 Coming up on DTNS, it's CES 2020, so we have smartwatches, we have smart toothbrushes, we have LG, Samsung, ASUS announcements, it's too much, we're going to start down. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 6th, 2020 from the Las Vegas Convention Center. I'm Tom Barrett. And I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Allison Charidan. And I'm Richard Gunther. Oh, and I'm Roger Chang off camera. Hey, folks, we were just talking a little bit about what our travel was like on the way here, prepping for getting this broadcast together from the show floor in CES. You can get all that and much more by becoming a patron and subscribing for good day internet at patreon.com.dts. Let's start with a few tech things you should know that are not from CES. Samsung confirmed it will hold its next Galaxy Unpacked product announcement event in San Francisco on February 11th, expect the Samsung Galaxy S11 and possibly a new foldable model as well. Samsung used a lot of folding imagery in its video tweet about the announcement and told the Verge there will be more than one device announced. A lot of 120 Hertz rumors out there, too. Amazon's head in Germany, Ralph Kleber, told the newspaper Weltum Son Tag that Amazon is considering opening retail shops in Germany. Kleber said the fact is that we know the customers shop offline and that they like variety. Following a settlement with the FTC, YouTube has officially restricted targeted ads on videos aimed at children. Kids videos also won't have comments. Few other former community features are going to get pulled as well. YouTube says that this will have a significant impact on business due to reduced ad revenue, but it will start running promotions for YouTube kids. That's the separate app which launched back in 2015. The FTC defines kid content as videos that emphasize kids' characters, themes, toys, games, and more. Okay, the CES coverage begins. Now, TCL announced it's going into phones with the TCL 10 Pro, 10L, and 10 5G. They hope to price the 5G phone less than $500. More details coming up Mobile World Congress on those. TCL also announced the Alto 9 Plus Dolby Atmos sound bar with full integration for Roku TVs using the Ray Don's reflector technology to provide a wide sound stage. Reviewers said it actually works pretty well. Shipping in the coming months, no price on that yet, and TCL's 8K Roku TVs will come this year as well. NVIDIA announced new GeForce drivers for 2020, letting you set a frame rate limit across all games, whether the game itself offers the option or not. And Qualcomm announced aptX voice devices will get 32kHz audio with a flat 16kHz frequency response quality as part of Bluetooth hands-free profile, so you get that HD audio. Qualcomm's 8K Roku X voice is now available on the Snapdragon 865 and 765 mobile platforms. Qualcomm also announced its car-to-cloud service, which lets car companies connect their cards to the cloud. Let's begin the official CES 2020 coverage by highlighting some of the CES announcements getting the most buzz, and we'll start with Lenovo. I'll give you what Lenovo announced and then we can have our impressions of it. The CES 2020 was the foldable ThinkPad X1. It's a 13.1-inch tablet that folds up into a 27.8mm thick black slab. When it's open, the bezels are 7.8mm thick. The whole thing weighs less than 2.2 lbs, is 2048x1536p OLED with a 4x3 aspect ratio. In the 90-degree laptop mode, you can use the on-screen keyboard or you can pair it with Lenovo's Bluetooth keyboard that magnetically attaches to the bottom of the screen, making it more laptop-like. It has Intel Core processors with UHD graphics up to 8GB of RAM, a terabyte PCIe SSD, 11-hour battery life, and CAT20 LTE. There are two USB-C ports, one of them is Gen 1 and the other is Gen 2. Sadly, no audio jack. ThinkPad X1 fold with Windows 10 arrives mid-2020, starting at 2,499 years. Lenovo also announced the 13.3-inch ThinkBook Plus, a dual-screen ThinkPad with a 10.8-inch E-ink display embedded in the cover. You can write and draw on it or read documents and get alerts. The ThinkBook Plus arrives March 2020, starting at 1,199. And the company introduced the Lenovo Smart Frame, a smart digital display that also doubles as a digital photo frame for $400, the SmartTab M10 FHD Plus second Gen, a full-featured Android tablet with a 10.3-inch 1080p display and a smart dock that becomes a smart display. That's $189. And Lenovo announced Connected Home Security, a new cloud-based solution from Lenovo Vantage that will, you know, do your home security for you. So there you go. The foldable ThinkPad X1 seemed to be really capturing people's eyes. What do you guys think of that? So which way is that folding, Tom, is that like a keyboard in front of you and fold it up? Yeah. You can put it at 90 degrees and you've got two, yeah, a laptop shape with a screen on the bottom. Okay. And on the top, obviously. And then you can lay it flat. You can also use it as a tablet. Oh, okay. That's interesting. I like the idea. I have been burnt twice, though, by first-generation Lenovo Windows tablets. So they're saying a lot by putting the X1 brand on it, though. So they must have a lot of confidence in it. Well, yeah. And it's an interesting trend I'm seeing at CES where people have teased concepts before. We've seen Lenovo tease this, but now they're coming out with the specs and the prices and the release dates at CES, which is sort of counterintuitive in a way when we kind of consider CES to be the more conceptual part. But I like that we finally got some details on this and a price and release date. It also makes a little more sense to me than the folding phone because something just getting longer seems weird. But this is a case of where you've got a big tablet and it's really hard to fit into things. Right. Fold it in half. That could be handy. Pop it in a bag and, yeah, off you go. Yeah. That could be cool. All right. What else has the tech press taken with Sarah? Oh, Tom. The tech press seems to be quite taken, in fact, with the Samsung Galaxy Chrome Book. The Verger's Deader Bone, in fact, called it the nicest piece of laptop hardware I've touched in a very long time. Wow. It is a 13.3-inch 4K AMOLED display, supports HDR 400, although Chrome OS can't support DRM to get HDR from all sources. It does use Google's Ambient EQ Tech, which is the same as in the Nest Hub, to adjust color temperature based on ambient light. It also has an Intel 10th Gen Core i5 processor, has a fingerprint sensor, two USB-C ports, a microSD slot, and rotates 360 degrees. 360 degrees, rather. It includes an S-Pen stylus that you can store in the device, has a large trackpad, and is 10 millimeters thick. Comes in a bright orangeish red and gray for its aluminum bodies. You got some choices there. The 49.2-watt hour battery should last about eight hours, and it's the first Chromebook to qualify for Intel's Project Athena specs. So when's it coming? How much is it going to cost? The Galaxy Chromebook arrives Q1 of 2020, starting at $999 for eight gigs of RAM and 120 gigs of storage. You can get up to 16 gigs of RAM or one terabyte of storage, although the company didn't say what the price increase would be on that. So let me make sure you understand this. In this teeny-thin little Chromebook, they can get an SD card slot in it, but Apple can't get one into a MacBook Pro. Can't or won't. Yeah, I think it's probably possible, as we can see here. You can get an SD card slot on your MacBook Pro. You just need a dongle. That's all you need. Did I hear you say it had a headphone jack or no? There was no word on that, at least with the article. But when I saw the red model, and I know that it's a color that stands out, and sometimes people like a flashy laptop, man, that's ugly. I would never have that. Hey, it's cool. Everybody thought I was crazy. Oh, that's awesome. I like that. It's the color of my car. I'm in the minority. I'm in the minority. I also get black luggage, and then I can never find it against other people's luggage. So there you go. But otherwise, this does seem real nice. It's cool. I just have a hard time with the concept of a $1,000 Chromebook. That's the thing. You still got Chrome OS. And all the benefits and detractions of Chrome OS apply, no matter how pretty it looks. I wonder whether we're running asymptotic to all of a sudden. We'll turn around and go, oh, wait, that is fine. Do you know one of these days? Because we're getting closer. Yeah, because when they added Android apps that made it better, and then people started complying, wow, but Android apps aren't the same as desktop apps. So who knows? Maybe they're going to tweak Chrome OS pretty soon and make it worth it as well. I use it a lot. I use Chrome OS a lot. And it's great for just stuff, but occasionally I'll run across something where I'm like, I really wish I had a full laptop. But it's just not meant for that. That's a desktop replacement kind of situation or media production kind of situation. Right. So 15 brands will launch Roku TV models this year in the UK, Mexico, and Canada and the United States. Roku also announced a Roku TV ready program that's getting a lot of attention. These products are meant to be easy to set up with a Roku TV, mostly sounders. They include on-screen access to sound settings in the Roku OS and use one remote. So if you're using your Roku remote, you can use it for the TV and the soundbar that you bought separately. Among the first partners for Roku TV ready are TCL and Sound United. Sound United is the parent company of Denon, Polk Audio, Morance, Definitive Technology and Class A. Denon and TCL plan to start their integration in upcoming soundbar. So you should get those this year early. They're still burning it up, huh? Still getting, sneaking it everywhere. Yeah. And I think people like the Roku TVs. The TCL Roku TVs are extremely popular. And the idea of saying, oh, you know I can buy a soundbar, plug it in. The settings, it'll all work well. Appeals to a big sector of the population, yeah. I like the idea of not being Android from a, you know, non-Google perspective. It's, you know, an option. Right? Yeah. And Android is a good point. It has not really had success in the home entertainment space. You've got some Android TVs out there, but not a ton. Yeah. I mean, Roku is doing well with these TVs. I think people like them because like you said, they are easy. They're certainly better than a lot of the other smart TV interfaces that are out there. And it's something that's familiar to a lot of people already. All right. Facebook has a booth. Yeah. You know, nothing says CES like Facebook, right? It's like, what are they going to show off? Facebook does have a booth showing off its new privacy checkup tool because they really want us to know about it. This was first launched back in 2014. And it's the company's attempt to make sure that its users all feel very clear on how things work. There are now four topics. Number one, who can see what you share? Number two, how to keep your account secure? Number three, how people find you on Facebook, which has always been a bit of a question. And number four, your data settings on Facebook that you have control over. One central tab now lets you change settings like who can see your profile, who can send you friend requests. It enables two-factor authentication and also reviewing third-party app permissions. You know, who's got your information and what they're doing with it. The tool doesn't offer controls, however, overletting Facebook or advertisers see information only other groups and users. Yeah. So this is not about ad tracking. Right. And Facebook's trying to say, look, we respect your privacy, which is not wrong, that this is a privacy control, but it's not that kind of privacy. You have to remember, like, if you're mad about advertisers tracking you, this doesn't address that. No. This addresses, wait, my friends could see this kind of data. And it does tangentially, therefore, address groups collecting data. So you can stop groups from knowing data, which is one way that companies get data on you, but it's not the only way. Yeah. I mean, listen, Facebook privacy settings and how other users can get a hold of you, if you really want to understand it, okay, it's not that hard, right? But I mean, just the other day, somebody that is in my family, who will remain nameless, posted his new address because he and his wife are moving. And I'm like, that's our public post. Oh my gosh, change that immediately. Like, I don't even want to see that. So this is something that the company still needs to work on, especially as its user base grows. All right, folks, to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. We'll get into the first of the big collective announcements from folks like Samsung, LG and HP in just a second. But first, here's a few other CES stories that caught our eye. Yes, in LA, electric vehicle maker Fisker showed off its mass market electric SUV, the Fisker Ocean, priced starting at $37,500 for a base version. With an 80 kilowatt battery pack, there will be multiple drivetrain options included in the performance version that can go zero to 60 in 2.9 seconds. Take that Tesla, Fisker says that the ocean will get 250 to 300 miles per charge in part with the very slight help of solar panels that are on the roof. The company is also promoting it as a sustainable model with recycled carpeting, interior materials made from recycled plastic, repurposed rubber waste. The ocean will be on display here at CES and is promised to arrive at the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022. So we've got a little time left. Fisker showed off the Emotion sports car at CES last year, but switched from a sports car to an SUV in March of last year, might recall. So I noticed this, this Fisker, is Fisker Incorporated started in 2016 by Henrik Fisker after Fisker Automotive went bankrupt and was revived as Karma Automotive, which makes the revero. Makes perfect sense. Doesn't it though? Yeah, it's, well, you could be forgiven for being like, what's going on? Weren't they doing something else? And the Chinese electric car maker, Byton has a 48 inch wraparound digital dashboard screen, AKA the Byton stage. It's in your front seat. Yeah, that's right. It's coming in the M byte SUV. To put stuff on that screen, Byton is launching a developer program to encourage apps that can run on the screen. They're working with companies like Access, AccuWeather, you know, give you the temperature, iCudo, Cloud Car, Road.Travel, you know, points of interest, navigation, Xperia. Byton's also going to partner with ViacomCBS to bring video content info to the screen. But don't worry, the video can only be viewed when parked. The M byte is expected to go into volume production later this year, sell for $45,000 coming to China in the second half of 2020, followed by the US, then Europe in the first half of 2021. Well, I can't imagine that this would all be touchscreen-based, but imagine the fingerprints on a wrap-around video screen in the front of your car. Otherwise, and that Tim Stevens had told us about this when he was on the show before we got here to CES last Friday. And I thought, oh, that sounds pretty cool. So yeah, I'm looking forward to going into what is it, the West Hall, or wherever all the cars are. The North Hall, the North Hall. You know, the Model 3 only has a screen and has nothing else, and it's actually, there's a big part of that I don't like is that everything has to be done through the screen. So you're always looking at the screen when you'd want to do something like... You can't just feel for... Yeah, you can't feel for anything. You can't even change your air vents without going through the screen. And there's something... So you've got that sort of sleek look, but not necessarily the right form or function. Wi-Fi 6 is turning into a big trend here, Sarah. It is. TP-Link updated. It's a deco line of mesh routers with support for Wi-Fi 6 and WPA3 security. The Decor X90 comes in a two-pack for $449, covering up to 6,000 square feet. Can handle up to 200 device connections and packs a 2.5 gigabit per second WAN port for support of gigabit internet. Woo-hoo! Two-pack of the deco X60 runs $269, covers 5,000 square feet, and up to 150 devices doesn't have as much bandwidth coverage between the two units. So it might slow down a little bit sometimes. The deco X20 comes in a two-pack for $189 or a three-pack for $269, but has even lower throughput than the other two models. The new system don't support power line backhaul offered on the current deco DP9 system though. TP-Link also announced the TP-Link Archer GX90 is a 8AX 6600 tri-band Wi-Fi 6 router with speeds of up to 6,600 megabits per second. Goes on sale in late Q2 this year for $330. All right, let's get into a couple of things that I know Richard might be interested in because they're involved the smart home. First, Ring has expanded its security cam lineup, including the access controller prom, a wall-mounted box that pairs any electrically controlled access gate with a Ring camera over ethernet or cell connection. So you can get it within the Ring app and allow key by Amazon couriers to drop packages inside the gate for you or let people in. It's available now for $299 or $398.99 if you wanna stick up cam battery. Ring also announced Amazon Assistant enabled LED light bulbs that can do standard smart bulb stuff, but also can turn on if a Ring cam detects motion that's coming to Amazon Ring and Home Depot on April 1st and there's a solar floodlight, step light and path light that's part of the Ring system that you can put out in your front long. Ring also announced a new section of its control center will offer the ability to manage which devices can access feeds and block access to clips requested by law enforcement. Yeah, a lot of good stuff there from Ring. I haven't had a chance to see any of this yet, obviously. I'm hoping that we'll get a preview of it tonight at tonight's press event. The thing that I find really interesting is this idea of integrating it with some sort of gate system. That's kind of been what literally the barrier for a lot of delivery services and any sort of ability to talk with people through a really easy to use app like Ring, so I'm excited to see that. Yeah. And then we've got another floodlights. Yeah, speaking of floodlights, Arlo announced its Pro 3 floodlight camera that offers a built-in floodlight wirelessly. It can record 2K video with a 160 degree field of view, HDR and color night vision. An ambient light sensor adjusts the floodlight brightness based on available light, and you can have it set to save battery as well. You have to recharge the battery periodically, though you do have the option to wire it into your electricity if you like. There's also two-way audio. The Arlo Pro 3 floodlight comes this spring for $250. The smart service offers 30 days of cloud recording storage and upgraded object selection and detection for an optional $3 per month for one camera or $10 a month for up to five. I love our floodlight cams and backyard front yard or kids have them. We love them. They're really, really cool. And we're gonna see a lot of this kind of home stuff. It's good to see more than just the big, big names. It's good to see Arlo in there as well. Yeah, Arlo has a good reputation from a security perspective, so that's good. Right. Intel announced the Ghost Canyon NUC and you see that lets you swap out the CPU, GPU, memory storage and ports with minimum effort. It's as small as game consoles are. They say it has five liters of volume. You can swap out the CPU as a compute element cartridge from Intel and it supports discrete graphics cards as well. It'll support Intel's laptop grade H series core processors. Intel also made an announcement that the Core i7-H series 10th gen processors will pass five gigahertz. That makes them faster than the Core i9-H series, which so you can expect the new Core i9-H series to be announced soon, but getting faster and faster. So if you had that little nut thing, you could swap it out. That's right, yeah. Exactly. Good timing. You can go with that Core i7 until the new Core i9 comes. Weber, you know Weber. The grillers. Yeah, people who love barbecues. Weber is partnering with June Smart Oven Folks, peaks my interest, on a new device to help you with grilling on any grill. The Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub includes ports for connecting up to four wired temperature sensors to monitor meat as you cook. Data is sent to the Weber app on your phone and it'll send alerts when your food reaches the temperature that you want or the temperature things you should have. It also will give you step-by-step instructions, including a notification when it's time to flip those things over. New features and future software updates will include support for Amazon Voice. It has come into 30 countries in early 2020 for $130. This is really cool. We knew that they had some sort of licensing agreement but we didn't really know how they were gonna use it. So this is a really practical way of using this technology to help with grilling. I just, why the wire? Aren't we past the wires now? Last night, even on Yale, we saw that Yumly was working with locals. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a bit. We've got that in the show later. Yeah, yeah. So, but why not wireless? Why the wires? We need to get rid of them. Well, folks, we're halfway through the show. Normally we'd be two thirds of the way through the show but it's CES. We haven't even got to the big names, the big press events. Let's start with Samsung, announcing more details about the previously leaked bezel-less 8K TV. It's the Q950TS as TVs are always snappily named. The bezel is actually there but it's 2.3 millimeters thick so it's barely discernible from any distance. The TV itself is 15 millimeters thick total along with AI assisted upscaling and adaptation to brightness and contrast based on the room conditions. Samsung announced AI ScaleNet which works with partner streamers to prevent data loss by downscaling 8K video to 4K for delivery then upscaling it again for playback, essentially a compression algorithm. The first partner for that will be Amazon Prime Video so maybe getting some 8K content from Prime Video is what it sounds like. The Q950TS does have speakers, they're in the back and they use object tracking to try to position the audio to follow the on-screen movement. Another feature of this TV is Q-Symphony combining the TV speakers with soundbars so you can go all the way up to 9.1.4 surround sound. Sports Bixby, Amazon and Google voice assistants compare with an Android phone for mirroring by tapping the screen and finally it has 14 different ways to split up the screen thanks to multitasking in the Tizen OS and why not have a health app for fitness content in there as well, sure. Samsung also announced its 2028K QLED TVs will include ATSC 3.0 tuners so you'll be able to get over the air 4K broadcasts. New models of the frame TV, remember the Artie looking Samsung TV we've talked about before are now larger as well as at 75 inches, you can also get smaller ones at 32 inches. You can now choose beige and burgundy bezels as well. There's a gapless wall mount option that helps it look even more like an art frame. Art mode 3.0 will automatically curate art pieces to show on the screen when it's not being used as a TV and it'll only cost you 4.99 a month to get Samsung's art curation subscription for your television. There's some improved ambient light sensors in there as well to adjust the image better to the room conditions kind of like that 8K TV we talked about at the top. Modular micro LED TV, the wall now comes in 88 inch, 93 inch, 110 inch and 150 inch fixed screen sizes. That's that one that you can just put as many together as you want to make a bigger screen. That is in addition to the existing size options, no price or release date for the new sizes. The Zero TV, the one that goes from landscape automatically to portrait mode when it senses portrait video, that one is coming to the rest of the world. It was only available in South Korea but now it's coming to global markets. Samsung's introduced a new app for its TVs called Privacy Choices to let users see what data is being collected and let them opt out. And Samsung isn't done. The official Samsung press event is Monday night at 6.30 p.m. Pacific. So who knows, more Samsung stuff to come tomorrow. This was just the televisions. Holy cow. Take a breath, Tom. I really liked, even though I don't totally understand how rear speakers would do this, but the object tracking to follow action on a screen, if it works, I'm into it. I don't know exactly how it would, especially because I'm just used to what surround sound is set up as, you know, or some form of it, whether it's 5.1 or 3.1 or whatever, but it's intriguing. Yeah, I like that. Presumably they're using some sort of computer vision to figure out maybe where people are. Where, yeah, no, it's the AI, exactly, yeah. Well, Tom, Samsung was not the only one with a few announcements. LG announced new TVs in its consumer line, including the first 48-inch 4K OLED, the CX line in the CX line, which is good for folks who just need a smaller TV or maybe you want a higher pixel density so you can sit closer to the TV. The existing paper-thin OLEDs with an external box are still here in 2020 now in the WX line at 65 and 77 inches. A new line called GX Gallery is around 20 millimeters thick so it can hang nice and flush on a wall, but the GX doesn't need the external box. An indent provides space for the wall mounts and the GX series will launch in 55-inch, a 65-inch and 75-inch models. An 88 and 77-inch 8K model will sell under the ZX line. LG is also announcing that it's bringing Dolby Vision IQ support to its OLED screens, which adjusts settings to adapt to ambient room light. The company will support the UHD Association's filmmaker mode for a one-click setting to disable post-processing like motion smoothing, noise reduction, sharpening. It can be switched on manually or triggered by an app over HDMI. 12 OLED models will get Nvidia G-Sync compatibility, including 4K gaming at 120 Hertz and are the first TVs to support HGIG mode developed by the HDR Gaming Interest Group. HDMI overrides can allow access to features that PC gaming cards might not support normally through their HDMI 2.0 ports. LG's WebOS also got some updates, including an Apple TV app for models going back to 2018. Sports alerts in the US will give you notifications when your favorite teams are about to start, letting you switch to the proper channel and input with a single click. Who, where, what can pull up information about people and places on screen? Kind of like how Amazon X-Ray works, but it includes identifying clothing and even where you might purchase that clothing. In fact, the Alpha 9 Gen 3 processor in LG's TVs can recognize what genre of content is playing and switch to the appropriate display for sports, movies, standards, or animations. You can also use, I don't know, right? You can also use a Bluetooth speaker as the front speaker or the rear speaker or the stereo left and right. Oh, yeah, and that rollable screen, remember LG's rollable screen, the one that rolls up and down is officially in the RX series and will supposedly go on sale this year in a 65-inch model with a microphone for voice control. I don't believe it. That's the one that rolls up that we've seen for two years in hasn't shipped, not the one that rolls down that we saw. I feel like they were like, we're really sure. In 2019, you'll see this. Well, LG Display couldn't get anybody to buy it. This is LG itself saying, fine, we'll buy it and we'll put it out. So I think there's a good chance of that happening, but yeah, we'll see. And it strikes me that we're finally seeing the application of AI. We've seen this in Samsung. We heard about it in TCL and we're seeing it in LG where they're using AI to automatically notice what's going on on a screen and adapt your picture, adapt your brightness, move the sound around, tell you what's on screen. It seems like that one shouldn't have been that hard, right? If you see a big green field, it's probably sports. Well, it is harder than you would think. I mean, you say that, but then humans can do things that computers can't. So it's good to see automatic stuff. Big green field could be Anna Green Gables too. Right, yeah, that's true. If you want the dingy look for soap operas, you really gotta think that out. How do you tell what's going on screen? Amazon announced partnerships with Lamborghini and EV car maker Rivian for putting the old Alex person inside there. Amazon Voice Service is going, GM already has this, so they'll be joining them. This will happen in the first half of this year. Also, Amazon plans to bring Fire TV to BMW and Fiat Chrysler Entertainment System. So more video systems coming into cars too. Auto specific voice activation skills and new markets for the Echo outside the US starting with India, January 15th. So the Echo Auto coming to India, January 15th. Among those new skills will be the ability to pay for gas by voice at all 11,500 Exxon and mobile stations. You just say, Alex, pay for gas. There are also integrations with Bosch Navigation, app companies here, TomTom, Telenev and Melco. And on top of all this, Amazon's going to partner with BlackBerry and Unity Technologies on accessing vehicle data through AWS. BlackBerry owns QNX, QNX is a big operating system for a lot of car systems. There's a lot of security data and system data that goes through BlackBerry systems. So putting it into AWS, making some good use of it there. That seems like a good partnership. And finally, Amazon partnering with Canalac and Zero Lite on new car buying features to help you through the process of buying a new car, a little smart assistance along the way. That's just the car stuff. That's all that they came up with. Do you want the fire TV stuff? There's a little bit of fire TV stuff in the car stuff. Amazon also announced the fire TV OS coming to TCL soundbars, the Alto 8 Plus in the US and Canada and the TCL TS8011 to the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain soon. And later this year, soundbars with fire TV will get a software update to support Dolby Atmos, HDMI switching, far field microphone and device control. Far field microphones makes the voice assistant work better. Amazon is expanding its fire TV edition program. That's the one that certifies TVs. It will now certify operators. So like your cell carrier or a certified solution provider like an auto integrator or a cable box manufacturer that this is optimized to work with fire TV OS. Amazon announced fire TV now has 40 million users letting it brag that it has more users than Roku which last reported Q3 numbers at 32.3 million. But hey, Roku's Q4 numbers are yet to come. So it seems like the buying of a television is getting just a little bit complicated. So we've just talked about like all the different form factors, all the different technologies that we've seen. Set every CES commentator ever. The wall where you put all the little pieces together, now you've got to decide in like a different axis, do I want the one that's got Roku in it? Or do I want Android TV? Or do I want fire TV? It's a good point because the choosing is becoming more complicated while the operation is becoming less complicated. There's less need to go dig into the settings and be a geek about all that stuff because the AI is starting to figure out like, oh, the color temperature in your room is this. We'll make it look right. But which one do you buy? I don't know. Two engineers in our house with master's degrees and spending about four days trying to get 4K to come out of our TV or Apple TV. I can't resonate to that. All right, we got some follow up announcements from Acer this year too. Yeah, following up on its concept, D9 laptop from last year, the company showing off the concept D7 EZL with a smart 4K display down from 17.3 to 15.6 inches still rotates this year in five directions. Tent, laptop, tablet, display, and floating where the screen hovers right above the touchpad for easier touchscreen use. So it's a bit of a transfer. The screen has a color accuracy of Delta E under two, less than two, my goodness. 100% Adobe RGB color, 400 nits of peak brightness and included Wacom EMR pen. Also comes with Intel 10th Gen processor Nvidia's RTX 2060 or 2080 TEI cards, two terabytes of PCI storage or a pro version with Intel Xeon processor and Nvidia Quadra RXT GPU. All of that runs at less than 40 decibels of sound. Acer also announced the concept D700 desktop with an Intel Xeon E processor, Nvidia Quadra RTX 4000 GPU and a wireless charging ad built in into a Fox foe wood top panel. The concept D7 easel starts at $2,699. No date of shipment. The pro starts at $3,099 available in July and the concept D700 comes to Europe first in March starting at 1,699 euros. You know what, I'm just gonna make a call here and say Acer also announced a bunch of new monitors with Nvidia G-Sync. Yeah. Details in our show notes. The predator line. Yeah, the predator line got some OLED updates, got some G-Sync in there and 360 degree spin laptops, the spin three and the spin five. Spin three is the bigger of the two, by the way. Oh, yeah, funny. That's spin three and the spin five, so weird. Vizio announced its first TV with an OLED panel as part of its new lineup of 4K TVs, though the majority of the lineup is still LCD. There's a new Vizio voice command system coming in the remote for basic TV controls. There's also 65 and 75 inch P series. V series goes from 40 inch to 75 inches. So a bunch of new sizes and FreeSync, AMD FreeSync and 4K gaming up to 120 Hertz in the pro. Vizio also announced the Elevate soundbars. You know, a lot of soundbars at CES with 18 total drivers, a pair of channels in the main soundbar point forward for 5.1 sound but rotate up to deliver better effects for Dolby Atmos and DTSX audio. Can work with any TV or dock with Vizio's new OLED TVs. So you can use it with your non-Vizio TV or docket with the Vizio. A wireless 8 inch subwoofer and two satellite speakers complete the setup. Vizio also announced mid-range speakers in the M series and Vizio's lower end systems will come under the V series name. All right, what did HP bring this? Updated its month old Elite Dragonfly laptop to now include options for 5G and Intel's 10th gen processors along with embedded tile chips for locating a lost laptop within Bluetooth range or connected to other tile tags. The Spectre X360-15 got some of the improvements that already came to the 13, including a smaller top and bottom bezel, new 4K OLED screen options and options for the latest NVIDIA GPUs. It also uses a Windows Precision Driver for the trackpad now. The smaller bezel and new thermal management system make the Spectre X360-15 13% smaller than the previous model should be arriving in March starting at $1,599. The company also updated its 31.5 inch 4K NV32 AIO all-in-one with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q inside. It has new Bang & Olufsen speakers, which can act as Bluetooth speakers for other devices when the desktop is off, that's kind of nifty. The base of the all-in-one includes a Qi wireless charging pad that works when the PC is off as well. The HP NV32 AIO is available now starting at $1,599.99. Putting that wireless charging pad, we saw that in the ASIS you were talking about as well into a computer. The Qi people have done a good job getting desktop makers to include wireless charging pads. It's kind of nifty. Yeah, ASIS showed off a real 360 Hertz, 24.5 inch 1080p gaming monitor. This is for real with NVIDIA G-Sync, the ASIS ROG Swift. So if you have a powerful enough GPU and you're good enough at CSGO or Overwatch, you might notice the difference. It's available later this year. We don't know what the price is. ASIS ZenBook Duo now has a smaller second screen version. Remember, ASIS ZenBook Pro Duo was the one that had a second screen in the keyboard section. This new ASIS ZenBook Duo is lighter. It's only 3.3 pounds and it's coming in Q1 with no price. ASIS also updated its Vivo book series with 10th Gen Intel CPUs. And ASIS has its own Chromebook certified for the Intel Project Athena, the Chromebook Flip C436 coming in Q2. We'll get more about Project Athena from Intel this evening as well. All right, we're gonna finish up with some of the stuff we saw at the CES Unveiled Press Announcement. This is the last stretch of CES announcements for today. There's so much stuff. We'll start with Connected Cats. Well, you know, I know the other day you had a show called The Sea is for Cars with Tim Stevens, but actually, I think the sea is for cat litter. We've got five separate companies here who brought us automated cat litter emptying. We've got Pluto, Lulupet, iCuttle, Litter Robot, and Lavibot. Wow. And I plan to cover them all. For complete cat, smart cat litter coverage. You go to podfeet.com. Alison Sheridan at podfeet.com. That's amazing. And these are all like with apps and connected. Yeah, yeah. So do they empty themselves? Well, it's not just cat litter. Sarah has questions. It's not just cat litter. There's one that's got a food thing so you can monitor exactly which cat got up there. It does AI to figure out which of your cats and stuff and it's measuring input and output. I mean, now that I'm out of town, I've got a cat that my mother is feeding because the cat needs to be fed. Something like some automated form where she's not overeating and not going hungry for too long would be great. There have definitely been auto-litter removal options. Everyone I know who's ever had one is like, uh, it's loud or it breaks or it scares the cat. Or it's too expensive or it scares the cat, you know, that sort of thing. So if that can be tackled in a way that is more pleasant for everyone involved because cats are lovely, but scooping litter out of a box is just not my favorite thing. Not lovely. Then I'm all for it. So another trend I thought that was definitely alive and well unveiled was the sort of like meditation slash sleep better type stuff. So we saw several sleep better solutions. Hatch, which is known for its baby sleep products in the past now has a microphone free. They were sure to tell me it's not a smart speaker. It's not gonna listen to you, but it's a sleep light slash clock called Restore with various lighting and meditation and white noise settings to help you get to sleep. Ergo Knight is a company that makes a headset kind of almost looks like headgear. If anybody's ever had braces that you wear during the day, pairs with the app exercises and you're supposed to train your brain not to be so restless when you eventually go to bed later. So you don't wear the whole thing when you're in bed. You wear it during the day. I said that it's like brain hacking. You kind of, yeah, like 20 minute intervals. He says after 15 sessions, this was the founder who was talking to me that I should see results. So I was like, you know what? I could try that out. Why things now includes sleep apnea detection and it's newly announced scan watch. There's a smartwatch which uses onboard SP02 sensors that transmit light into blood vessels. And then notes, hey, this wear isn't getting enough oxygen, which is often a sign that you might be having sleep apnea which can lead to other health risks. There are a lot of people who have sleep apnea in fact the National Sleep Foundation estimates that 18 million Americans do suffer from the condition, but don't know that they haven't. The scan watch is set for a Q2 release for $249. All right, now we get to the Whirlpool-owned Yumly that we were mentioning earlier. Yes, the people who do the recipes online announced a wireless smart meat thermometer. That's what we were mentioning earlier. The probe grows into the meat, communicates with the dock of both sides. They can tell you the temperature of the meat but also the temperature of the oven. The probe senses the temperatures and sends them back to the dock and based on your settings alerts you through the app when your goose or other item is cooked. It also can let you know how much time is left and adjust that even if you open the door. It'll notice the temperature change from opening the door and adjust the time. The dock has a range of 150 feet and doubles as a charger for the probe. And later this year we'll pull ovens through a firmware update I confirmed with them will be able to communicate with the probe and adjust temperature and bake broil settings automatically. So then you won't even have to use the app. The oven will just be able to do it all on its own if you have a Whirlpool oven. Yumly smart thermometer available early this year for 129 bucks. Love this. It was one of my favorite things there. With wires. No wire. Oh, this was. Because it's wireless, right? Yep. No wire. Okay. The June oven that I have is, well, first of all it's smaller than what the Whirlpool oven would be. And so when you see the Whirlpool you go, oh, wow. It's just a regular oven. Yeah, I gotta put a big old turkey in there because that's what I'm doing every Sunday. But also not having wires. The June oven does have a wired thermometer and it works really well. But it is just one more thing for me to clean and not lose. And make sure I'm using it correctly. Oh, well, you thought we were done? We're not. Sunto, that's S-U-U-N-T-O. If you haven't heard of the company, first smart watch, the Sunto 7, is the company's first Wear OS watch with GPS tracking, offline outdoor maps, heart rate sensors, an altimeter, sleep tracker, and more than 70 exercise modes with 48 hours of battery life. Or 12 hours if it's in GPS, Glow Nascala Leo tracking mode and uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 chip as other recent Wear OS devices. It's available at the end of January for $499. Apparently it's just pretty as hell get out. That's why people are liking it. It's slightly bigger. The battery life is pretty good for the size, but yeah, it's a good-looking watch. Your local news is gonna be covering these next two. Smart Dental Care is all over CES so far. Colgate's Plaquus Pro won a CES Innovation Award. It's the usual Bluetooth connected electric truth brush but it includes sensors in the bristles to detect plaque and a light ring turns blue when the plaque is detected, white when the plaque is cleared. It also creates a map of your brushing to help you overcome the habit to miss difficult spots. There's no price or release date but it should be around the 200 buck range. Then the Oral-B I.O uses some machine learning to be good at detecting those 16 zones of brushing to help make sure you didn't miss a spot. Also has a quieter magnetic drive to better get those bristles going without as much noise. And it also has a pressure sensor that turns red if you're brushing too hard, green, when you hit the right pressure. French company called Fastisse showed off its now-shipping electric toothbrush called the Y brush that is basically just a retainer lined with bristles. So it's not a thing you hold in your hand. You put it in your mouse, I'm sorry, you fill it with toothpaste, then you put it in your mouth, pop it on your teeth, chomp down for five seconds, flip it over, do the same thing again, you've brushed your teeth in 10 seconds. I, you know, it just seems like you wouldn't be trying hard enough but maybe it's just because I'm just used to doing things the old way. You know, it was funny, I had unveiled last night, I was looking at, I believe is the Oral-B version of the new toothbrush and a couple of gals next to me, you know, looking at each other and they go, an electric toothbrush, we've had these for years. There's a lot more going on here. It sounds like you gotta use it the right way though. With the Y brush, you gotta replace that brush at every six months, they sell those for 30 bucks a pop. Baseline brush costs $125, which includes the handle, the brush, the charger, the toothpaste applicator, and a storage container for your toothbrushes. Now lock that uses NFC with Apple's home kit looks like a key and then you put it into a lock and turn it like a key, but it uses Bluetooth and NFC, not teeth, to unlock that door. To charge the locks, you just use the app to reprogram which keys you want it to also use. Keys can also be programmed to unlock different numbers of locks. One key, for instance, could do just the front door, another could do the front door and the garage, you know, so maybe you got someone coming over and you don't want them to have access to the whole house, just one or two doors at once. The lock runs on four AAA batteries or is powered by micro USB. It doesn't offer cloud unlock though, you can unlock it using the app though. There's no subscription service, you just buy the lock and then you use the lock. The Natomo smart door lock and keys includes a look and three keys if we're in between at 350 euros and 400 euros. Extra keys are expected to cost an additional 100 euros. The look is coming to Europe in late 2020. So, Richard? Lock rather. It's offline. I'm scratching my head on this one. I'm scratching my head on this one. You still have a key. Can't get hacked, can't get hacked. Yeah, and also your locksmith is gonna be no help with this one whatsoever. No, no, it shouldn't be, right? Cause it wouldn't be a help with the smart key with the smart lock that doesn't have a key anyway. This is just NFC. The key is just a form factor for NFC. Yeah, this is strange. This is by the name of the company is Natomo. They often come out with some strange designs or things. This is unusual and it's certainly groundbreaking. I'm curious to see this myself. It's so crazy it just might work, but it also might not work. Yeah, I think it's a little too different for me. All right. How about this one? Make sure it showed off the Juno, a chiller that uses the Peltier effect to cool a soda can down in two minutes or a bottle of wine in five minutes. It can also be used for fruits and vegetables. There's no app, no Wi-Fi. It's basically just a Peltier effect machine, which we've had these for years, but it has an LED that can tell you when the chilling has taken effect available for pre-order on Indiegogo for $199. I actually love this. Yeah, do you? Yeah, I do. I think this is a solution for people who have wine cooler or who have wine collections, but don't have the ability to keep the red wines or the white wines that they want always at the right temperature all the time. Well, you can buy this already. It's just electric and it doesn't have the LED though. This is just a very nice version of it. This is a really nice version of it. All right. Nice version for people who like matcha green tea. World matcha showed off its Kuzen matcha drink maker that grinds matcha leaves fresh into powder to make fresh brood matcha shots. In fact, Tom and Roger and I had some last night. Alison, Richard, I don't know if you guys got to that booth, but it was real good. The device is available for pre-order now for $290. That price will go up in about a month though. So you got a pre-order if you want the good price. No ship date yet though. I want to say to Kuzen matcha Oishi desu, this is my favorite product of the EES so far. Honestly, I'm not even kidding. It's true, Tom was like, you got to see this and I was like, a tea maker? It's so good because it's real leaves, but it's the convenience of a pod. Yeah, so it's a maker and dispenser and it's very cool looking as well. And finally, Alison, oh, I'm sorry, Richard. You have a green tea thought. I don't even know what this is. You know what green tea is? That's all you need to know. Alison, you saw a couple of the things last night at CES and failed. Yeah, the two big things I want to talk about that excited me was one is called the Y Charge. It provides wireless power delivery with an infrared beam so it's directed. And since it is that collimated beam, it's much more efficient than other methods that kind of flood the whole area with energy. And one of the use cases they talked about was what about like an airport restroom where we've got a whole bunch of battery operated soap dispensers and you're paying somebody to change out those batteries all the time. You could provide energy to those devices with this. Another example that gave was smart locks. You've got to, they can only do Bluetooth LE because they've got these replaceable batteries that you could power that directly with a beam from this thing and then you'd be able to. Oh, the Natapmo smart lock. We were just talking about the NFC. You can be powered by that. Yeah, you can power the whole thing and that way you don't ever have to change out the batteries and it can do wifi so you don't have to have a separate device to pick up the wifi to connect it. So that was really cool. And something on just a super practical basis was a product called Facetto. It's something you run on, say your laptop and you create a hotspot with it and everybody in the room that's listening to you gets your presentation on their screens and anybody with a web browser can do it. So they can jump onto the presentation with you. They can send you questions while you're chatting and they can do polls. Looked really cool. It's like 10 bucks a month for the lowest end plan and goes up from there depending on how many people are gonna be in the room. Yeah, nice. Well, there you go folks. Always Monday at CES is our super sized episode because there's so much going on but big thanks to everybody. Absolutely and big thanks to everybody who will be in our subreddit learning us to stories that we might not see otherwise. Hey, we're trying our best. We need to work. But there are always more. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Also join in our Discord conversation. Nice and lively this week. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. Quick shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including Andrew Bradley, Tim deputy and Kevin S. Morgan. Also thanks to Allison and Richard for being here. You're our first guest of, well, I was about to say the week. It's only three days, but boy it feels like a month. Where Allison will start with you? Where can people keep up with your work this week? The best place is over at podfeat.com. Very good. Richard, what about you? Yeah, for us at the digitalmediazone.com covering gaming, media and connected home tech. We have all kinds of cool rewards for backing us on Patreon but backing us on Patreon, the biggest reward for us is being able to come here and look at all this stuff and talk to you about it. So thank you for supporting the show at patreon.com slash D T N S. If you've got feedback, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We are live Monday through Friday as usual even though we're on location for the next couple of days for 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tomorrow, Sony, AMD, Samsung, Intel press conference and more from CES 2020 in Las Vegas, we'll talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ha, ha, ha.