Inside CES 2024: A Recap of the Trade Show’s Most Exciting Tech
CES 2024 featured impressive state-of-the-art tech powering some of the most innovative devices.
- The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024 wrapped up late last week, with more than 135,000 individuals from 150 countries attending the proceedings that generally set the technology-related expectations for the year.
- Attendees this year included 4,300 exhibitors, of which more than 1,400 were startups, and 1,000+ speakers addressing over 250 sessions.
Considered the Mecca of consumer tech, CES is one of the most anticipated trade shows of the year. And with good reason, as CES revelations tend to impress. Some of the most iconic CES product reveals include the Atari 800 in 1979, the CD in 1981 and the DVD in 1996, Commodore 64 in 1982, plasma televisions in 2001, 4G LTE and cloud-based music in 2011, 4K streaming in 2014, and more.
However, not everything introduced to the market at CES turns to gold. In fact, most of the tech that captures the imagination with an impressive demonstration fails to capture the market.
This time, techies continued to display their new wares and inventions, including state-of-the-art televisions, smart devices, computers, cars, spatial computing, and more. Spiceworks News & Insights separates the noise from the genuinely revolutionary tech at CES 2024. Take a look.
Best of CES 2024
1. TVs
South Korean consumer electronics major LG introduced its 77” transparent 4K OLED TV, which is see-through when not in use and turned off. The invisible TV, called LG Signature OLED T, also features a contrast setting to resemble a conventional OLED TV, although why would anyone want to do this?
LG’s model also features the company’s wireless tech for audio-visual transmission.
Similarly, Samsung also introduced its transparent OLED TV, a transparent MicroLED, and a transparent LCD one. Of the three, the MicroLED truly deserved the ‘transparent’ tag, not because of its screen panel but because of its design, which omits the bordering frame. Samsung’s transparent MicroLED also performed the best in terms of brightness.
The Samsung MicroLED TV’s one cm thickness and high pixel density also make it an attractive prospect compared to LG’s, except the latter’s product is going on sale in 2024 and is way more affordable.
2. NVIDIA Special Address
Before CES 2024 kicked off, American semiconductor company NVIDIA conducted its three-day Special Address besides making its presence felt with a huge exhibition.
The company announced various hardware and software offerings, including three new graphics cards, viz., GeForce RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4070 Super, all of which double as gaming-cum-local AI dev chips.
However, NVIDIA’s broad spectrum of AI software for various use cases has allowed it to emerge as a key enabler of AI and forget partnerships with multiple companies across several sectors, some of which were displayed at CES 2024.
See Mor: AI and Beyond: Insights From NVIDIA Special Address at CES 2024
3. Semiconductors by AMD, Intel
AMD debuted its new Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors with AMD RDNA 3 integrated graphics and XDNA AI neural processor unit (NPU) to take on Intel. Based on the AM5 platform and the Zen 4 architecture, the 8000G series can offer a boost of up to 5.1 GHz.
While AMD’s new chips have the serious potential to dent Intels’ revenue from the Meteor Lake lineup (even with the multi-chiplet module architecture), the company is focused on a refreshed Raptor Lake lineup of five new stock-keeping units (SKUs). This suggests the company expects mobile computing chips to be at the forefront of the semiconductor battle this year.
Intel’s five new 14th Gen Core HX platforms include those for Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9.
4. AI
AI is the biggest thing in tech right now, with everybody wanting to get in on it to improve their products. For others, it is simply a way to make their products more marketable. Nevertheless, AI and generative AI are the talk of the town, and without conflating the two with each other, look at the best AI tools and services at CES 2024.
The rabbit r1 is a new device on the market intended to make human interaction with smartphones more efficient. The $200 device has a unique form, a SIM card slot, a 2.88-inch display, a 2.3GHz MediaTek Helios P35 processor, 128 GB storage, and 4 GB RAM, supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and eliminates the need to perform the tedious tasks of pulling out your smartphone, unlocking it, heading to the app you need to access, opening it, entering the relevant details, and getting the results.
Nope, we’re not mocking it. The device indeed leverages an innovative technique based on a custom-made large action model to perform tasks as a human would as opposed to AI-driven assistants such as Alexa. It accepts inputs from the user through the camera and mic and interacts with apps on the smartphone to perform tasks such as booking an Uber or ordering a pizza.
rabbit r1’s initial two batches of 10,000 units were sold out as soon as they were introduced. rabbit r1 is available for preorder in the U.S., Canada, Japan, South Korea, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden.
Speaking of AI, the conversation would remain incomplete without the product that spurred the age of generative AI — OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Volkswagen announced its vehicles would have ChatGPT preinstalled in the Passat, Tiguan, Golf, and its electric vehicles.
Meanwhile, Amazon is also making strides in generative AI. The company showed off its new generative AI-driven Alexa, initially announced at its Devices and Services event in fall 2023. Alexa now derives its conversational skills from a custom-built large language model (LLM) to answer and address open-ended queries, something the previous Alexa Answers contributors-based tech couldn’t deliver.
5. Robotics
CES 2024 visitors also got a glimpse of an updated Ballie, Samsung’s personal home assistant, albeit only in a video. The robot now has a projector that detects posture, facial angle, etc., to project relevant media on the wall, the ceiling, or the floor. Ballie connects to and manages home appliances to deliver a personalized experience and, while the user is away, keeps them updated on the situation at home.
On the other hand, LG also introduced an AI agent intended to provide users with a “Zero Labor Home” experience. The robotic agent features multi-modal functionality to perform housekeeping tasks using LG’s smart home platform ThinQ. Like Ballie, LG’s smart robot connects to home appliances for a personalized experience and is mobile.
6. Devices, peripherals, and accessories
Of the hundreds of new products revealed at CES 2024, Spiceworks gives a shoutout to the following for
- Samsung Concept Flip Phone — Samsung’s new Flex In & Out phone resembles Galaxy Z Flip 5 but can flip both sides.
- ASUS ROG Phone 8 — for the first Android smartphone of 2024, ASUS has shed the bulky form factor of the previous Republic of Gamers (ROG) phones for the ASUS ROG Phone 8. That’s the most significant update, besides, of course, hardware upgrades in the smartphone.
- Sony’s new mixed reality headset for spatial computing — targeted for enterprise use cases. The headset is a part of the Spatial Content Creation System. Sony is developing XR experiences in collaboration with Siemens.
- ASUS foldable portable monitor — the ASUS ZenScreen Fold OLED has a resolution of 2560 x 1920 resolution, a 17.3” screen, two USB-C ports, a Mini HDMI port, VESA DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification, and 100% coverage of the cinema-grade DCI-P3 color space. Oh, and did we mention it is foldable?
- Clicks keyboard for iPhone — a keyboard for iPhones fashioned after the BlackBerry phones for those who still crave the glory days of the once-popular devices.
What was your favorite CES 2024 highlight? Share with us on LinkedIn, X, or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!
Image source: Shutterstock
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