Kalakshar US

JBL is showing off several models of true wireless earbuds at CES, but perhaps the most interesting is the Tour Pro 2. This premium set comes with a “smart” case that features a touchscreen display on the outside. That 1.45-inch LED panel gives you access to the core features of the JBL One app, including noise cancellation modes, EQ presets, volume and track controls. The display will also show you battery info for each earbud and the case individually, along with the current time. Those four items line the top while the other tools are available by swiping across screens. 

The display turns on when you open the case or when you tap it, and then you unlock it with a swipe. As you might expect, the touchscreen automatically turns off after a few seconds and JBL has thrown in brightness and wallpaper customization for good measure. Another item the Tour Pro 2 case offers is message and social notifications, but the display doesn’t actually show any text for those. It will just let you know you have something waiting. 

The touchscreen case is on the larger side for a set of true wireless earbuds, but not drastically so. It’s noticeably bigger than most of JBL’s lineup, but definitely not the largest I’ve seen. Of course, the larger stature is understandable since the company needed more room to accommodate a bigger battery for the display. Despite the extra power consumption, JBL is still promising battery life you’d expect in active noise canceling (ANC) buds: up to 8 hours with it on, up to 10 with it off. Plus, the case offers wireless charging and the quick-charge feature gives you four hours of listening in 15 minutes. 

JBL is touting the convenience of not having to look at your phone for the “smart” case with the Tour Pro 2. Of course, you’ll still have to carry the case with you and you’ll have to stay within Bluetooth range of your connected device. I think the concept could have potential, but I’ll need to spend some time doing “regular” everyday things to properly gauge the utility. There are things available on the display that you can’t access directly on the earbuds and that you will otherwise have to tap into JBL’s app to change, so it could conceivably save you a few seconds.  

I’ll have to wait until the $250 Tour Pro 2 arrives this spring to judge the audio quality as I wasn’t able to do so during a brief CES demo. However, the company has a solid track record in that department so I expect its latest premium set will handle listening habits just fine. 

Apple is the second tech giant today to receive a fine over personalized ads. France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) has issued an €8 million (roughly $8.5 million) penalty over allegations Apple automatically collected identifying data from App Store visitors using iOS 14.6 without their permission, helping the company target ads. The firm was profiting from violations of data protection law, according to officials.

You could turn off the ad targeting, but it was enabled by default and couldn’t be disabled without wading through multiple menu levels, CNIL added. That reportedly made it impossible for users to give proper consent. Apple has since changed its practices, and CNIL said it conducted “several” checks between 2021 and 2022 to make sure the company was honoring data rules. France launched its investigation in March 2021.

We’ve asked Apple for comment. As 9to5Mac noted, Apple told Financial Times‘ Patrick McGee in a statement that it was “disappointed” with the decision and planned an appeal. The iPhone maker argued that its Search Ads system went “further” than any rival in offering choice over targeted ads, and didn’t track user cross third-party apps or websites.

Apple has had a contentious relationship with French regulators. In 2020, the country’s competition authority issued a fine equivalent to $1.2 billion (now down to $364.6 million) for alleged antitrust abuses in its distribution chain. The company also received a $27.3 million fine over iPhone performance throttling that same year. While the French government defended Apple’s iOS 14 anti-tracking measures against industry pressure, it’s evident that the brand remains under close scrutiny.

Signify (formerly known as Philips Lighting) has a new app. It sounds kind of fun. You can use it to sync whatever’s playing on certain Samsung TVs to Philips Hue smart lights, whether you’re streaming a movie, listening to music or playing games. The idea is to make whatever you’re watching feel more immersive by extending the colors to the rest of the room. Neat! Not so neat is how much Signify is charging for the Philips Hue Sync TV app. It costs £115, which works out to $138.

In fairness, that’s still around $100 less expensive than the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box, a device that connects to your TV and syncs your lights to whatever’s playing. The app supports all image formats and you can customize the settings. You’ll be able to tweak the lights’ brightness and how intense the syncing is. You can choose to auto-start the experience and whether the lights should be in video or game mode. There’s the option to pinpoint where lights are in relative to your TV too.

If you’re somehow interested in paying $138 for the app instead of snapping up disco lights for, like, $12, you’ll need a 2022 or newer QLED TV in the Q60 range or above. You’ll find Philips Hue Sync TV on the Samsung TV app store starting on January 5th.

Elsewhere, Signify announced more Philips Hue devices. The Resonate downward wall light can brighten up outdoor spaces. It costs £110 ($132) and will be available on January 24th. 

You may need to wait until March 14th for the latest Philips Hue Tap dial switch, which has a round mini mount that can be placed on magnetic surfaces, like a fridge. That will run you £45 ($54). Signify has also revealed when the Go portable table lamp it debuted last year will go on sale in the UK. You can snap it up for £140 ($169) on February 21st.

Four years after debuting at CES 2019, Holoride’s in-car VR technology is finally poised to go mainstream. Starting today, the startup has begun selling Retrofit, an all-in-one system you can install in your car to access Holoride content, in the US and Germany. The company designed Retrofit to work with vehicles of any make, model or year.

The device is about the size of a smart speaker and weighs less than half a pound. Installing Retrofit involves attaching it to the windshield of your car with the included mounting arm, which features a suction cup for easy installation. Retrofit’s built-in battery can power the device for up to 14 hours on one charge, and you can use the included USB-C to USB-A cable to charge the device inside your car. You can connect Retrofit to up to two Holoride-compatible VR headsets via Bluetooth.

Inside, the puck features all the technology needed to enable Holoride’s signature “Elastic Content.” When you play an interactive video or game, the platform adapts the experience to the car’s movement. So say you’re playing a game that involves a spacecraft. When the vehicle accelerates, so too will the spaceship. In that way, not only is the experience more immersive, but it’s also likely to cause you to experience motion sickness. Retrofit can collect and process all the movement and location data needed to enable those experiences. 

Of course, adding that sort of functionality to your car won’t come cheap. By itself, Retrofit costs $199. However, most people will probably need to shell out for the $799 Retrofit Pack to get an HTC Vive Flow headset and 8BitDo Pro2 controller with their purchase. That’s a lot of money to pay for a backseat experience, and likely as good of a test as any whether there’s a market for Holoride’s technology.

Disney+ is bolstering its IMAX Enhanced films, including some Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, with another audio option. The streaming service will enable IMAX signature sound by DTS on select titles this year, offering viewers high-fidelity audio to go with the expanded aspect ratio.

You’ll need compatible equipment to hear DTS audio, however. At the outset, some IMAX Enhanced-certified TVs from manufacturers such as Sony and Hisense will support DTS on Disney+, as will certain AV receivers from the likes of Denon, Marantz and JBL. However, you don’t need any particular devices to view IMAX’s expanded aspect ratio of 1.90:1, which offers up to 26 percent taller pictures during certain sequences.

Some may find that the addition of DTS audio will help them to better replicate the IMAX experience at home. DTS will provide a higher bitrate alternative to Dolby Atmos, but many folks prefer the latter. In the near future, you may be able to watch a Disney+ movie in either audio format and decide for yourself.

Meanwhile, Disney+ has announced when Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is coming to the platform. You’ll be able to stream the most recent MCU movie at home starting on February 1st. The film will have IMAX Enhanced support.

CES is back! For real. Sort of. While the show has never actually gone away in spirit, this year is the first time since the pandemic that Engadget has a team on the ground. The show proper kicks off on Thursday Jan 5th, but the news has already been coming hot and heavy. If we count Jan 4th as Day 1, since it’s usually the media preview day, that would make today… Day 0. Some companies couldn’t even wait and broke their news on New Year’s day, those eager beavers. From Samsung’s eye-catching display prototypes and home appliances, to a slew of chips and laptops, here’s what you missed from Day 0 of CES 2023.

Samsung beat everyone to the punch by announcing some of its news early. On Monday, the company unveiled new QD-OLED TVs that will hit up to 2,000 nits of brightness, as well as a 57-inch 8K gaming display. But most intriguing are the new wall ovens that will livestream a video feed of what you’re cooking, plus a new prototype mobile display that can both slide and fold.

CES is also a big show for chip makers like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. This year, Intel unveiled its 13th-gen CPUs for laptops, which can offer up to 24 cores. NVIDIA had a slew of news, including the mid-range RTX 4070 Ti, which costs $800, as well as a series of RTX 4000 cards for laptops. The latter promises serious leaps in gaming performance for portable machines, with the flagship 4080 and 4090 GPUs reportedly being powerful enough to play games across three 4K monitors at 60 frames per second. NVIDIA is also expanding its GeForce Now game streaming to cars, while bringing the processing power of the RTX 4080 desktop GPU to the cloud gaming service.

These new chips are showing up in the usual plethora of laptops and computers from companies like Acer, Lenovo, Dell, ASUS, HP and more. Acer, for example, is updating its range of gaming laptops and simplifying its Swift series, with all of them getting 13th-generation Intel Core processors, alongside design refinements. Meanwhile, LG is updating its Gram series of super thin and light laptops with — you guessed it — 13th-generation Intel Raptor Lake processors. The new Gram Style is a mere 10.99mm or 0.43 inches thin, and has a so-called “hidden” trackpad that has LED backlighting that illuminates when you touch it.

Dell usually shows off some compelling concepts at CES and this year it’s catching our attention with an update to Concept Nyx. As a refresher, Concept Nyx is the company’s vision for a server for your home that can let you play games on various screens around the house. The update this year is a new accessory, and senior reporter Devindra Hardawar, who has already checked it out, called it a “truly baffling PC gamepad.” He even says “it’s like the Steam Controller 2.0, but worse.” Check out his hands-on to see why, and stay tuned all week as we bring you all the news from CES 2023.

This year at CES ASUS has an updated version of its bread and butter ultraportable in the Zenbook 14X OLED. But for 2023, in addition to revamped specs, ASUS is trying out a fancy new ceramic coating on the laptop’s lid.

The process used to create the coating is called PEO, or plasma electrolytic oxidation. This allows ASUS to add a lightweight but durable finish that’s not only harder than traditional anodized aluminum, because it doesn’t require any strong acids or heavy metals during manufacturing, it’s also more environmentally friendly.

In person, the Zenbook 14X’s ceramic finish feels great. It reminds me of the magnesium chassis Microsoft used on old Surfaces, except that it’s even smoother and better at resisting fingerprints. The downside is that because this is the first time ASUS is using this process, the ceramic coating is only available in one color: sandstone. On the bright side, if you want something a bit more traditional, there’s also a cheaper model with an aluminum finish in Inkwell gray.

Other updates on the Zenbook 14X include a slightly larger 14.5-inch OLED touchscreen, a faster 120Hz refresh rate and a taller 16:10 aspect ratio. And of course, performance is also getting a bump thanks to new 13th-gen Intel CPUs, support for up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM and even an optional RTX 3050 GPU from NVIDIA. ASUS is also adding faster Wi-Fi 6E connectivity and with a slightly larger 70-watt hour battery, I’m hoping we see a small boost in longevity too.

Port selection looks solid as well with two Thunderbolt 4 connectors. And when it comes to making video calls, there’s a new full HD webcam (which is up from the 720p on last year’s model) with support for windows hello and dual mics with AI noise cancellation, so you should look and sound better during meetings.

Now I know some of you might be disappointed that ASUS didn’t find room for Nvidia’s newest 40-series mobile graphics cards. But considering that the Zenbook 14X weighs barely more than four pounds and isn’t meant to be your main gaming machine, it’s hard to be too upset.

All told, between the new ceramic coating, the slightly larger display and revamped components, the Zenbook 14X is shaping up to be a pretty well-equipped and stylish notebook. I just hope other people like it too, because I’d love to see ASUS expand the color options for the ceramic coating to more shades than just sandstone. Of course, just how much of a premium you have to pay for it may play a role in its success. ASUS has not yet released pricing for the Zenbook 14X OLED, though it is slated to go on sale sometime in Q2 2023.

Along with its gaming-focused laptops and models that offer 3D visuals without the need for glasses, ASUS had some upgraded general-purpose systems to show off at CES. Depending on how you spec them, though, the likes of Elden Ring should still look pretty great on these laptops.

First up is the latest Zenbook Pro 16X OLED, which ASUS says is the most powerful Zenbook to date. You’ll be able to kit it out with up to a 13th-gen Intel Core processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series laptop GPU and 32GB of LPDDR5X DRAM.

ASUS says the Zenbook Pro 16X OLED (UX7602BZ) has a “unique” Intel processor and a Supernova System-on-Module design that reduces the size of the motherboard core area by 38 percent, allowing for more efficient cooling. There’s also more space for the graphics unit’s power components, which ASUS says will deliver higher and more stable GPU performance.

As the name suggests, this model has an OLED display. It’s a 16-inch, 3.2K HDR touchscreen with an aspect ratio of 16:10 and a 120Hz refresh rate. There’s an auto-tilting keyboard that could help you to find the ideal typing angle. You’ll also be able to take advantage of the ASUS Dial, which should offer more precise control in creativity-focused apps.

The Zenbook Pro 14 OLED is getting a glow up too. The UX6404 model has a 2.8K, 120Hz NanoEdge Dolby Vision display with a 100 percent DCI-P3 gamut and Pantone validation for accurate colors. It comes with up to a 13th-gen Intel Core processor, a GeForce RTX 40-series laptop GPU, a 2TB SSD and 16GB of DDR5 RAM. There’s a memory slot that can accommodate up to 32GB SO-DIMM, as well as WiFi 6E connectivity and a 76Wh battery. ASUS says it packed all of this into a body that weighs 3.64 lbs (1.65 kg) and is less than 0.7 inches (1.8 cm) thick.

As for the Zenbook 14X OLED (UX3404), that has a 14.5-inch, 2.8K HDR display with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 120Hz refresh rate. The laptop comes with up to a 13th-gen Intel Core processor, GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD and a 70Wh battery. The thin and light 14X comes in two colors, Inkwell Gray and Sandstone Beige. The latter has a lid with what ASUS describes as “a new ecofriendly Plasma Ceramization coating technique that creates a ceramic-like finish and stone-like feel.”

Meanwhile, the business-oriented ExpertBook B9 OLED (B9403CVA) is an all-metal laptop. The company claims the “ecofriendly manufacturing process helps to reduce production materials by up to 29 percent, and shortens manufacturing time by up to 75 percent to maximize energy efficiency.” It’s said to be lighter than most 13-inch laptops too.

The latest ExpertBook B9 has a 14-inch 2.8K display with a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio. There’s a touchpad that’s almost 27 percent larger than the previous model and you can expect a raft of security features, including NFC login, face login and a physical webcam shutter.

ASUS hasn’t revealed pricing for any of these models as yet. The laptops should start shipping between April and June.

ASUS is taking a stab at glasses-free 3D in 2023, starting with its new ProArt StudioBook laptop. It sports a 16-inch, 3.2K OLED panel that has the ability to flip into 3D at the touch of a button. This feature, which ASUS calls Spatial Vision, uses eye-tracking and a lenticular lens to deliver two separate images to your eyes. That lets you view things like 3D models and movies with the same amount of depth that you’d expect from a typical 3D screen with glasses.

Now this isn’t exactly new — Acer has been hyping up its SpatialLabs technology for years, which was most recently featured in a gaming notebook. ASUS appears to be following a similar path by focusing on professional users first. Aside from the ProArt StudioBook 16 3D OLED, Spatial Vision will also make its way to a slightly less premium VivoBook Pro mode, which will hopefully cost less. Pricing details aren’t available just yet, but you can expect to pay a great deal more than a typical 2D laptop.

Based on a brief demo with ASUS, Spatial Vision looked impressive on the StudioBook 16, though it took a few tries to get it working properly. It turns out ASUS’s eye-tracking technology couldn’t deal with a face mask easily, which makes me concerned about using this tech in a crowded office. Once I removed my mask though, I was able to view a variety of 3D models up close. When I moved my head side to side, the eye-tracking sensors rotated the models, almost as if they were physically in the room with me. I didn’t get to try out any 3D gaming with the StudioBook, but it’ll be interesting to see how shooters work with Spatial Vision.

Personally, I’m excited about the possibilities of glasses-free 3D while watching movies. I was able to see 3D cinema-like depth while viewing the trailer from Avatar: The Way of Water. It was a reminder that 3D can be more than a gimmick when done correctly. Unfortunately, Spatial Vision only supports one viewer at a time, but that’s true of every glasses-free 3D solution. It’s hard enough to track one person’s eyes to keep perspective — adding more people is exponentially more difficult.

Beyond its 3D capabilities, the ASUS ProArt StudioBook 16 3D OLED looks like a premium workhorse laptop. It’s powered by Intel’s new 13th-gen HX CPUs, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 4000 graphics. It can fit up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM and 8TB of PCIe 4.0 SSD storage, and thankfully there are two user-replaceable slots for memory and storage. The ProArt’s OLED screen can also reach up to 120Hz, which makes it useful for late-night gaming together with its NVIDIA hardware.

Even though Spatial Vision looks cool, it’s still unclear if people actually want glasses-free 3D. I’ve talked to 3D artists who prefer having a VR headset nearby to fully explore their models, they don’t see much value in getting a bit of depth right on their screens. But I don’t blame ASUS, Acer and other companies for exploring the possibilities of this technology — when it works well, it looks absolutely magical.

Put away the Little Trees air freshener, Panasonic has a more advanced solution the next time you want to make your car smell its best. At this year’s CES, the company showed off a portable air purifier that can fit in the cupholder of nearly any car, and filter out odors and even some pathogenic viruses and bacteria. The device uses Panasonic’s Nanoe X technology, which employs hydroxyl radicals, a diatomic molecule that’s known to act as a “detergent” when it comes into contact with pollutants, to clean the air. Panasonic says it takes about two hours for the device to freshen up the cabin of a car, and it does so while only producing about 36 decibels of sound. All you need to do is plug the Nanoe X Portable Air Purifier plugs into one of your car’s USB ports.

Panasonic is not the first company to announce a portable in-car purifier, but with the exception of Philips, it’s not exactly a market crowded by big brands. The company also went out of its way to certify the Nanoe X Purifer with the California Air Resource Board (CARB). Panasonic did not announce pricing and availability information for the device. Expect those to arrive at a later date.