Folding tech has quickly moved from imagination to reality in the past couple of years. Mostly led by Samsung and its range of foldable smartphones, the movement has now started to permeate the world of tablets and computers. Asus hit CES 2022 with the announcement of the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED.
While it isn’t available to buy yet (Asus is stating mid-2022), it looks like it could be a promising attempt at a folding tablet. The 17-inch OLED display is significantly bigger than most tablets, and if you fancy something smaller you can fold it in half to act like a smaller tablet or bend the screen at a 90 degree angle to imitate a laptop.
Asus demonstrated this device at CES 2022 with a bluetooth keyboard in front of it, but also in a clamshell layout with the lower half of the screen acting as a keyboard. Smart as it looks, we’ll have to wait until mid-2022 to find out if the screen can handle all the folding its users will put it through without showing signs of wear and tear.
Skydio 2+
Consumer drones are everywhere these days and while it is a market that is heavily monopolised by DJI, a lot of other brands are finding punchy ways to stand out. Skydio is one of these brands, making waves with its smart features. At CES 2022 it revealed the latest rendition of its Skydio 2 – the Plus model.
Considering people were pretty pumped about the original Skydio 2, it seems surprising that they would release an update and yet, it makes some really key changes. On top of a 20 percent boost in battery life and control range, Skydio also added its keyframe technology.
Keyframe is an app that allows the user to create a pre-set flight plan for the drone. It will then use an autonomous AI to do both the flying and filming for you. That’s a really exciting addition for those who are trying to both film and be the centre of the action. You choose keyframes and locations and the AI will fly on its own through that path. It even allows you to take the exact same route over and over again if you didn’t get a shot you like.
BMW’s iX Flow colour changing car
BMW’s iX Flow was one of the biggest talking points of this year’s CES event, and with good reason! While this is just a concept car, the iX Flow has a special trick up its sleeve. Yes, it looks like an incredibly normal and somewhat boring car but, at the touch of a button it can completely change colour.
BMW has made use of colour-swapping e-ink ‘paint’ that means it can change effortlessly from black to white. Calling it paint doesn’t quite encapsulate the technology going on here. Instead, BMW has covered the car in a body wrap with electrophoretic technology built into it.
What does that mean? The car is covered in millions of microcapsules. These contain negatively charged white pigments and positively charged black pigments. Change the setting on an electrical field and boom, the chosen pigments rise to the surface to change the colour of the car. It’s essentially a giant E-reader display stretched across a car.
Not the most useful feature for a car unless your the new Bond escaping from the latest batch of nameless henchmen sent after you, but an eye-catching ‘display’ nonetheless.
Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Lights
Sure, your lamp can light up your room but can it monitor your breathing, sleep, heart rate and movement? No? Who cares if that sounds creepy, that’s exactly what this new light bulb unveiled at CES 2022 can do.The Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Light (catchy name, right?) isn’t just for lighting up a room, nor is it just a bulb that can connect to a smart assistant, it is also a human vitals detection system. In essence you can monitor all your health metrics at home, without needing to wear any health tracking kit.
You can even set the light up to interact with you. Perhaps you want some intense white light to wake you up if you had a bad night’s sleep, or you might want something a little dimmer if it sensesyou’ve lied down. Mood lighting at is creepiest.
Withings body scan
Sure, any scale can tell you how much you weigh, some can even add in a couple of extra measurements on the more intelligent end, but Withing’s new Body Scan scale that it revealed at CES 2022 seems to do everything. Thanks to an attached handle on the scale, you can scan your torso, arms and legs to give an even more precise picture of body composition and overall fitness.
What that means is that you could see your torso fat mass, the muscle mass of your left arm and more. That’s already very specific, but the Body Scan goes further: it can estimate your vascular age and assess your nerve activity through the handle attachment. How Withings can tell all of that? We’ll have to wait for it to come out to see how the magic works.
While this is still a prototype and not available to buy yet, it seems like easily one of the most complete health assessment tools we’ve seen. Especially with a paired app where all of your health data can be gathered into one place.
Samsung eco remote
Samsung had a lot of tech to reveal at this year’s CES event but, the product that stood out to us the most was a TV remote. Yes, that does sound like a strange choice from a company that showed off giant TVs and intelligent projectors but, The Eco Remote is a surprisingly impressive device.
Samsung has been trying to push more environmentally-friendly products for a while and with this remote, they are promising a situation where you never have to charge it again. No more batteries, no more plugging it in. Like Samsung’s previous Eco Remote, this can be charged by solar energy but, it can now also charge by collecting your router’s radio waves and converting them into energy.
Between the solar power and radio waves, this is a remote that should never run out of charge! Compared to some of Samsung’s less believable environmental moves (removing chargers from phone boxes comes to mind), this feels like a genuinely useful move.
Mayht Solar powered speaker
This speaker offers a similar incentive to Samsung’s remote above or to Urbanista’s Los Angeles headphones launched last year. That’s because you don’t have to ever plug it in or change any batteries – this little minimalistic speaker runs entirely on the power of light.
And yet, looking at this speaker, you won’t spot any solar panels or anything that could resemble a charger. That’s because Mayht (the makers of this speaker) paired up with Exeger, a company that makes a solar material known as Powerfoyle. This can turn natural and ambient light into power.
This paired with Mayht’s speciality – tiny but powerful speakers – leaves you with a small, powerful and entirely solar powered speaker. How well the charging material works or even how good the sound is are yet to be seen but for now, this seems like a solid move into the world of solar materials.
Sony Bravia TV cam
Interactive webcams for your TV are nothing new. TVs have been using them for ambient light reaction for a while now and for gaming they stretch all the way back to the likes of the PS2’s classic but slightly inconsistent EyeToy. But, Sony’s Bravia Cam seems to be bringing something new to the table, allowing you to control a huge number of factors on your TV.
The Bravia cam allows you to control your TV with gestures, adjust the sound depending on where you are in the room, adjust the picture quality or simply turn the TV off to conserve power when you leave the room. It can display prompts if someone gets too near to the TV and, like most smart tech these days, you can mute it if the idea of a microphone in your living room is giving you the creeps.
While this product hasn’t launched yet, it won’t be long until it’s available with Sony saying it will be competitively priced. Is it worth it? We’ll have to wait and see. The smart video and audio corrections are an interesting feature and so are the voice control additions. It will really come down to how much you value your TV experience.
Masonite M-Pwr smart door
Does your door feel too… normal? Does it just open and close? That’s what Masonite is trying to change with the M-Pwr Smart Door. As part of a collaboration from Masonite, Ring and Yale, this door has integrated power, lights, sensors, a video doorbell and a smart lock all built in.
More specifically, that means a Ring Video doorbell, a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Yale smart lock and a PIR motion sensor. The door also has its own built-in smart hub with a backup battery just in case you have a power outage in your home.
While this is an interesting project, it is essentially all technology that already exists with Masonite simply combining it into one integrated door. However, this is a good sign that the world of home IOT is rapidly improving and we would imagine smart doors will see vast improvements over the next couple of years.
Noveto N1 speaker
The Noveto N1 speaker is one of those products that could come along and revolutionise… or flop, completely depending on how well it can do its big selling point. This is a speaker that Noveto claims can project sound to just you, acting as a speaker that you can enjoy but your colleagues don’t have to deal with your 90’s classics playlists on repeat.
Noveto explains that this is done through Smart Beaming with Alexa and an AI-based built-in face, gesture and sound recognition interface. It’s essentially like wearing an invisible pair of headphones as you stand in front of the speaker, the sound will come directly to you.
But, as we said, we haven’t tested this product yet and whether it can do what it says it can is yet to be seen. However, if it works as well as Noveto is suggesting, this could be a revolutionary piece of tech for the office.
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