Kalakshar US

In March of 2022, Honda and Sony shocked the world by announcing that not only were the venerable electronics and automotive manufacturers were teaming up, they were doing so to build a battery electric SUV. By June, the project had been spun of into its own company and less than a year after being announced, Sony Honda Mobility took to the CES 2023 stage to officially unveil its first prototype. The Vision-S 02 is now the Afeela. 

Sony executives shared a few details about the upcoming vehicle including that it has 14 exterior cameras — 45 of them in total! — as well as a grille-mounted “Media Bar” that will display pertinent charging and vehicle information, “which allows intelligent mobility to express itself to surrounding people using light, enabling interactive communication between mobility and people,” according to Wednesday’s release. SHM also noted that online pre-orders will begin in mid-2025 ahead of deliveries scheduled for spring of 2026. We’ll have a hands-on from the show floor on Thursday, stay tuned!

Sony is building a better PlayStation 5 controller with Project Leonardo, a kit that promises to make games easier to play for people with limited motor control. In initial images, Project Leonardo is a set of circular gamepads lined with buttons and directional input methods, all of it customizable. Sony says the system will work “out of the box” with the PS5, allowing players to craft their ideal gamepad by mapping buttons, swapping out hardware bits and creating distinct profiles.

Project Leonardo can be used on its own or paired with DualSense controllers — up to two Leonardos and one DualSense can be read as one gamepad by the PS5. This grants players flexibility and also allows other people to help control games.

The hardware includes four 3.5mm AUX ports to accommodate a variety of existing accessibility accessories and switches. The controller itself lies flat on a table or can be mounted on a tripod; it doesn’t need to be held. Sony partnered with a handful of organizations, including AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up, while designing Project Leonardo.

With Project Leonardo, Sony is taking clear cues from Microsoft, which has been a leader in accessibility tech, particularly in the gaming space. Microsoft released the Xbox Adaptive Controller in 2018 and it had many of the same selling points as Sony’s new endeavor, but in a longer and flatter package. Microsoft has a new laboratory focused on building inclusive hardware and a five-year plan to improve the technology landscape for people with disabilities.

One of the major draws of the Xbox Adaptive Controller is its price, which was also designed to be accessible: $100. There’s no word on how much Project Leonardo will cost; there’s also no release window.

On the PlayStation Blog, Sony designer So Morimoto described Project Leondardo as follows: “Our team tested over a dozen designs with accessibility experts, looking for approaches that would help address key challenges to effective controller use. We finally settled on a ‘split controller’ design that allows near free-form left/right thumbstick repositionability, can be used without needing to be held, and features very flexible button and stick cap swapping.”

There was more positive news for the PS5 out of Sony’s CES press conference today — PlayStation head Jim Ryan declared an official end to the PS5 shortage, saying, “Everyone who wants a PS5 should have a much easier time finding one at retailers globally starting from this point forward.” That should is doing a lot of heavy lifting, of course.

After taking a big swing at high-end desktop gaming with its RDNA 3 GPUs, AMD is bringing that technology down to laptops. At CES today, the company unveiled an array of Radeon RX 7000 mobile graphics cards. There’s the Radeon RX 7600M XT and 7600M, both targeted at high fps 1080p gaming, as well as the RX 7700S and RX 7600S, which are meant for thin and light notebooks. But that’s not all! There are also a few more mobile GPUs using AMD’s last-gen RDNA 2 technology, which will likely end up in more affordable laptops.

Let’s start with the RX 7600M XT, though, as it represents the pinnacle of AMD’s laptop gaming ambitions. It features 32 compute units, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and it can use up to 120 watts worth of power. According to AMD, it soundly beats the desktop RTX 3060 GPU, which is notable since that card is faster than NVDIA’s laptop models. The 7600M XT can reach up to 184 fps in Hitman 3 with maxed out graphics settings, whereas the 12GB RTX 3060 hits 160fps. It’s not faster in every title, though, as AMD notes that the new GPU is 9fps slower than the 3060 in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (145fps vs 154 fps).

It’ll be more interesting to see how the RX 7700S and 7600S actually perform in thin and light machines. The 7700S features the same 32 compute units and 8GB of RAM as the 7600M XT, but it maxes out at 100W of power. AMD says the 7700S can reach up to 87fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 147fps in Death Stranding with maxed out 1080p graphics.

Based on my review of AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs, it’s clear the company has some powerful architecture. But those cards also lagged far behind NVIDIA’s when it came to ray tracing performance, especially once I enabled DLSS 3 upscaling. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0 upscaling just couldn’t compete. The company says it’s developed a new feature, dubbed Smart Shift RSR, which offers upscaling “decoupled from the GPU.” Details are a bit fuzzy, but it supposedly adds more performance. AMD says it’ll arrive sometime in the first half of 2023.

You can expect to see AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 GPUs in laptops next month. It’ll be featured in AMD Advantage editions of Alienware’s M16 and M18, as well as ASUS’s TUF Gaming A16. Almost as an afterthought, AMD also briefly noted the launched of several new Radeon 6000 GPUs, including the Radeon RX 6550M, featuring 16 compute units and 4GB of RAM. A wider variety of GPUs is ultimately a good thing for consumers, since it means you’re more likely to find a gaming laptop within your budget.

With last year’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D, AMD turned its long-awaited 3D V-Cache technology into a reality. That innovation allowed the company to stack more cache onto its CPUs, something that’s particularly helpful for demanding tasks like games. Unfortunately, AMD wasn’t able to reach the same clock speeds as the original 5800X, which made the chip tough for some reviewers to recommend. Now, it appears that AMD has (mostly) solved that problem.

Today at CES, AMD unveiled its first Ryzen 7000 CPUs with 3D V-Cache, the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D with 104MB of combined L2 and L3 cache, the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D with 140MB of cache, and the king of them all, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D with a whopping 144MB of cache. What’s truly impressive about the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, though, is that they can also reach the full 5.7GHz and 5.6GHz boost speeds of their 2D counterparts. Their base speeds are a bit slower, to be clear, but they shouldn’t feel like the step down the 5800X3D was.

It remains to be seen how much of an upgrade these chips will be, but cache-hungry gamers will likely be intrigued. AMD says the new V-Cache CPUs will be available in February, but there aren’t any pricing details just yet.

AMD also rounded out its Ryzen 7000 desktop family, which initially launched last year, with a slew of 65-watt chips coming on January 10th. Those include the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900 ($429), the 8-core Ryzen 7 7700 ($329) and the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600 ($229). Not everyone needs 3D V-Cache, after all.

AMD is bringing out some big guns to take on Intel’s powerful HX laptop CPUs, and once again, they’re also called “HX.” The company’s new Ryzen 9 7945HX processor is its most premium mobile offering, with 16 cores and 32 threads, as well as speeds between 2.5GHz and 5.4GHz. It’s joined by an array of other Ryzen 7000 CPUs unveiled at CES (AMD also announced low-end chipsin September), which will power everything from budget laptops to extreme gaming and creator machines. The big takeaway this year? There will be a Ryzen laptop chip for practically every need.

It makes sense for AMD to focus even more on its HX chips this year. Intel unveiled its high-powered lineup last year, and this week it revealed that there will be even more HX processors in 2023, led by the 24-core i9-13980HX. Like its previous chips, Intel is using a hybrid design which combines Performance and Efficient cores. So while Intel’s core count is higher, its chips may end up performing similarly to AMD’s, which utilize full-speed cores across the board.

The Ryzen HX CPUs will run at 55-watts and above (also like Intel’s), meaning they’ll focus more on raw power than battery life. AMD claims the 7945HX is 78 percent faster than the previous top-end Ryzen 6900HX in Cinebench’s multithreaded benchmark, and 18 percent faster in the single threaded test. Compared to Intel’s 12900HX, its high-end chip from last year, the 7945HX is 169 percent faster in Handbrake encoding and 75 percent faster with Blender rendering. You can expect to see the 7945HX in some of the premiere gaming laptops this year, like the Alienware m16 and m18, as well as the latest ASUS ROG Strix.

For a better balance between size and power, there’s also the new Ryzen 7040 HS series chips, running between 35W and 45W. AMD says these chips are aimed at thin enthusiasts, and you can expect to see them in laptops this March. The Ryzen 9 7940HS is the pinnacle of this lineup, featuring 8 cores, 16 threads and up to 5.2 GHz boost speeds.

The 7040 chips will also feature Ryzen AI, an integrated AI engine that can handle tasks like making background blurs during video calls, or sorting through your photo library. AMD says Ryzen AI can multitask up to 4 different AI workloads (or combine those capabilities on one task), and it’s reportedly 50 percent more power efficient than Apple’s M2. Intel is also planning to introduce a VPU AI accelerator in some of its 13th-gen chips — previously, we’ve only seen these accelerators on ARM chips, like the Microsoft SQ3 on the Surface Pro 9.

When it comes to true ultraportables, AMD has the U-series Ryzen 7030 and 7035 lineups, which range from 15W to 35W chips. Those include the Ryzen 3 7330U at the low end, featuring 6 cores and 12 threads, to the 8 core/16 thread Ryzen 7 7730U. (Curiously, Ryzen 3 7335U is just a quad-core chip, but it can use almost twice as much power as the 7330U.)

Anyone who knows their tools knows that Makita, which makes drills and saws, also produces its own coffee machine that runs on the same batteries that power its equipment. Not to be outdone, Black + Decker has its own powered cocktail maker, and has now built a cordless model that you can take on the road. The Bev by Black + Decker Cordless Cocktail Maker is a battery powered booze-dispenser that harnesses Bartesian’s capsules to dish out alcoholic goodies.

Standing taller than a foot on the tabletop, the portable Bev has space for six liquor bottles with the Bartesian pod up front. Naturally, you can use the controls on the top of the machine to set your dose size, from mocktail all the way through to large. And, because a cocktail dispenser isn’t the conversation starter it once was, the unit has its own “enhanced party mode” with a “rainbow of colors that light under the bottles.”

The company says that you’ll be able to get up to 250 drinks on a single charge, assuming you’re rocking a fully-charged 20V MAX battery and don’t want anything too fancy. Naturally, when it’s plugged in, the machine will charge the battery, and run it down when you’re out of the kitchen. In terms of availability, the Bev by Black + Decker Cordless will be available in Spring of 2023, with the price set at $400 when it arrives.

Apple’s Find My app alerts iOS and Mac users when they’ve left an item behind or helps them locate something they’ve lost. Later this year, you’ll be able to do just that with Ember’s heated travel mug. A new version, dubbed the Travel Mug 2+, is on the way this spring. Inside, updated firmware enables the cup to show up inside Apple’s app. The Travel Mug 2+ is also equipped with a speaker, so if you lose it you can make it play a sound like you would for lost AirPods. Like other products that work with Find My, the new mug will show up in the app on iPhone, iPad or Mac and you can also locate it via the Find Items app on Apple Watch. 

Ember’s current model, the Travel Mug 2, is available for $199.95 and keeps beverages hot for up to three hours with a 12-ounce capacity. It can also keep things warm all day if you keep it on the charging dock. A touch display allows you to adjust temperature right on the cup within a range of 120-145 degrees Fahrenheit. And like other Ember models, you can make that temp change inside the company’s app. The company says that despite the added functionality, the Travel Mug 2+ won’t cost more and it will eventually replace the Travel Mug 2.

BMW is once again ready to give the world a glimpse of the futuristic tech it has in the works as p[art of its i Vision concept vehicle program. Following 2017’s iVision Dynamics, 2018’s iNext SAV, and last year’s iVision Circular, the German automaker revealed at CES 2023 on Thursday the i Vision Dee (“Digital Emotional Experience”), a pared-down concept vehicle with a HUD running the full width of the front windshield.

And like the previous iVision iterations, many features from the Dee are expected to make their way into production models — specifically BMW’s new NEUE KLASSE EV platform beginning in 2025. Per the company, the Dee will feature BMW’s Mixed Reality Slider which leverages the company’s “shy tech” sensors to control how much digital content is displayed on the heads-up display. It will slide from fully analog up four additional steps — driving-related information, to infotainment information, to AR — and (eventually) full VR. Fingers crossed that only happens after BMW masters Level 5 driver assist.

“With BMW i Vision Dee, we are showing how the car can be seamlessly integrated into your digital life and become a trusty companion. The vehicle itself becomes your portal to the digital world – with the driver always in control,” Adrian van Hooydonk, head of BMW Group Design, said in a press release. “Implemented the right way, technology will create worthwhile experiences, make you a better driver and simply bring humans and machines closer together.”

The vehicle will also greet their drivers as they approach with a “personalised welcome scenario that combines graphical elements, light and sound effects.” You’ll even be able to communicate directly with the vehicle through verbal commands while it will respond using its headlights and kidney-shaped grille to “form a common phygital (fusion of physical and digital) icon on a uniform surface, allowing the vehicle to produce different facial expressions,” according to Wednesday’s release. The Dee will reportedly be capable of conveying joy, astonishment and approval, all visually. There’s no word on what happens if you manage to anger it, but it can’t be good.

Nothing on the road is more important than the safety of your loved ones but you wouldn’t think it from the state of child safety technology these days. “While safety features for adults in vehicles have evolved dramatically over the past 10 years, child passenger safety technology has remained stagnant,” notes Babyark founder and CEO Shy Mindel stated in a release Wednesday. Their startup, Babyark, aims to significantly advance the quality of vehicular child protection with the self-referential Babyark car set. 

“I was surprised to learn that the most important people in our lives, our children, sit in safety seats primarily made out of plastic and styrofoam,” Mandel noted. “Babyark is approaching safety through the hardware, the actual seat, and the software, including the safety sensors that communicate with the app. The result is a car seat that takes a holistic approach to safety.”

Rather than styrofoam and plastic, the Babyark is constructed of anticrash materials and relies on a novel shock-absorbing SafeCoil that absorbs forward momentum during a crash. Should the worst case occur and the seat is involved in an accident, a set of IoT sensors will record the crash telemetry and relay it to first responders so that they can better and more quickly treat the child. 

An associated smartphone app for both Android and iOS will remind forgetful parents that happen to leave their children behind. Additionally, the ark itself will not engage with its base unit (which secures using the standard seat anchor points) if it is improperly seated upon it — a handy LED light ring will switch from red to green once everything is correctly set. The seat is rated to accommodate up infants and toddlers from four to a 65 pounds (front facing) and up to 55 pounds for rear facing. The Babyark is currently available for pre-order at $990 and will increase to $1,190 when it is officially released later this summer.

Fellow is well-known among coffee geeks for its well-designed range of brewing accessories. The company makes everything from kettles and mugs to brewers and grinders. And while Fellow’s first grinder, the Ode, is mostly designed for pour overs, the company will debut a more versatile model next month. The Opus is a conical burr grinder than can sort everything from fine espresso to coarse cold brew. 

Inside, a six-blade 40mm burr set offers consistent grinds across 41 different settings. So whether you’re brewing AeroPress or French press, the Opus will cover a lot more styles than the flat burr Ode. Fellow did bring its anti-static tech back for the new model, which the company says will help keep the mess to a minimum. Plus, there’s an automatic timed stop, single dose loading, 110-gram capacity hopper and no-tool calibration. The Opus will be available on February 21st for $195, significantly cheaper than the second-gen Ode.