative reaction to it.
Well it's something that if you are not accustomed to meat and this thing that's supposed to be a immitation of it is so similar to it.
I mean it's amazing
To see that it can elicit the same reaction as the real deal.
Everybody loves a meat placement except for Joan.
[LAUGH] Yes.
Except for Joan.
I also know that [UNKNOWN], okay, [LAUGH] this is my favorite company to talk about in CS becauae we've seen them here for
This is the third year.
But we've heard about them for I think even longer than that.
It feels like even longer than that, and FoldiMate is finally hopefully-
Yeah, let's all cross our fingers.
Let's all cross our fingers, coming to market.
I know a lot of folks, a lot of people are saying, what do you think about FoldiMate?
I personally think it still folds too slow.
To really be for a family
You're just sitting there waiting
If you've got a family, you got a lot of laundry and this seems like it takes a little time.
And Lamyfrog says that's commitment in both space and money to how much you hate folding clothes.
You have to be really, you have to hate folding clothes so much.
That you are willing to drop a thousand dollars.
A thousand dollars just so you don't have to fold clothes.
It's the most CES of all CES products.
It really is truly CES.
She says, I think I'll stick to having money and just angrily folding stuff on the edge of my bed with my hands.
I like that take because I agree with it wholeheartedly.
It's very good.
Yeah.
I will begrudingly fold those clothes in my house knowing That I've saved some money.
Okay so we also talk about Sophia, who visited our stage yesterday.
And didn't quite go as planned, which I-
She had some interesting responses-
Had some blips, had some interesting responses,
And then had kind of an odd-ish response to a question about her hates.
But then she introduced little Sophia.
Who is a tiny terror.
She's I mean- >
Who is slightly In all honesty, it was a little horrific, a little scary.
You mentioned that she's the new bride of Chucky for the new rebooted series.
New bride of Chucky.
Look, we have found, they're gonna reboot Chucky.
They're gonna reboot Child's Play, and I feel that they have found a perfect companion to Chucky.
I don't want to look at her.
She's right there in the monitor, and she's scaring me.
This is a nightmare.
She looks like she's about to light you on fire with her mind.
Like, it's, that's what it looks like to me.
It's up to no good!
It's scary.
Yeah, that expression maybe is, I'm not here for that.
I'm a little frightened.
It was really cute how she walked, though.
I did think it was cute.
It kind of had that weird little wobble.
But I can also see that put to a nice
Horror movie sound track of like very slow lullaby music and then in the dark and I feel like that would also give me nightmares for a long time.
And she pull the nife for behind her back and comes at you.
Yeah yeah exactly exactly and then we have a, I love this the AMG press conference we have the [UNKNOWN] and I love the very top comment from.
Johnny Miscotonic says many people who have not sat through a corporate press presentation, if you're not bored, they're doing something wrong.
Yeah.
So there was a ton of hype on AMD, I know everybody on the YouTube livestream saw earlier in the week when everybody was asking when we're gonna show AMD, when is AMD gonna come on?
We had a ton of conversation about it on our own channels.
They unveiled their new graphics card, the new processor.
Yep.
A lot of really interesting stuff.
But it's still ultimately.
You're not getting the same kind of presentations that you see it in E3.
No.
At an Apple event.
At, it's, this, these aren't presentations for consumers necessarily.
Yeah, the press conferences here are a little bit different.
Because CES is, is still a trade show at its, at its heart.
And so a lot of times we end up with some press conferences that are a little boring to the normal consumer.
Yeah.
And so they're not as exciting.
They're not as consumer-facing as say an E3 press conference where And they're like, hey, look at all these awesome games that you're gonna get to play.
And it's-
You'll have a reference to something cool coming out and then they'll pivot to okay, well, here's how that's gonna increase our market sharing.
Here's the chipset information.
Yep.
And then it becomes sort of a, it's a little bit of a slog When you've got 8.
So and then the very last hot take, the very last hot take we have which they talked about the LG OLED roll able television, this wallpaper TV that goes into a box.
This is my favorite hot take.
A++
Gizmo78 says, how is this not called ROLED?
ROLED-
Honesty, I feel That person is a genius.
Kind of embarrasse that we've never pu that in a headline.
I'm horrified.
We've missed this opportunity.
Morgan, I think you've found your newest employee if I'm being honest.
We'll send him a DM and see if we can hire him.
I think you gotta get into that guy's DM so you gotta ask him if he wants to come work at CNET cuz that is a great hot take.
