Sony is starting 2013 with a bang, in the shape of the new Sony Xperia Z smartphone, a 5-inch 1080p powerhouse that wraps a 13-megapixel camera, quadcore S4 Pro processor, and 4G LTE in a waterproof glass casing. Revealed at CES today, and beginning a global roll-out in Q1, the Xperia Z puts Sony back on top of its game (and leaves us wishing Sony, not LG, was picked for the latest Google Nexus product). Read on for our hands-on first impressions.
Samsung certainly knows how to grab attention, and the freshly announced Ultra HD UN85S9000 shown off at CES today is hardly shy and retiring. A whopping 85-inches of 4k-resolution screen, the vast TV – with a 110-inch version also in the pipeline – is incredibly bright and detailed, and even at a distance the quality and crispness is eye-catchingly impressive.
Just last night we first heard of the Tegra 4-toting NVIDIA Project SHIELD for the very first time, and right here and now we’ve gotten our own opportunity to get our hands on it. This machine is a large piece in a gaming ecosystem NVIDIA is bringing forth to the world combining not only Android and its brand new Tegra 4 processors, but large screen monitors like your HDTV, and PC gaming too! We’ve been shown this device in its current state playing an early version of the new-to-Android game Hawken, Call of Duty: Black Ops II streamed from a GeForce-packing PC wirelessly, and some interesting moves through the device’s unique user interface.
CES 2013 has only just started, but already NVIDIA has made its pitch for product of the show with Project SHIELD, the Tegra 4 based portable console that pairs the growing Android gaming scene with remote access to your home gaming rig. An eye-catching clamshell, borrowing cues from Xbox 360 and with a 5-inch 720p display, Project SHIELD promises the best of portable play with the freedom to output up to 4k Ultra HD video to your TV when you’re home.
It was made plain this week at the NVIDIA presentation at CES 2013 that their newest beast, Project SHIELD, was a personal gaming machine that could stream games from the cloud with graphics and abilities only otherwise available to a PC. The abilities shown here were foretold earlier in the presentation this week via NVIDIA GRID, the company’s cloud processing solution for the future of gaming. This system connects with STEAM to bring on the games you already play on your PC streamed – and played – through the cloud.
This week the folks at NVIDIA made with the reveal of the NVIDIA Tegra 4 SoC, a processor with 72 GPU cores – and with it came the next-generation NVIDIA Computational Photography Engine, architecture that basically gives your camera the ability to take amazing photos. This processor process takes a massive amount of image data in at once, allowing you to create what you’d only been able to do with HDR before here, now, with a single exposure – instantly.
The Consumer Electronics Show 2013 is upon us, and the bacchanalian excesses of the holidays give way to big TVs, tablets galore, and marketing hyperbole aplenty as SlashGear heads to Las Vegas to see what’s umissable in consumer electronics. CES not only opens the year with a bang, it sets the tone for the next twelve months in tech; some of the gadgets we’ll be seeing won’t be on sale until the summer or even the 2013 holidays, and the buzzwords are likely to be peppering marketing copy until we’re all convinced we need Ultra HD.
2012 was a great year for gaming, but I have a feeling that 2013 will be even better. We’ve got a lot of exciting game releases coming up in the next few months, and if we’re lucky, we might have a new hardware reveal or two as well. Of course, we won’t know for sure what happens until we’re further into 2013, but that doesn’t mean we can’t drop some predictions in the meantime. Read on to see gaming predictions and even a few hopes for 2013!
This year the automotive world really stepped it up when it comes to technological breakthroughs, especially when it came to connecting to drivers’ personal mobile devices. What we’ve seen was everything from integration of mobile chipsets into automobile systems to wireless connectivity to smartphones from many of the top car and truck brands across the spectrum. Have a peek at some of the highlights in our 2012 run-down right this minute!
2012 was quite a huge year for Android. We saw the jump from Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and then to version 4.2. Ice Cream Sandwich was a solid operating system, but Jelly Bean made it even better, adding new features like Google Now, better notifications, and even Photo Sphere. However, the software was merely just a vehicle for the hardware to ride on — the devices themselves were what really shined this year.
The strength of Samsung‘s 2012 depends on whether you’re in the South Korean company’s product team or its legal team. Seldom does a single firm see such a mixture of fate in the same product segment: huge success – both in sales and user reaction – to the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II, versus a billion-dollar judgement against Samsung at the hands of arch-rival (and key components customer) Apple. All in a year’s work for a company described as both an “arch copyist” and a capable innovator.
A lot of companies had a big year – Apple released the highly anticipated iPad mini and iPhone 5, Samsung found a smashing success in the Galaxy S III, Nintendo launched the Wii U, while Google delivered Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and released a number of impressive Nexus devices. Despite all of that, Microsoft arguably had a bigger year than all of them. 2012 was huge with Microsoft, with the release of Windows 8, Microsoft Surface, and Windows Phone 8 all happening in a high-energy span of just a few weeks. It wasn’t so much that these new operating systems and products were released this year either, but rather the fact that Microsoft was taking so many risks with the launch of each and every one.
