CES 2017

If you thought that Intel was done with its Kaby Lake generation of Core processors, then its CES 2017 announcement just proved you wrong. Then again, it’s not surprising either. The first batch of 7th gen “Kaby Lake” Intel Core CPUs it announced back in August were part of its Y-series, focused primarily on detachables and PCs on a stick. Now it is putting its 14 nm processors into full swing with U, H, and S series that aim for more powerful PCs, especially gaming ones.

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Honor brought its Millennial-bait 6X to CES 2017 complete with a startlingly low price tag, but it hid its magic - literally - in the corner of a demo booth. The Honor Magic was announced for China some months ago, but had until now avoided American shores, despite no shortage of interest. It's undoubtedly the company's most interesting device right now.

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The Chrysler Portal Concept makes an effort to guess at what the car buyers of the future - specifically, the 'Millennial' generation - will be looking for in a vehicle. After sitting down with the engineers and designers behind the Portal after it's debut here in Las Vegas at CES, I myself have a better idea of which, if any, of the technologies on display inside the Portal might make it into an actual production vehicle down the road.

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Honor may be obsessed with Millennials and youth, but its ambitions of cornering the affordable Android smartphone market aren't just good news for the young. Joining the team on Huawei's offshoot is the new Honor 6X, originally announced in China back in October, but given its North American and European pricing at CES 2017 today. The price is certainly enough to catch the eye, at $250 unlocked and SIM-free in the US.

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Linksys came to CES 2017 with a few different routers in tow, one of which being its new WRT32X WiFi gaming router. If the phrase "gaming router" elicits an eye-roll, you're probably not alone, but there may be reason for gamers to consider this router over others. Linksys has teamed with Rivet Networks to make this the first router that features the Killer Prioritization Engine.

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MU-MIMO functionality is becoming more and more prevalent in wireless routers, and Linksys is looking to get in while the market is still growing. Today the company announced two new Tri-Band routers in its Max Stream line, bringing the total number of MU-MIMO capable routers it offers up to eight. On top of those two routers, Linksys also announced plans to launch a MU-MIMO adapter for PCs and laptops.

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Osterhout Design Group, more commonly referred to as just ODG, has introduced the R-8 and R-9 smart glasses, wearable augmented reality devices that are the first to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 processor. Developer units of these glasses will be shipping out later this year, but as with other wearable headset dev kits, you’ll have to pay a pretty penny to get them: the R-8 will be “less than $1,000” and the R-9 will be “around” $1,799 USD.

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Kingston Digital has taken the wraps off a new flash drive with a crazy high capacity, relatively speaking: 2TB. That’s despite its small 72mm x 26.9mm x 21mm size, making it an exceptionally small way to tote around a lot of data. According to Kingston, this capacity can accommodate up to 70 hours of 4K UHD-resolution videos.

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Honor, Huawei's brand obsessed with Millennials and selling them smartphones, has brought its latest model at CES 2017, the Honor 6X. Boasting two cameras on the back, for a surprisingly broad aperture range of f/0.95 through to f/16 - albeit digitally aided - the Honor 6X could very well turn out to be a favorite of the shutterbug on a budget. As well as the dual lenses, there's phase detection autofocus for 0.3-second locks.

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Ford's seven-strong electrified vehicle announcement at CES 2017 this morning is the Detroit automaker's biggest commitment to EVs to-date, and there are no half-measures. On the cards - and, indeed, on the roads within the next few years - will be hybrid versions of some of the blue oval's biggest nameplates. It's a strategy that's markedly different from that taken by many of Ford's rivals, which have focused on a few halo hybrid and EV products amid the rest of their mainstream range. I caught up with Hau Thai-Tang, Ford group vice president of Purchasing and the automaker's "executive electrified vehicle champion" to find out more.

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While generally we see a collection of new or otherwise daring devices at the Consumer Electronics Show, CES 2017 is about improving what works. This can be seen best in the collections of devices shown by Acer, Lenovo, and HP, the lot of which revealed a set of notebooks, displays, and keyboards improved incrementally from years past. It's as if the entirety of the PC industry has finally caught Apple "Just a bit better each time" fever.

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Smartphones may have taken a back-seat to TVs and car tech at CES, but Qualcomm is revealing the Snapdragon 835 that's likely to be at the heart of many 2017 flagships. The new chipset is Qualcomm's first 10nm silicon, but the company is using the milestone for more than just competitive crowing. Indeed, the physically smaller package has big implications for the overall size of phones and other devices, as well as what they can do.

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