CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2016 begins in just a couple of days (but), and LG's going to use it as a stage to showcase its latest and greatest achievements on the display technology front. The company will be bringing some of its craziest OLED and LCD exhibits for nerds to see and drool over (but probably not touch yet), and while most of these prototype displays are actually destined to become TV sets at some point in the not so distant future, a particular 18" specimen — the one in the image above — caught our attention.
To be politically correct, rollable display concepts have been teased by other companies before, but our hopes here are that LG will be willing to bring things to the next level with this new prototype. Who knows, maybe they'll let us roll and unroll it to our heart's content this time around? Oh well, we'll let you know what this new prototype is all about in a few days' time. One thing is certain, though – our iPads have never looked so... flat and borin
Have you dreamed of that moment where you point the TV remote at your lights and they just turn off?
REmote
That's what French developer Sevenhugs believes it's done with a device, simply called " Smart Remote," that promises to one day control any smart thing in your home. After initial setup, you can point the remote at a light, for example, and the screen on the remote changes to show a lightbulb you can tap to turn on or off. Point it at a Sonos player and the screen changes so you can control music.
Point it at your family members and... nothing happens (Sevenhugs says that's not in the cards either).
Despite that shortcoming, the device may finally offer the nirvana few technology enthusiasts have actually been able to find. Companies ranging from Comcast to Logi ( formerly Logitech) offer customers programmable remotes designed to wrangle the growing army of devices in our homes. We're expected to spend $100 million on smarthome technology by 2020, according to Juniper Research, more than twice the $43 billion we're going to fork over this year.
SmartyPans
Think you know everything about cooking? SmartyPans begs to differ. This $299 connected skillet (that's just over £200 or about AU$415 at current rates), which debuts at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, uses voice commands, weight and temperature sensors along with an app to provide you with nutritional information about the food you're cooking.
The SmartyPans is one of a growing number of small kitchen appliances that use connected apps to guide you through recipes and tell you more about the food you are preparing to help you be healthier. For example, the Perfect Blend, which will also debut at CES 2016, uses a connected scale and app to help you build better smoothies and give you nutritional data about your drink.
Samsung seems to have obliged.
Please welcome the company's new Family Hub refrigerator, the details of which might cause shivers.
For here, according to a Google Translate version of a press release published Sunday in Korean, is a shiny, fancy fridge with an enormous screen on one of its doors. Samsung says it will be showing off the device in its exhibition space on the CES show floor, which hasn't opened yet.
It's as if the South Korean electronics maker wasn't content to just build those rather lovely Note phablets and decided to make a fridgelet.
This thing is less the iPad Pro than the iPad Froze.
It has a 21.5-inch HD touchscreen. That screen is, naturally, connected to the Web.
You can also play music on it (of course it has speakers), or even buy a new outfit.
I know that fridges have lurched toward the dreamland of every electronic thing being part of the Internet of Things.
More Technically Incorrect
How last year's most moving tech ad points the way for 2016
US Marines drop Google's robo-dogs for a simple reason
Donald Trump shames President Obama for watching 'Star Wars'
Samsung
I never thought, though, that I'd see a fridge that has cameras -- also connected to the Web -- that allow you to see what's inside the fridge without you opening the doors.
Finally, you can watch your cheese go moldy in real time. And think of the hours of fun staring at your milk, hoping to see it curdle. You could make a revolutionary time-lapse video and post it to YouTube.
This isn't, of course, the only gadget whose makers appear to be living in a remarkable bubble of (dis)connected electronic joy. Samsung also wants its new SmartThings TVs to be central to all your gadgets -- in Samsung's words, "the controller for the entire smart home."
Because you've always wanted your flat-screen to turn off your lights and draw your drapes.
The fridge, though, is communing with your appliances at a completely different, clearly more exalted, level. These engineers have focused on something that they're sure will capture human imaginations.
They know that ingenuity has no bounds and neither does laziness.
Perfect Blend
The company that sought to perfect boozy drinks and baked goods wants to revamp your morning smoothie. The Perfect Company, formerly called Pure Imagination, will add the Perfect Blend system to its lineup of culinary kits today at a pre-event for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The Perfect Blend pairs a connected kitchen scale with an app that uses an index of more than 200 recipes and the weight of your ingredients to help you build a better, healthier smoothie.
The system is similar to the company's Perfect Bake and Perfect Drink, which use collections of recipes and the weight of ingredients to guide you step-by-step through instructions for baked goods and cocktails
Withings
On the show floor at the CES Unveiled press event, the Thermo worked as promised. Press a button, hold it to your temple, and it reads your temperature a second later. Then, you just scroll through any saved names and press the button again to save the reading to that profile. Everything was seamless and impressively fast. It kept up with the numerous willing participants wanting to try it out, giving a quick reading every time
In addition to trying the device on my own temple, and feeling suitably goofy in the process, I was shown a brief hands on demo of the working app, which tracks all readings for each participant, along with a timestamp of when they were taken. You can add any medication you take or symptoms you experience to this timeline, which you can also see in a calendar view -- a potentially handy reference at your next doctor's visit.
