It’s Friday. The liveblogs are ending; the major announcements wrapped up, the wacky finds fewer and further between. CES 2014 has finally come to an end, and this was our second year covering the event, finding the most important, most influential, or just plain most crazy announcements of the week. It was also our biggest year covering the event, with thousands of readers visiting the site to check out the best of what CES has to offer.
It was a pretty crazy week. Let’s revisit it. Click through after the break to read more.CES 2014 was all about one thing – iteration. Lets take the existing things we have, the things that we use day in, day out, up to seven days a week – and let’s make it better. Let’s make it faster. Let’s make it – dare I say it - smarter. Smart technology was all the rage this year, from smart television sets finally coming into its own with LG’s new WebOS TV lineup to the smart wearables and to even smart cars running Android.
Samsung was the poster child for iteration this year with their new “professional” Galaxy tablets, the Samsung Galaxy NotePro and the Galaxy TabPro. What’s new there? Well, not a whole lot – faster processors. A new user interface that looks awfully similar to Microsoft’s tablet operating system. Bigger screens – shocker. They even pre-announced the Samsung Galaxy S5, an improved version of today’s Galaxy S4, and even the Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatch. Nothing to write home about – though those twelve inch Galaxy NotePro tablets might garner a fan or two.
Lenovo announced their new Lenovo ThinkPad 8, a faster, smarter, better designed Windows 8 tablet. Valve finally lifted the lid off their starting lineup of Steam Machine partnerships – next generation consoles running Steam’s new Linux based operating system, Steam OS, that will soon go head to head against the Wii U’s and Xbox One’s of the world. We saw twelve of these things at CES this year, all of varying quality – that Alienware sure looks nice, but I’m not so sure about that that Fractal box.
This year, we also got two of the most impressive improvements in the areas that we were most impressed with last year. The Pebble, which was a show stealer at the last CES, got a big visual upgrade with the new Pebble Steel – a beautiful looking new smartwatch that, while functionally similar to the Pebble you might already be wearing, is a lot, lot nicer looking. The Pebble Steel goes on sale mid-February, though you can pre-order today if you’d like.
And then we have 4K TVs, also known as “ultra-high definition” sets – the spiritual successor to now standard 1080p HDTVs. I infamously claimed that 2013 would be the year 4K television sets went mainstream. If that didn’t happen last year, it certainly will this year thanks to some major new announcements by the likes of Vizio, Polaroid, and Netflix – all of which are making 4K televisions better looking, more affordable, and/or more useful.
CES 2014 may not have changed the face of consumer electronics as we know it, but it seemed to have focused on one thing, and one thing very successfully – it has made the technology that we all use every single day infinitely more beautiful, and more useful. And that’s no small feat.
Here’s to a smarter 2014.
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