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The Harman Kardon Citation 200 will be available to buy in October
It was first announced back in January, but it's finally going on sale
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High-end audio brand Harman Kardon is owned by Samsung these days, but it's still capable of some fine hardware, as I discovered when I reviewed the Citation One speaker about this time last year. It's part of a wider range of Google Assistant-enabled products that sound much better than most other smart speakers, which is now being expanded with several new devices.
August's compact new Wi-Fi smart door lock is now on sale for $250
It's 45% smaller and doesn't require a hub
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Smart locks add a level of convenience, as they let you leave your keys behind and grant access to guests remotely. Unfortunately, many of them are bulky, and often use a Bluetooth connection, which could require a separate hub. With the announcement of the Wi-Fi Smart Lock, August wants to address these issues, with a more compact device that connects directly to the Internet.
Arlo announces the Pro 3 Floodlight camera, coming this spring for $250 (Update: Pre-orders open)
We see what you did there; well, now we can
Netgear spinoff Arlo has produced security cameras, smart floodlights, and even some cameras with tiny lights of their own. Now, there's a floodlight with a built-in camera. The new Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight has all the features of the recently released Pro 3 but adds a giant LED array to illuminate the camera's field-of-view.
Quibi is a new streaming service with short films that can be viewed in portrait or landscape (Update: Partial launch lineup)
Launching on April 6 for $5-8/month
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Most of the professionally produced video you watch is filmed for a TV or movie screen—it's landscape. That makes sense, of course, because most screens don't rotate to portrait mode, that new Samsung spinning TV notwithstanding. However, your phone does rotate, and a new streaming service called Quibi wants to take advantage of that. Quibi will offer premium video content that you can watch in either portrait or landscape, and you can switch back and forth whenever you want.
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Ring's smart home security hardware was cheap and popular. Turns out, it was also lacking basic security protections and leaking customer data, including household locations, through its Neighbors social app — which was already contentiously sharing customer videos with law enforcement. In the wake of all these concerns, the company has today announced that it's building a new section for its app specifically for improved privacy and security settings and pushing two-factor authentication (2FA) as a default, opt-out setting on all new accounts.The new Control Center will be rolling out via an update to the Ring app later this month. According to details provided to The Verge, it will notify you if local police have access to your video clips in the Neighbors app. The announcement itself also states that it will let you disable sharing those videos with police and see which devices and third-party services your Ring account is connected to. In the future, the company plans to offer other, more vague improvements, including "the ability to easily view and control other privacy and security settings right from the Ring app." It all kind of sounds like an afterthought, but given the time it took for Ring to take customer privacy seriously, that's probably because it is.The Verge was also told that 2FA will be enabled by default for all new accounts, but existing customers won't be forced to migrate. It also isn't a mandatory setting (even though it should be), customers can opt-out to disable it during the setup process. Unfortunately, the company still only offers SMS-based 2FA (i.e., the bad kind that's vulnerable to things like SIM-swap attacks), but it's better than nothing, and Ring claims it intends to add other options eventually.
If you've been impatiently waiting for OnePlus to release a folding phone, we finally know why the OEM hasn't taken the plunge yet. At CES last week, Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn from The Verge chatted with OnePlus CEO Pete Lau (and his interpreter, Eric Gass) about the company's Concept One phone, 5G technology, and when consumers should expect a OnePlus foldable device to hit the market (spoiler: not anytime soon).
CES 2020 brought us new smartwatches, Chromebooks, smart home gadgets, and even a few phones. Here are some of our favorites that we chose to award this year.
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Samsung has a solid lineup of rugged smartphones, but they usually get sidelined by their myriad of mainstream, lifestyle peers. Something similar happened when it revealed a brand-new adventure-ready phone on the hush-hush in Finland alongside four new Galaxy A and Lite models. The Galaxy XCover Pro appears to come packed with a bunch of rugged features making it sturdy yet usable in rough environments.
The Consumer Electronics Show is always full of surprises, and one of them this year was a pre-production smartphone with a color e-ink screen from Hisense. While Stephen wasn't convinced of the device's usability during a hands-on demo, Hisense doesn't seem to be the only company working on an e-ink phone.
This year's Consumer Electronics Show has finally come to a close, and just like always has managed to introduce us to a nice crop of fresh smartphones, laptops, and wearables from some of our favorite brands. But there is always a lot, lot more to see beyond the obvious stuff, and this year we took the time to poke around a bit and discover some of the unusual, conceptual, or just plain weird products that were exhibited at CES 2020.
Smartwatches and other wearables have become regular guests at tech exhibitions. The same is true for CES, where Fossil has taken the stage to launch a ton of variations for its Wear OS lineup. A new competitor, Suunto, has also entered the high-end market during the show. To give you an overview of the introduced designs and devices, we've compiled this article listing all Wear OS watches shown during CES 2020.
Now that this year's CES event has wrapped up and we've seen everything from the OnePlus Concept One phone, to new Fossil Gen 5 smartwatches, and a ton more, we've taken some time to pull together all the products that debuted with Amazon Alexa support. This year, there were significantly more Alexa-enabled gadgets than what we saw at CES 2018 and CES 2019 — great news for anyone who wants to dip their toes into the Amazon-connected ecosystem. We have more than 50 different products to check out, so let's dive right in.
Smart home products are becoming the main attractions at CES shows. Last year saw an explosion of Google Assistant-powered devices being revealed, and while CES 2020 wasn't quite as intense in that regard, this was still a big week for Google's virtual helper.All the product announcements during CES can be overwhelming, so for your reading convenience, we've compiled a big list of all the new products with Google Assistant. There's something for everyone, no matter if you're interested in headphones, home security, or... sink faucets. No, really.
Smartphones, as a concept, have been reduced down to glowing rectangles that have grown boring. Why not have it take on a different shape? Well, the people behind the Cyrcle Phone have decided to take up the challenge, showcasing a circular phone at CES 2020. And from the looks of it, let's just say Android will be a tight fit on the thing.
CES 2020 gave the networking device market a solid head start for the rest of the year. We not only saw a more capable Wi-Fi standard come into being but also mainstream brands jumping in with a pile of new routers and mesh systems. Besides an expanded security camera lineup, D-Link’s CES announcement includes a long list of routers and range extenders that integrate the EasyMesh and Wi-Fi 6 standard.
Your smartphone's screen is a glutton. Sure, it may be beautiful, high-res, and with action as smooth as silk, but every second you're staring at it your phone's battery is just ravenously being sucked dry. Manufacturers have been working since smartphones existed to mitigate that problem, but progress has been a series of baby steps. Now a new tech promises to turn screen power consumption on its head, adapting the sort of low-power B&W e-ink screen you'll find on devices like Kindles to show a full range of colors.
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Just like any year, this year's CES has focused quite a bit on television sets. And just like any (recent) year, this year brings us a whole slew of new Android TV products. To make it easier to sift through them, we've compiled this article combining all the announcements from the show, sorted alphabetically by manufacturer.
Alpine has returned to CES to expand the breadth (and width, and height) of its Halo line of Android Auto-compatible, digital head units. Expanding on its previous 9-inch models, the iLX-F411 features a massive 11-inch screen — seems pretty wild, but luckily the Halo line features a Tesla-like "floating" display and installs via a single DIN slot to save dash real-estate.
LG hasn't turned a profit on smartphones for years, but it says that will change by 2021. No really, for real this time. The promise comes from LG Electronics CEO Kwon Bong-seok, who addressed the company's mobile struggles during a press conference at CES. Bong-seok didn't offer any specifics on how LG would do this, but it sounds like we might be in for some weird phones.
When Amazon launched its smart lock, it had the brilliant idea of coupling it with an option to let delivery people in to drop your packages when you're not home. Although it's a convenient approach, it's not necessarily reassuring to let strangers in. Yale came up with a solution to this problem, with the announcement of its smart delivery boxes. In addition, it also unveiled a connected cabinet lock and a safe, letting you secure items using your phone.