My Favorites of CES 2016

Last week Huawei sent me to CES 2016 in Las Vegas to cover the experience for my blog. The Consumer Electronics Show is one of the largest electronics shows that takes place during the year and the largest event that takes place in Las Vegas period. If you checked any electronics or gadgets blog last week like Gizmodo or The Verge then you were probably overwhelmed by all the CES related posts that they published. Well I’m not going to do the same here, instead I’m going to highlight just some of my favorite things I saw at CES this year.

The whole experience was insane since the Las Vegas Convention Center is HUMONGOUS. I thought the watch expo Basel World was huge when I visited it in 2013 but CES is so much larger. It’s hard to explain how big it is, I mean just the lobby of one of the halls was larger than any of the halls at the Kuwait International Fair Ground. CES was so huge that it took me more than 2 hours of fast walking to cover all the halls and then after I left I found out I had even missed one hall completely. There was so much stimulation everywhere I looked that I felt like I was having out of body experience at one point.

Anyway, below are some of the things that stuck out for me, if you follow me on twitter (@mark248am) then you’ve probably already seen most of the below but with less details.

Casio Smart Watch
The first stand that grabbed my attention was the Casio stand. They launched a smart watch during CES and it’s probably one of the nicest looking smart watches out there. The only issue I had with it was that it was pretty big, so big in fact it made my already pretty big watch look fairly tiny.

ICON FJ40
This isn’t really electronics related but Polk Audio had an ICON FJ40 on display at their exhibit. Any car fanatic knows what an ICON is but for those of you who don’t, ICON is basically an LA based company that takes classic SUVs like the FJ40 or the Ford Bronco and rebuilds them from the ground up while improving them in every way. They cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars when complete and the waiting period is a couple of years as well depending on the model so they’re really rare to come by. Here is a link to their website if you’re interested to learn more [Link]

Gentex Hybrid Full Display Mirror
It’s a very simple product but one I’d really love to have in my car. It’s a rearview mirror for the car that looks like a normal mirror but then with a click of a switch becomes a full digital display mirror. The idea behind this is that the standard rearview mirror has a lot of limitations and usually has obstructions like rear head rests in the way, maybe a high spoiler or children blocking your view. With the hybrid mirror you just click a switch and the mirror turns into a digital display showing you a better view of whats behind your car with the help of a camera. It’s really simple and ingenious and you can see how it works [Here]

Gogoro’s Electric Scooter
I thought this was a concept but turns out it’s actually available in Taiwan right now and a company is trying to bring it to the US. Gogoro are electric scooters but what makes them special is that in Taiwan when you run low on battery, you just pull up to a convenience store, go to the Gogoro battery stand and replace your dying batteries with fresh ones. You can see the batteries and the stand in the photo above, it’s such a smart idea.

Sony RX1 II
I own the Sony RX1 and the new RX1 II is visually exactly the same except it has a bunch of great new features. First thing they did is remove the flash and instead replace it with a much needed pop up electronic view finder. They also updated the full frame sensor and it now shoots at 42MP, the rear screen is now tilt-able and most importantly the focus is now much faster. They’ve sadly increase the price slightly and the camera is now selling for around $3,300. Still a steal compared to the Leica Q.

IGN
While leaving the Sony exhibit I spotted Brian Altano and Marty Sliva from the gaming site IGN. It felt weird seeing them in person, I guess kinda like meeting a girl in person the first time after having skyped with her for a year.

The New Acura NSX
Fucking drop dead gorgeous and so evil looking in all black.

Huawei Ladies Smart Watch
This was one of the products Huawei launched at CES and one I thought was interesting since not a lot of companies are designing smart watches specifically for women. They’ve collaborated with Swarovski on this but sadly Kuwait wasn’t on the list as an early launch market for this watch.

Game of Thrones Pinball Machine
This pinball machine caught me completely by surprise. Probably wasted 10 minutes just playing on this machine, I really want one.

Oculus
The line to get into the Oculus booth was just ridiculously long so decided to just skip it instead of waiting an hour to get in.

Kodak Super 8
No idea why Kodak is releasing this but the Super 8 is their new film camera. Film as in old fashioned 8mm film. You buy the film cartridges, shoot your video and then mail it to them so the can process it for you as well as digitize it. The cartridges last for less then 3 minutes at 24fps and cost around $40. The cost includes the Kodak processing and digitizing fee. Super expensive.

Overall, CES was a great experience and I’d definitely want to do it again.