Every January, more than 170,000 people and 4,000 exhibiting companies flock to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas hoping to be a part of the future of tech. This year, Adorama teamed up with RIZKNOWS to cover the event and unearth some of the biggest trends and most noteworthy products. Here’s what you need to know:
Smart Home Innovation at CES 2018
Signs that read “Hey Google” and “Works with Amazon Alexa” were everywhere at CES. They adorned buildings, cars, booths, and even people — Google had dozens of people wearing white “Hey Google” jumpsuits wherever they were featuring smart home tech. Small companies were looking to make their products smarter and large companies were looking to build an ecosystem around their latest products.
If we had to single out one company though, LG was really making a big push in smart home innovation this year. Among their most exciting products were their ThinQ (pronounced “Think-Q”) smart appliances. In particular, their ThinQ Family Hub 3.0 Refrigerator really captured our attention. Not only is it a stunning specimen as far as aesthetics are concerned, but it also has some very practical, clever features (and several over-the-top features). It has a transparent 29” display that runs WebOS and, among other things, allows you to look into the fridge without opening the doors, create notes and reminders, check the weather, scroll through and read recipes, control other LG ThinQ appliances, peer into your fridge remotely, and monitor the freshness of your groceries.
Those last points had us the most excited, however. Representatives from LG showcased how you can manually enter the various expiration dates from your groceries to keep those dates front and center—you can even get alerts when you’re approaching spoilage dates. Furthermore, LG talked of smart labeling in the future that would automatically scan the dates of your produce, dairy, eggs, etc. the moment that you put them into the fridge, thereby eliminating any manual entry needs. As mentioned, with the ThinQ Smart Fridge, you can view the contents of your fridge remotely from your smartphone. Let’s say you’re at the grocery store and forget whether you have onions. You can actually view in real-time what’s in your fridge.
The other subcategory that was on fire at CES was smart speakers, which feature a voice assistant to seamlessly play music, control smart home products, shop, and a host of other things. JBL announced the Link 500, the largest speaker in their Link lineup of smart speakers that feature Google Assistant. Harman Kardon showcased for the Allure Portable, their first-ever portable speaker featuring Amazon Alexa. LG announced its first smart speaker to date, the ThinQ QK7 Google Assistant Speaker.
Several other brands, including Bang & Olufsen, iHome, and Altec Lansing announced smart speakers at the event. And while the category is still relatively new, Google is serious about pushing the envelope with its smart home products to really compete with Amazon. They teamed up with LG, JBL, Lenovo, and Sony to show off Smart Displays, which are essentially the next evolution of smart speakers. Not only can they play music and execute various commands, but also they display interactive content, including maps and directions, your calendars, weather updates, recipes, YouTube videos and more. Here’s a video from Google that shows just a glimpse of what you can expect from these smart displays. You can expect to see smart displays hitting retail shelves starting as early as Summer 2018.
You can’t talk smart home without paying homage to TVs. LG, TCL, Samsung Sony, and plenty of other brands were showing off the latests when it comes to 4K and even 8K TVs. LG, in particular, was showing off a 77″ 4K TV running WebOS that’s less than an inch thick — and it was actually up for a CES 2018 Innovation Award. LG even showed off a Rollable 4K TV that essentially rolls up like newspaper. But the star of CES 2018, at least when it comes to TVs, was The Wall from Samsung, a 146′ MicroLED TV. As opposed to LED TVs — which light from the back and therefore don’t generally rich, deep black colors — MicroLED TVs function similar to OLED TVs in that they light each individual pixel independently so there’s no bleed-through effect, which can deaden certain colors. MicroLED just takes things a step further (smaller) by using extremely tiny LEDs that are lit individually — a 4K TV will have 25 million sub-pixels! Samsung says The Wall is not just a concept TV. It plans to actually retail The Wall sometime in 2018.
Moving over to something slightly less “smart,” but no less impressive. Anker Innovations announced the PowerHouse 200, a portable power bank with a 200 watt-hour battery capacity. The 7-pound power bank allows you to charge all of your devices, including from DC, AC, and USB outputs. Designed to go anywhere with you, this is the smallest power bank of its power level and, at retail, it will be about $200 cheaper than its predecessor.
To learn more about the biggest announcements at CES 2018, check out our other coverage:
CES 2018: The Best & Biggest Announcements in Camera Tech
CES 2018: The Biggest New Health & Fitness Products
CES 2018: The Cars & Vehicle Technology That Stole the Show
