CES Live

I guarantee that the first time you hold the LG G Flex 2 in your hand, you're going to ask yourself why aren't there more phones with a curved display. And that's LG's hook. Instead of making you read this entire hands-on to really know how I feel about the G Flex 2 (though, you know, you really should read it anyway), I'm going to just come right out and tell you that it's beautiful to look at and it's beyond comfortable to hold. I'm not just saying this just because this is another new device coming to market but because, for the first time in a while now, I feel that LG has hit a home run.

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Last we heard of Gogoro, the mysterious startup was promising a new age of batteries for mobility in smart cities, and clutching a sheaf of patents to that effect: now, we know what it’s been working on. The Gogoro Smartscooter and its companion Gogoro Energy Network - essentially a city-wide infrastructure of charging stations for easily-swapped battery packs, offering up to 60 miles range - has been fully announced at CES 2015 today, but I caught up with the company ahead of time to find out why the founders think this is far, far broader than just urban transport.

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A coffee machine with built-in WiFi and its own app may not be the weirdest connected gadget CES 2015 has for us, but it could be one of the most useful. Smarter's simply titled WiFi Coffee Machine does exactly what it says on the box, a grind-on-demand drip brewer that can not only be instructed to start the process on a regular timer, but at the touch of a button in the companion iOS and Android app, or even using geofencing. Walking through the front door to a fresh pot of Joe is the future, Smarter explained to me when I checked out the kitchen gadget at the show.

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Last year, NVIDIA opened CES with its pre-show keynote and the Tegra K1; for CES 2015, it’s the turn of the Tegra X1. NVIDIA’s latest mobile super-chip takes the Maxwell GPU as one half of its beating heart, paired with an 8-core, 64-bit ARM processor. It’s arriving in devices like smartphones, tablets, and car dashboards this year, but we grabbed some early hands-on time to get a taste of what NVIDIA believes will thoroughly squash Apple’s A8x.

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Withings turned heads with its first smartwatch, the Activité, approaching the wearables market from the timepiece end rather than the gadget mindset. The result was a fitness tracker that didn't look like an oversized Livestrong band, but while it certainly felt the part from a wristwatch perspective, at $450 it certainly wasn't an option for the mass market. Enter the Activité Pop, a cut-price version with the same core features but a far more palatable $149.95 price tag.

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Times can be tough when you're trying to kickstart a new wearables segment, use crowdfunding to pay for it, and facing society's growing concerns around privacy, but Narrative and its Clip life-logging camera seem to be doing alright. Fresh to CES 2015, the Narrative Clip 2 keeps the core concept of snapping a photo every 30 seconds and highlighting the best for you, but gives hardware and software a comprehensive upgrade. So, the new Clip 2 has WiFi and Bluetooth where its predecessor had only USB, a modular back for more imaginative mounting, and - most importantly - an 8-megapixel sensor with better low-light performance. I sat down with CMO Oskar Kalmaru in Narrative's new San Francisco workspace to find out how a year of life-logging has shaped the new camera.

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It's fair to say Motorola had a big 2013, and SlashGear sat down with Steve Horowitz, senior VP of software engineering, and Steve Sinclair, VP of product marketing, at CES last week to talk wearables, contextual ecosystems, and the Internet of Things. The Google-owned company kicked off a new smartphone strategy, epitomized by the always-listening Moto X and the shockingly-affordable Moto G, arguably just as notable for what it left out of its products as what it chose to include. Meanwhile - and topical, given Google has just acquired Nest - we also talked about Motorola's place in the smart home, and where former Android project lead Horowitz sees the smartphone fitting in. Read on for the full interview.

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CES 2014 has come and gone, and as the dust settles it's time to pick over the remains of the show. The Consumer Electronics Show demands a theme - or at least we in the industry demand a theme of it - and 2014 proved to be wearables, with a little competition from Ultra HD (again) and big, curved TVs (again). That came as no great shock, since analysts have been telling us 2014 is to be "the year of wearables" pretty much since 2013 started out; if there was any degree of surprise, it was in quite how "me too" the various devices were on show.

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The time has come: the video game industry must finally come together to pick a single standard for game controllers that will work across platforms and easily handle gameplay on any device.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week, a slew of companies showed off their own Steam Machines. That, coupled with the latest-generation consoles, the possibility of the Tegra K1 bringing yet more set-top boxes into the gaming space, and products like Ouya, sitting on store shelves, it becomes all the more apparent that we’re in gaming overload.

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CES 2014 is drawing to a close, and it’s time for SlashGear’s choices for the best of the best at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. This has been a particularly exciting year with many revitalized or wholly new categories in the CE environment, with more possibilities than we could possibly list. As such, keep this in mind as you have a peek a our picks: there’s a whole lot more where that came from. Dive into the CES show hub and take a look as we hash out the greats right here and now.

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Throwing a camera is generally a bad idea - lenses tend to be delicate - but Panono positively begs to be tossed. The spherical, lens-studded camera ball slammed through its Indiegogo goal recently, a happy backdrop to its first appearance at CES ahead of its estimated ship date later in the year. We've been tracking the project for the past few years, so we stopped by to grab some hands-on time.

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Anybody can clip on a camera and call it a life-logger, but startup LifeLogger says its wearable goes the extra mile with its combination of face, text, and even audio recognition to make reviewing your "augmented memory" more meaningful. Showing at CES 2014 this week, LifeLogger's approach consists of a tiny, gum-packet sized stick camera weighing around 9g and which can record 720/30p HD video as well as stills, and a companion cloud service that does the heavy lifting by processing all that recorded content and allowing you to make better sense of it. We grabbed some hands-on time at the show to find out more.

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