CES Live

Smartwatches are popping up everywhere here at CES 2015, even in cars! As reported earlier, Hyundai is indeed bringing its Blue Link system to the showroom floor and it is bringing it to your wrist. The Android Wear incarnation of the app, as expected, lets you control certain functions of your Blue Link-enabled Hyundai car by talking to your wrist, which probably brings to mind many a spy or sci-fi show. We take a hands-on, or a wrist-on rather, tour of what Hyundai has in mind when it comes to wearables.

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Our smartphones today are being unlocked by a variety of secure methods, ranging from the traditional pin code, to fingerprints, to voice. What if those same secure methods were available to secure our doors as well? Except for the fingerprint part, Schlage pretty much has you covered. Here at CES 2015, we take a quick hands-on of the company's new generation of smart locks that keeps your door and your phone connected, even when you're far away. It even has one that can be unlocked just using your voice.

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While Livescribe might not have a shiny new gadget to show off at CES 2015, it still has some very big news to share. Finally the company has turned its eyes to one of the most populous user bases in the mobile industry, announcing the upcoming release of the Android version of its Livescribe+ app. Starting spring, Livescribe users will no longer feel chained to only one mobile platform, freely switching between their iOS or Android device of choice, if they're actually making that choice.

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Mercedes-Benz teased something big - figuratively and literally - for CES 2015, and the F 015 Luxury in Motion autonomous car ticks both boxes. Latest in the German marque’s F line of prototypes and proofs-of-concept, the F 015 is a luxury lounge on wheels, as Mercedes flirts not only with how cars of tomorrow might pilot themselves, but what those inside will do with the extra time they’ve suddenly had handed to them. Strikingly long, with color-changing LED lights on the outside to show if the AI is in charge and four electrically pivoting seats inside, it’s Mercedes’ take on what transport could look like in 2030 and beyond.

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A lounge on wheels, an obscenely luxurious pod that drives itself, or just the F 015 Luxury in Motion: whatever you want to call it, Mercedes-Benz's new autonomous car is certainly striking. Revealed during the company's CES 2015 keynote, the vast sedan takes a less-than typical approach to driving - and makes an argument for why the best days of the auto industry might still be ahead of it. Despite the ongoing growth in the population, and the increasing number of people who live in urban areas, Dr Dieter Zetsche Chairman of the Board of Daimler says, driverless cars give the gift of privacy.

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Samsung may have invented some new branding for its top-tier TVs, but we're more interested in how Tizen has found its way into the sets as Sammy's smart TV OS of choice. The company has been flirting with the open-source platform for the past few years, predominantly focusing on its potential on the wrist as an OS for smartwatches and wearables, but for the 2015 SUHD TV range it's being repurposed as a catch-up platform for live, on-demand, and streaming content that plays particularly nicely with smartphones and tablets. We stopped by to see how it all worked.

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What comes after Ultra HD when you're trying to sell people new TVs? If you're Samsung, the answer is SUHD, when the added "S" somewhat nebulous in its abbreviating but kept for the firm's most high-end models. It's not just a name and some sleek beveled edges, however, with Samsung turning to nanocrystal semiconductors to improve picture quality, contrast, brightness, and color, even running at the same 4K resolution as last year's sets. Meanwhile, under the hood of each SUHD is a new Smart TV platform powered by Tizen.

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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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