The Beauty and Functionality of Smartwatches

I think that's what you know, what would be killer is if these smart watches could tell time. There's no need for watches anymore, at least not in my experience. You have a phone in your pocket and it tells time like yeah, it's good to have it right here. But I mean, what is that half second difference? So like, if they're not going for style or amazing functionality, how much functionality can you really have on a tiny tiny little screen? Yeah, it's true. I don't know man, like I've been checking the time with my phone for a long time and then I got the Fitbit blaze and I instantly converted to doing this again. Like yeah because it's more convenient than pulling it out of my pocket.

No, it really isn't convenient sometimes. Like you know, I'm sitting at my desk and no, I don't want to pull my phone out of my pocket. No tight pants, that's what I'm saying. So, you know, it's really hard to for me to pull my phone out of my pocket. Sometimes I need that extra convenience and the SmartWatch is like, does anyone see our tech in 2030? I mean at this point, I think you'll either be owned by Alexa or Google Home and they will wake you up they will transport you in your bed in your autonomous vehicle to wherever they make you go work. That's pretty much what it's going to be like.

I don't know, it's so hard to say at this point, but I think how fancy is it? It's not gonna be as different as we think it will be, really because that's what happens all the time. We think it's all this pie in the sky stuff is gonna work itself out and what happens? Well, we can't get a battery for that or whatever it might be. You know it's like it's always got it's always incremental and it always moves more slowly than we think it's going to. There'll be cool stuff, don't get me wrong, but I just don't know about the flying cars and all this stuff.

Like I don't know about that. I'll be really sad if we don't have a flying car by now. You really want to get into flying? Always of the mind when we look to the future and see where technology is going that we came pretty much bet, especially within a 10-year time frame, give or take. That's gonna be more of what we've seen in the past. So I'm hoping for one thing: better electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

That doesn't sound super fun but if we could take electric cars and get away from them just being commuters and turned them into roadtrip vehicles where you can actually go long distances in comfort and style, and you know with a relatively low cost and low carbon footprint I'd love to see that. We need that right now. And yes, absolutely. Electric cars are gonna be more practical in the near term than the autonomous vehicles building out autonomous vehicles so that they can all coordinate with each other on the road.

I mean, a lot of coordination needs to happen there among the different platforms and vidia obviously, with their xavier chip is pushing that forward really, really fast. So we could be wrong, but autonomous vehicles could be a very real thing, very prevalent in the next five years. I don't know, but yeah, transportation is a big tech topic, and that's why we're seeing more and more car stuff at the CES show.

It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger in the terms of a footprint on the show floor. We keep seeing these high-end cars that are really high-performance saying we're gonna go all electric because Elon Musk made it cool to get electric, that's true. That's a really neat deal.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome back to Digital Trends live CES 2018 coverage here in Las Vegas it is day 3 we have made it we have made it eight hours or plus of broadcasting each day all of the news from Deb from CES is that Digital Trends calm / - yes and the time has come down for trends with benefits our weekly round table tech podcast where we talk about the trending topics of the day but of course this is our CES edition I'm Greg nibbler and we are broadcasting live on Facebook and YouTube in addition to this going up as a podcast later so subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and we have a roundtable of experts here with us today - regulars that you are used to seeing if you listen to this show and a brand new person to trends with benefits so why do we go around just introduce ourselves say what we do here are digital trends and then we'll get into talking about some topics Julian Shekhar - I'm the mobile editor and I review phones and check wearables and anything really that's that can move and a first-time chance with benefits oh yes yes there's rituals about yesterday I'm down the line if you've been watching our live broadcast you've probably seen him already today yeah I've been I've been taking the spotlight too much Ryan juanita home theater and entertainment associate editor and on the end the whiskey miss a whiskey mist aka Caleb Denison I just try not to get in trouble out here you know it's difficult there's so much cool stuff going on it's tough to run into a lot of things to spill coffee on yeah so far so good though go ahead and take that off of there well it's trends with benefits something had to go wrong write up the game alright let's talk about tech gentlemen so we have been here for three days we've seen a lot there's a lot going on at this festival and this is what I want it first of all keep going it festival it's kind of like it is I'm gonna have a party absolutely slightly fewer drugs like I won't even get I'm just trying to keep this thing rolling so so you know we see a lot of different products there's been a lot of trends that we've been noticing a lot of things that we expected to see from from this event and what I want to know is what your favorite product announcement maybe it was that you saw from CES this year and so if you're if you're commenting live if you're watching on Facebook and YouTube let us know what that was for you but maybe we just go around and see if there's if there's one thing that stood out out of all of this insanity that for you maybe was maybe maybe your favorite Julian well I think something that I saw the show was gonna be sort of a trend that you're gonna see in almost every single smartphone this year potentially if not next year is an under glass fingerprint sensor so you know face ID is something that Apple introduced and they got rid of touch ID and everyone signed it so no on defense fifty-fifty do I like face ID do I like kind of miss touch touch ID but now rumors were saying that Apple hasn't really had a chance to really get that technology right to put the fingerprint sensor under the glass but vivo a Chinese company they're huge in China but not really out there and you want any other markets they basically helped with with synaptics help they put the fingerprint sensor under the under glass so basically you don't need another component and you can have a truly bezel-less phone and basically it's the same thing as a traditional fingerprint sensor just put put your finger on the display and unlock your phone and that's cool because that's that's gonna shape smartphone design for this year and it's just gonna be something everyone's gonna want for their phones that's super cool do you know can they also integrate the haptic feedback so that it feels like you have a button even though there's not like a physical button there well what vivo did is that they have this little cool like crypto animation that sort of happens when you put your finger and like it's like this digital like these wires or lines kind of like fade in and the screen opens so that was kind of cool but I can't imagine why I'd be it'd be wouldn't be difficult to add some kind of a haptic vibration as well so how long before Apple buys vivo they want that taken their phone you know it apples been trying to do that for years I feel like to actually get that to where they don't have to have a specific button for the fingerprint sensor and for some reason it's eluded them this long I mean I think you're right Apple with however many billions of dollars that they have that's totally something they would try to snap up yeah I mean I think we buy it do that don't they like to just kind of say we don't need that we'll make something even better we'll make it behind the phone or well whatever one usually says with Apple is that they don't you know innovate they usually wait and they they wait for the technology to get better and then maybe in a year or two we'll see Apple's version of it which of course will probably have a huge focus on privacy and security as is the case with Apple right all right Ryan what about you what's one thing that I saw comments in here live on YouTube and Facebook to let me know and I will get to those I saw somebody testing if I was checking them I am checking them so we'll get to those here in just a second yes cool things in the audio realm not as much in the video stuff because Caleb was doing all that stuff so I it's really hard to pick I saw some amazing turntables and stuff but it's a little there's I mean vinyl like $45,000 turntables made out of this crazy wood that's stuck together that's bulletproof like four sympathetic resonances but no like you know negative resonances all this crazy stuff but I think one of the things that's like most gonna touch people that are looking for really good cinema sound was Sennheiser's new um BeoSound bar it's it's a prototype but it's already been tuned and we listen to it in a room where they had a 9.1 sound system set up with some of the nicest neumann monitors you can buy and they flip back and forth and the sound bar was just just there no subwoofer at the front of the room and you know it wasn't as good as the system around us but it wasn't nearly as the difference wasn't nearly as big as you two thought and it's a gorgeous bar and the other thing it does it does this really really good DSP virtual surround which is really hard to do and make it sound right but it also does it without making it sound synthetic or tight and like you know sharp up up top it was really soft sort of a delicate sound as well well it's really cool and knowing you you have the most particular taste for sound a problem anybody I know I was gonna say that but yes audio file but yeah so if you're saying it's that good I definitely believe that when people were lined up for this thing it's a really impressive system and it's also Sennheiser's first ever sound bar right you know story I'm an audio brand they make the microphones that capture the sound they make the headphones that help you mix and master the sound and just listen at home they haven't really done a speaker product notes before I think buying Norman was a huge huge deal for him and also a huge super super high-end brand you know basically if you've seen like somebody in the studio you've probably seen them using an open mic there what is it the UAT - I think it's like one of the most ubiquitous vocal mics in the world it's everywhere they're right they're a huge company Sennheiser is a huge sound company so the two of them together they've really come together for something really really cool now that's awesome and we've got that review - at Digital Trends comms flash CES just like everything else that we're talking about now down to you Caleb before we start you know we're gonna talk about these products and then maybe talk about where we see this tech going what we see the trends are for the for the future but televisions were huge this year as far as coverage everybody's interested yeah yes physically everything else and I'm seeing some different questions come here in here asking about that noah wants to know about the micro LED announcement that came out so maybe Caleb we can tell us a little bit about that yeah okay so we'll actually start with the Samsung wall a little bit out of order okay that our good friends the video producers can pull that up Samsung introduced a 146 inch TV they're calling the wall and that's because it takes up an entire wall it's built to be about six and a half feet tall so it's gonna fit in most homes that's if you can afford to put it in there but the real story behind that TV was actually the technology behind it micro LED and we're not saying micro LED I don't know why I think it's just that's how it is but Michael Eady alright is like oh let it's an emissive technology the pixels make their own light so we don't have to have these thick layers between LED backlights and the in the panel makes its own light it's also modular so you can scale it up to an even bigger size if you could actually manage but the cool thing about it is that it's brighter then OLED but it still does true black and it has no off access issues so you can be anywhere in the room even though 146 inches is pretty much you're gonna see it from anywhere a cool thing is you can be 15 feet away from this absolutely massive wall consuming display you don't see any pixels it's 4k it's HDR and it was amazing but again it was the technology micro LED put in the TV for the first time some people say this could be a challenger to OLED as we know Samsung hasn't been interested in getting too into the OLED TV game so micro LED could be the the next thing but if we want to go back to fancy OLED TVs last year we saw the wallpaper OLED if you followed CES last year it was amazing thinner than your iPhone sticks up on the wall with magnets little ribbon cable goes down to an at most sand bar and that's where all the guts are really cool they brought back the w8 OLED with some processing improvements and it looks even better than before but what really stole the show is actually not something that you can see on the show floor it's behind closed doors private booth and it's called the LG rollup OLED this is from LG Display so it hasn't been made into a TV yet but it is a TV that you can literally roll up like a newspaper and while a lot of people like the idea of rolling up your TV and taking it on the go that's not really where they're trying to go with this they're trying to make a very flexible literally and figuratively display so they've got mechanics in this big rectangular box it spools the OLED around like like I said rolls it up and so it can pop up to a full size display or if you mounted it upside down it could drop down from the ceiling you could conceivably never see the TV until you wanted to see it in addition to that it can actually drop down effectively changing the aspect ratio so you know when you watch movies a lot of them are filmed in a cinema wide aspect ratio you have black bars on the top at the bottom this comes down so you don't have to have the black bars it's just a perfect cinema wide display drop it even further and you could put you could do computing on it you could put photos on there you could just interact with various apps so that you could monitor your video doorbell or you could you know listen to music I mean the possibilities are endless but nobody's been able to make something like this before it's really really cool now that pick up those old-school shades where you pull the string and it goes flying up yeah well I mean that's the thing we've been talking about a rollup television for years and the last couple years been rumored oh maybe it's gonna show up this year maybe it'll be this year maybe they'll get it right what's taking so long to get this technology off the ground well I mean I mean I know it's hard even though you can make vegetable it's really hard to make it stable you know and so so that it's both protected and also flexible and I mean the last couple of years they've been teasing this it's been white-gloved engineers gently rolling it but don't touch it you know god forbid you should touch the thing now they have it figured out so that it can go up and down I mean it's it's cool to think where we could take that technology yeah and what it could mean for TV displays in the future and you know not just your TV but retail outlets could use this in a number of different ways it just has lots of implications I'm really excited about it and based on the response that we're seeing from our coverage of it you can see a video of it right now at Digital Trends calm for its last CES scroll down foldable OLED it's right there totally fun it's all there at the website so go there to the website you can check out all that well I mean and talked about so how long do you think we could act before we actually see one of these to market I'll go by and roll up television and throw it in my backpack and bring it around with me about losing to me I think that comes down to how ready they are to manufacture it at a large scale I mean when we first got OLED TVs it took him a while to produce a significant amount of them took them a while to get from 55 to 65 from 65 to 77 now they have an 85 inch 8k OLED TV - so yeah they're capable of producing what we need to know now is how long it's gonna take them to produce those at scale I bet that they will have a limited number available next year I think next year at CES we're going to see that TV is something you can actually buy all right well then I'm wrong that's okay I don't care I'm just excited yeah I think it's gonna happen we will circle back one year from now and test and pull out this footage to see if Caleb was right so with that you know that we these are some of the products that we saw that we enjoyed it again this is trends with benefit laughs here at CES 2018 and taking your questions and comments drop those in Facebook and YouTube and we'll get to those one other overall trend and that was definitely predominant here at CES was Alexa further getting incorporated into everything home assistance whether you like them or not whether you're getting weary of hearing about home assistance it's not going away the battle between Google and Amazon I think it's gonna be huge this year yeah I mean those two Google already kind of threw down a little bit here at CES with their their competition or their competitive products I think they threw down harder I just wrote an article actually basically says that I think Google sort of stole the show this year at CES because for me last year when I came it was you know everyone was saying oh we have an Alexa product we have an Alexa product and everything yeah and here this year I think I've heard more we have we support Google assistant oh right and Alexa you know it's like Alexa is there but if everyone seems more excited about Google assistant yeah because it's just something new or maybe it's the partnerships that Google have because they've been you know working with a lot of these companies for so long already but Android and all those other platforms that they have but from from a person who just attend CES this year you know you just can't miss anything about Google assist in here it's if gumball machines they have all those huge ads everywhere and they also deliver they have 200 partners that are showcasing different kinds of products all over CES yeah the assistance in LG TVs Sony TVs and they're saying look we have Google assistant oh and it also does Alexa here's the other thing though if you get Google assistant from the audio side of things Google was really smart okay they came out with the chromecast right and then that was like how to get things wirelessly you can send video and audio then they came out with the chromecast Audio right and then later on they came out with multi-room then they packaged it all in one amp and called it home and now it has Google assistant so now if you have Google assistant not only do you have that but if you have a speaker with that all of a sudden it's multi-room now you can connect any number of any of these google connected speakers throughout your home I think it's up to like a hundred or something yeah it's absolutely and so like how is I mean yeah Alexis cool but how do you compete with that when it's like you get it all it's an all packet and not just that but your nest thermostat your eco be your smart garage door opener your ring right door but I mean it's all fold it you just open up the app and if it's turned on it's like oh I see you have a smart doorbell now let's go ahead and fold that in you can transfer your TV from one TV to another you know pause send this to my bedroom and then you can just walk back there and say go I mean it they have it down and I was talking to Julian I think part of the reason why it's so attractive is that it doesn't require this Alexa skills type of thing like I said you open the app and there it is and it and it's just it's just working well that's what I think Google you know there are a software company they get software far more than Amazon des and I think I think one of they're also main advantages is that you can have a assistant on any Android phone right or at least most not like most Android phones you have the capability to access assistant and Alexa days now or Amazon sort of toying with that idea they've been you know debuting Alexa on a couple of phones but none of those implementations have been as good as Google's and you know with Android being the biggest market share in the world for smart phones that is a real advantage I think if it's already in your phone that's one step ahead right right there let's be clear though Alexa's not going anywhere Amazon just has to work a little bit harder now they've got state competition and as we know competition Stokes innovation and so I think it's just gonna get better and better from here and do you see anybody jumping into this competition somebody just wrote Chris just said Cortana is getting jealous of all of this stock at this time Cortana is trying the jealous girlfriend right yes don't even talk about Siri but say the home pot is gonna come in this year and I feel like you know I was initially dismissing saying you know all Google and Alexa there's gonna be on so many devices but you just know as soon as you know people who have iPhones when the home pod comes out they're gonna get it half of the world I'll buy that one right no matter what and then you're gonna have Alexa owners probably you know maybe gives most people who buy I feel like Google homes are in that Google ecosystem especially with Android phones especially and if you like you know iPhone people are gonna just flock to apples home pod so who doesn't like I mean anyone can get a chromecast and that sets you in right there for $35 you're locked into the system right there you can buy things from there so that's that's what I said about Google assistant it is coming to Android auto in just a month or two if it hasn't already been released we actually just rolled out yet yeah okay there you go and so also I know that Android auto is going Wireless right so right now you get in your car you pull the phone out of your pocket or wherever you get it you have to plug it in now you got to find a place to put it no longer you just leave it in your pocket you get in your car you turn it on automatically connects and you know it can sense when you're going to work or whatever it's just gonna pop up your route right there on your screen you can use Google assistant to adjust the lights in your house the temperature in your house double check to make sure that you close the garage door and if you didn't close it smart locks maybe you forgot to lock the back door on your way out cuz that's my paranoid things I always think I left my house unlocked it's not like you can't get a smart lock right now but if it's all incorporated into Google hope now I'm worried I left my home unlocked but everybody know that neighborhood man well yeah but yeah I mean I really now that you're saying this I can see how Google can actually put up some really fierce competition but again though Amazon and Alexa was first they did a really good job I mean they practically gave away echo speakers in the beginning you know just to get people to use them I think it's though is it the wind that has echo speakers in their hotel rooms really the app that they were there at least they were going to be rolling that out so I don't think you can discount Alexa as still coming out on top F initely not I mean I have echo speakers I'm not gonna run out and replace them right away I can still do tons of stuff with Alexis I have a fire TV those things communicate really nicely with each other but I do think that as I get into more smart home gear and I get those connected locks and thermostats and stuff like that because they were getting less and less expensive and I think maybe Google is a better way to go for those things yeah we just saw Alexa putting a sound bar and that was a really cool implementation as well a poke has done this I think they called the command bar and you can adjust the volume on the bar you can check your security you can adjust the thermostat if there's nest there's a button on the remote so you can hit it without asking for Alexa so yeah there's a lot of cool things happening with Amazon Alexa as well well there was an article actually on Digital Trends dot-com it was I think came up on Tuesday I'm trying to find it so I'll paraphrase but it was basically that they the estimation is that forty four percent of American households I believe it was will be purchasing a home assistant at some point in this next year I mean that's crazy growth over two years ago from CES like how we've seen this this whole market develop in that short amount of time and where it's gonna be you know where's it gonna be a year from now what are we gonna be seeing I'd you got you have any guesses on where you think this will go well I don't think it's gonna need to look a little hub it's probably gonna to be start you know buy a home it has Google assistant right yeah be yeah smart homes what's really I think important about if you really want it to be everywhere is third-party you know adapt adaptation because rich people can't like you know I mean the only rich people can make their whole home you know electronics so that everything is connected so you need those third-party like you had that air-conditioning thing like there's those three party ones that you know they have little ways to make your old gear yeah old stuff in your house new you know with the new the new something to retrofit yeah you really need those third-party components to make that happen for a lot of people yeah I think that it's gonna put a bunch of people out of work honestly custom integrators who come in and they hook all these things up they make them talk to each other and they program things it's gonna be harder and harder for them to find work because they are in the business of selling the devices they hook them up right but they can't make their bread and butter unless they're selling hardware and right now it's more appealing to go on Amazon go go to various online retailers and buy the stuff yourself I can go buy a nest at you know freakin Home Depot you know yeah and that stuff I can install it myself and get it connected myself it's not that hard and I think to ryan's point it's been for people who are wealthier you know but now it's not i think it's coming down in price to the point where anybody can have it and i think that yeah getting rid of the hub having the hub be in the cloud so that everything just sort of runs through the crowd cloud that's gonna be the future right they're just gonna keep expanding like that security wise that is so scary i know i mean it really is big brother in your house I mean it could be well especially when they had that truck that trouble mother savannah walks you know just somebody was hacking all the locks or locking people out of their houses and stuff like that like that's what I worry about with this stuff Noah's saying when you see smart homes becoming affordable I mean if you bought a home maybe like Julian saying where it just comes fully installed with Google home you know or something like that that's gonna be a ways up that's why it's gas those third party items that you can purchase for 70 bucks here and there hundred bucks there like that's what it's gonna be about I see what Noah's asking about and I think that one of the best things Samsung did was they tied everything together under one smart things app used to be you had an app for your fridge for your you know your oven maybe your washer and dryer and all these different your lights yeah everything was under a different app now with the smartthings hub you can tie all that stuff together and control it with just one app so you don't have to open the ring app or the nest app you just open your Samsung smartthings app and it will control all of it there's they're relying on Bixby though cuz they're not going down the Alexa or Google oh yeah we forgot to include Bixby Bixby is still there so definitely I think that's that's probably one of the biggest trends we're gonna see this year yep it's more incorporation of that we did have a quick question Julian I don't know if you can speak on this as far as smartwatches what the future of smartwatches was there any were there any big announcements Gareth is asking yeah they were actually two well in Andy box lrr you can't writer he saw this modular watch called blocks and basically the idea is that you can just replace the watch band components with different things like a battery or maybe a heart rate monitor and that was really cool but I mean sort of you know I would need to play it around with that more but I did get to try out too cool Android wear watches in and I would did want to go you know speak about how like last year a lot of fashion brands started releasing Android wear watches and that's really cool because you know a lot of people they see a SmartWatch and they're like why doesn't this do the things that my phone does and I think there just has to be a collective and conscious decision by people in that you know we don't have to treat smartwatches as a gadget it's just a watch that's that looks cool and maybe it does a couple of cool things like show your notifications where you can if you want to respond to something you can do it I don't think watches need to do everything and I think that's what all these fashion brands are following and that's what we saw with the Kate Spade scallop watch that actually I think we're getting in Kate Spade on the booth next or in a couple minutes but that was a watch for women and it doesn't you know it's it's designed for women by women and it's you don't really see a lot of dedication and details poured into a watch a Smart Watch at least for for a woman these days and you know there are female centric smartwatches but that that's why I really like the Kate Spade watch and then the other Skagen was you know just a really nice looking watch that a lot of people are you know I've just seen someone wearing it at everyone's who sees it they're like it looks great on you and and that's what I think collectively people just have to think about smart watches going forward you know yeah there's gonna be stuff like the blocks where you and the Apple watch where does so much techy stuff but yeah you know if it also just focuses on on fashion and beauty and looking good while also helping you enhance your life slightly then I think I think that's what you know what would be killer is if these smart watches could tell time there's the can the whiskey mist I know that's such a great point that you make because we haven't needed watches for at least a decade right right I mean or longer I mean you have a phone in your pocket it tells time like yeah it's good to have it right here but yeah what is that a half second so like if they're not going for style you know right or amazing functionality and how much functionality can you really have on a tiny tiny little screen yeah it's true I don't know man like I you know I've been you know checking the time with my phone for a long time and then I got the Fitbit blaze and I instantly converted to doing this again like yeah because it's more convenient than pulling it out of my pocket and that may seem like whoa why this is so hard to for you to pull your phone out of your pocket no it really isn't convenient sometimes like you know I I'm sitting at my desk and no I don't want to I like tight pants you know what I'm saying so you know it's really hard I have to pull it out of the pocket sometimes I need that SmartWatch guys yeah does like tight pants that say pants all right it's been three days what happens to your mind at about this point of the show fans okay somebody just asked Robert said and just will kind of wrap up with this where does anyone see our tech in 2030 I mean at this point I think you'll either be owned by Alexa or Google home and they will wake you up they will transport you in your bed in your autonomous vehicle to wherever they make you go work and that's pretty much what it what we're gonna be I don't know it's so hard to say at this point I think how fancy is it's not gonna be as different as we think it will be really because that's what happens all the time we think it's all this pie in the sky stuff is going to work itself out and what happens well we can't get a battery for that or whatever it might be you know it's like it's always got it's always incremental and it always moves more slowly than we think it's going to there'll be cool stuff don't get me wrong but I don't know about the flying cars and all this stuff like I don't know about that I'll be really sad if we don't have a flying car by joining do you really want to get into flying yes I want to flying cars because you're gonna explode I always of the mind when we look to the future and see where technology is going that we came pretty much bet especially within a 10-year time frame give or take that's gonna be more of what we've seen in the past and so I'm hoping for one that we have a better electric vehicle charging infrastructure that doesn't sound super fun but but if we could take electric cars and get away from them just being commuters and turned them into roadtrip vehicles where you can actually go long distances in comfort and style and you know with a relatively low cost and low carbon footprint I'd love to see that and we need that right now but I see more brands going just electric - yep absolutely I think that electric cars are gonna be more practical in the near term than the autonomous vehicles building out autonomous vehicles so that they can all coordinate with each other on the road I mean a lot of coordination needs to happen there among the different platforms and Vidia obviously with their xavier chip is pushing that forward really really fast so we could be wrong autonomous vehicles could be a very real thing very prevalent in the next five years I don't know but yeah I think transportation is a is a big tech topic and that's why we're seeing more and more car stuff at the CES show it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger in the in terms of a footprint on the show floor we keep seeing these like high-end sorry real quickly its high-end cars that are really high-performance saying we're gonna go all electric because Elon Musk made it cool to get electric that's true that's a really neat deal we'll see what you all must does in this amount of time well that's all the time we have for this so again this is trends with benefits this is our weekly round table tech podcast here at Digital Trends subscribe on iTunes or stitcher and we do a live on Facebook in YouTube every Thursday at 2:30 p.m. Pacific so join us there but we've got lots more coming for you this is our lives to es 2018 coverage we'll be back in a bit of course follow us at digital Transcom slash CES CNF youhello and welcome back to Digital Trends live CES 2018 coverage here in Las Vegas it is day 3 we have made it we have made it eight hours or plus of broadcasting each day all of the news from Deb from CES is that Digital Trends calm / - yes and the time has come down for trends with benefits our weekly round table tech podcast where we talk about the trending topics of the day but of course this is our CES edition I'm Greg nibbler and we are broadcasting live on Facebook and YouTube in addition to this going up as a podcast later so subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and we have a roundtable of experts here with us today - regulars that you are used to seeing if you listen to this show and a brand new person to trends with benefits so why do we go around just introduce ourselves say what we do here are digital trends and then we'll get into talking about some topics Julian Shekhar - I'm the mobile editor and I review phones and check wearables and anything really that's that can move and a first-time chance with benefits oh yes yes there's rituals about yesterday I'm down the line if you've been watching our live broadcast you've probably seen him already today yeah I've been I've been taking the spotlight too much Ryan juanita home theater and entertainment associate editor and on the end the whiskey miss a whiskey mist aka Caleb Denison I just try not to get in trouble out here you know it's difficult there's so much cool stuff going on it's tough to run into a lot of things to spill coffee on yeah so far so good though go ahead and take that off of there well it's trends with benefits something had to go wrong write up the game alright let's talk about tech gentlemen so we have been here for three days we've seen a lot there's a lot going on at this festival and this is what I want it first of all keep going it festival it's kind of like it is I'm gonna have a party absolutely slightly fewer drugs like I won't even get I'm just trying to keep this thing rolling so so you know we see a lot of different products there's been a lot of trends that we've been noticing a lot of things that we expected to see from from this event and what I want to know is what your favorite product announcement maybe it was that you saw from CES this year and so if you're if you're commenting live if you're watching on Facebook and YouTube let us know what that was for you but maybe we just go around and see if there's if there's one thing that stood out out of all of this insanity that for you maybe was maybe maybe your favorite Julian well I think something that I saw the show was gonna be sort of a trend that you're gonna see in almost every single smartphone this year potentially if not next year is an under glass fingerprint sensor so you know face ID is something that Apple introduced and they got rid of touch ID and everyone signed it so no on defense fifty-fifty do I like face ID do I like kind of miss touch touch ID but now rumors were saying that Apple hasn't really had a chance to really get that technology right to put the fingerprint sensor under the glass but vivo a Chinese company they're huge in China but not really out there and you want any other markets they basically helped with with synaptics help they put the fingerprint sensor under the under glass so basically you don't need another component and you can have a truly bezel-less phone and basically it's the same thing as a traditional fingerprint sensor just put put your finger on the display and unlock your phone and that's cool because that's that's gonna shape smartphone design for this year and it's just gonna be something everyone's gonna want for their phones that's super cool do you know can they also integrate the haptic feedback so that it feels like you have a button even though there's not like a physical button there well what vivo did is that they have this little cool like crypto animation that sort of happens when you put your finger and like it's like this digital like these wires or lines kind of like fade in and the screen opens so that was kind of cool but I can't imagine why I'd be it'd be wouldn't be difficult to add some kind of a haptic vibration as well so how long before Apple buys vivo they want that taken their phone you know it apples been trying to do that for years I feel like to actually get that to where they don't have to have a specific button for the fingerprint sensor and for some reason it's eluded them this long I mean I think you're right Apple with however many billions of dollars that they have that's totally something they would try to snap up yeah I mean I think we buy it do that don't they like to just kind of say we don't need that we'll make something even better we'll make it behind the phone or well whatever one usually says with Apple is that they don't you know innovate they usually wait and they they wait for the technology to get better and then maybe in a year or two we'll see Apple's version of it which of course will probably have a huge focus on privacy and security as is the case with Apple right all right Ryan what about you what's one thing that I saw comments in here live on YouTube and Facebook to let me know and I will get to those I saw somebody testing if I was checking them I am checking them so we'll get to those here in just a second yes cool things in the audio realm not as much in the video stuff because Caleb was doing all that stuff so I it's really hard to pick I saw some amazing turntables and stuff but it's a little there's I mean vinyl like $45,000 turntables made out of this crazy wood that's stuck together that's bulletproof like four sympathetic resonances but no like you know negative resonances all this crazy stuff but I think one of the things that's like most gonna touch people that are looking for really good cinema sound was Sennheiser's new um BeoSound bar it's it's a prototype but it's already been tuned and we listen to it in a room where they had a 9.1 sound system set up with some of the nicest neumann monitors you can buy and they flip back and forth and the sound bar was just just there no subwoofer at the front of the room and you know it wasn't as good as the system around us but it wasn't nearly as the difference wasn't nearly as big as you two thought and it's a gorgeous bar and the other thing it does it does this really really good DSP virtual surround which is really hard to do and make it sound right but it also does it without making it sound synthetic or tight and like you know sharp up up top it was really soft sort of a delicate sound as well well it's really cool and knowing you you have the most particular taste for sound a problem anybody I know I was gonna say that but yes audio file but yeah so if you're saying it's that good I definitely believe that when people were lined up for this thing it's a really impressive system and it's also Sennheiser's first ever sound bar right you know story I'm an audio brand they make the microphones that capture the sound they make the headphones that help you mix and master the sound and just listen at home they haven't really done a speaker product notes before I think buying Norman was a huge huge deal for him and also a huge super super high-end brand you know basically if you've seen like somebody in the studio you've probably seen them using an open mic there what is it the UAT - I think it's like one of the most ubiquitous vocal mics in the world it's everywhere they're right they're a huge company Sennheiser is a huge sound company so the two of them together they've really come together for something really really cool now that's awesome and we've got that review - at Digital Trends comms flash CES just like everything else that we're talking about now down to you Caleb before we start you know we're gonna talk about these products and then maybe talk about where we see this tech going what we see the trends are for the for the future but televisions were huge this year as far as coverage everybody's interested yeah yes physically everything else and I'm seeing some different questions come here in here asking about that noah wants to know about the micro LED announcement that came out so maybe Caleb we can tell us a little bit about that yeah okay so we'll actually start with the Samsung wall a little bit out of order okay that our good friends the video producers can pull that up Samsung introduced a 146 inch TV they're calling the wall and that's because it takes up an entire wall it's built to be about six and a half feet tall so it's gonna fit in most homes that's if you can afford to put it in there but the real story behind that TV was actually the technology behind it micro LED and we're not saying micro LED I don't know why I think it's just that's how it is but Michael Eady alright is like oh let it's an emissive technology the pixels make their own light so we don't have to have these thick layers between LED backlights and the in the panel makes its own light it's also modular so you can scale it up to an even bigger size if you could actually manage but the cool thing about it is that it's brighter then OLED but it still does true black and it has no off access issues so you can be anywhere in the room even though 146 inches is pretty much you're gonna see it from anywhere a cool thing is you can be 15 feet away from this absolutely massive wall consuming display you don't see any pixels it's 4k it's HDR and it was amazing but again it was the technology micro LED put in the TV for the first time some people say this could be a challenger to OLED as we know Samsung hasn't been interested in getting too into the OLED TV game so micro LED could be the the next thing but if we want to go back to fancy OLED TVs last year we saw the wallpaper OLED if you followed CES last year it was amazing thinner than your iPhone sticks up on the wall with magnets little ribbon cable goes down to an at most sand bar and that's where all the guts are really cool they brought back the w8 OLED with some processing improvements and it looks even better than before but what really stole the show is actually not something that you can see on the show floor it's behind closed doors private booth and it's called the LG rollup OLED this is from LG Display so it hasn't been made into a TV yet but it is a TV that you can literally roll up like a newspaper and while a lot of people like the idea of rolling up your TV and taking it on the go that's not really where they're trying to go with this they're trying to make a very flexible literally and figuratively display so they've got mechanics in this big rectangular box it spools the OLED around like like I said rolls it up and so it can pop up to a full size display or if you mounted it upside down it could drop down from the ceiling you could conceivably never see the TV until you wanted to see it in addition to that it can actually drop down effectively changing the aspect ratio so you know when you watch movies a lot of them are filmed in a cinema wide aspect ratio you have black bars on the top at the bottom this comes down so you don't have to have the black bars it's just a perfect cinema wide display drop it even further and you could put you could do computing on it you could put photos on there you could just interact with various apps so that you could monitor your video doorbell or you could you know listen to music I mean the possibilities are endless but nobody's been able to make something like this before it's really really cool now that pick up those old-school shades where you pull the string and it goes flying up yeah well I mean that's the thing we've been talking about a rollup television for years and the last couple years been rumored oh maybe it's gonna show up this year maybe it'll be this year maybe they'll get it right what's taking so long to get this technology off the ground well I mean I mean I know it's hard even though you can make vegetable it's really hard to make it stable you know and so so that it's both protected and also flexible and I mean the last couple of years they've been teasing this it's been white-gloved engineers gently rolling it but don't touch it you know god forbid you should touch the thing now they have it figured out so that it can go up and down I mean it's it's cool to think where we could take that technology yeah and what it could mean for TV displays in the future and you know not just your TV but retail outlets could use this in a number of different ways it just has lots of implications I'm really excited about it and based on the response that we're seeing from our coverage of it you can see a video of it right now at Digital Trends calm for its last CES scroll down foldable OLED it's right there totally fun it's all there at the website so go there to the website you can check out all that well I mean and talked about so how long do you think we could act before we actually see one of these to market I'll go by and roll up television and throw it in my backpack and bring it around with me about losing to me I think that comes down to how ready they are to manufacture it at a large scale I mean when we first got OLED TVs it took him a while to produce a significant amount of them took them a while to get from 55 to 65 from 65 to 77 now they have an 85 inch 8k OLED TV - so yeah they're capable of producing what we need to know now is how long it's gonna take them to produce those at scale I bet that they will have a limited number available next year I think next year at CES we're going to see that TV is something you can actually buy all right well then I'm wrong that's okay I don't care I'm just excited yeah I think it's gonna happen we will circle back one year from now and test and pull out this footage to see if Caleb was right so with that you know that we these are some of the products that we saw that we enjoyed it again this is trends with benefit laughs here at CES 2018 and taking your questions and comments drop those in Facebook and YouTube and we'll get to those one other overall trend and that was definitely predominant here at CES was Alexa further getting incorporated into everything home assistance whether you like them or not whether you're getting weary of hearing about home assistance it's not going away the battle between Google and Amazon I think it's gonna be huge this year yeah I mean those two Google already kind of threw down a little bit here at CES with their their competition or their competitive products I think they threw down harder I just wrote an article actually basically says that I think Google sort of stole the show this year at CES because for me last year when I came it was you know everyone was saying oh we have an Alexa product we have an Alexa product and everything yeah and here this year I think I've heard more we have we support Google assistant oh right and Alexa you know it's like Alexa is there but if everyone seems more excited about Google assistant yeah because it's just something new or maybe it's the partnerships that Google have because they've been you know working with a lot of these companies for so long already but Android and all those other platforms that they have but from from a person who just attend CES this year you know you just can't miss anything about Google assist in here it's if gumball machines they have all those huge ads everywhere and they also deliver they have 200 partners that are showcasing different kinds of products all over CES yeah the assistance in LG TVs Sony TVs and they're saying look we have Google assistant oh and it also does Alexa here's the other thing though if you get Google assistant from the audio side of things Google was really smart okay they came out with the chromecast right and then that was like how to get things wirelessly you can send video and audio then they came out with the chromecast Audio right and then later on they came out with multi-room then they packaged it all in one amp and called it home and now it has Google assistant so now if you have Google assistant not only do you have that but if you have a speaker with that all of a sudden it's multi-room now you can connect any number of any of these google connected speakers throughout your home I think it's up to like a hundred or something yeah it's absolutely and so like how is I mean yeah Alexis cool but how do you compete with that when it's like you get it all it's an all packet and not just that but your nest thermostat your eco be your smart garage door opener your ring right door but I mean it's all fold it you just open up the app and if it's turned on it's like oh I see you have a smart doorbell now let's go ahead and fold that in you can transfer your TV from one TV to another you know pause send this to my bedroom and then you can just walk back there and say go I mean it they have it down and I was talking to Julian I think part of the reason why it's so attractive is that it doesn't require this Alexa skills type of thing like I said you open the app and there it is and it and it's just it's just working well that's what I think Google you know there are a software company they get software far more than Amazon des and I think I think one of they're also main advantages is that you can have a assistant on any Android phone right or at least most not like most Android phones you have the capability to access assistant and Alexa days now or Amazon sort of toying with that idea they've been you know debuting Alexa on a couple of phones but none of those implementations have been as good as Google's and you know with Android being the biggest market share in the world for smart phones that is a real advantage I think if it's already in your phone that's one step ahead right right there let's be clear though Alexa's not going anywhere Amazon just has to work a little bit harder now they've got state competition and as we know competition Stokes innovation and so I think it's just gonna get better and better from here and do you see anybody jumping into this competition somebody just wrote Chris just said Cortana is getting jealous of all of this stock at this time Cortana is trying the jealous girlfriend right yes don't even talk about Siri but say the home pot is gonna come in this year and I feel like you know I was initially dismissing saying you know all Google and Alexa there's gonna be on so many devices but you just know as soon as you know people who have iPhones when the home pod comes out they're gonna get it half of the world I'll buy that one right no matter what and then you're gonna have Alexa owners probably you know maybe gives most people who buy I feel like Google homes are in that Google ecosystem especially with Android phones especially and if you like you know iPhone people are gonna just flock to apples home pod so who doesn't like I mean anyone can get a chromecast and that sets you in right there for $35 you're locked into the system right there you can buy things from there so that's that's what I said about Google assistant it is coming to Android auto in just a month or two if it hasn't already been released we actually just rolled out yet yeah okay there you go and so also I know that Android auto is going Wireless right so right now you get in your car you pull the phone out of your pocket or wherever you get it you have to plug it in now you got to find a place to put it no longer you just leave it in your pocket you get in your car you turn it on automatically connects and you know it can sense when you're going to work or whatever it's just gonna pop up your route right there on your screen you can use Google assistant to adjust the lights in your house the temperature in your house double check to make sure that you close the garage door and if you didn't close it smart locks maybe you forgot to lock the back door on your way out cuz that's my paranoid things I always think I left my house unlocked it's not like you can't get a smart lock right now but if it's all incorporated into Google hope now I'm worried I left my home unlocked but everybody know that neighborhood man well yeah but yeah I mean I really now that you're saying this I can see how Google can actually put up some really fierce competition but again though Amazon and Alexa was first they did a really good job I mean they practically gave away echo speakers in the beginning you know just to get people to use them I think it's though is it the wind that has echo speakers in their hotel rooms really the app that they were there at least they were going to be rolling that out so I don't think you can discount Alexa as still coming out on top F initely not I mean I have echo speakers I'm not gonna run out and replace them right away I can still do tons of stuff with Alexis I have a fire TV those things communicate really nicely with each other but I do think that as I get into more smart home gear and I get those connected locks and thermostats and stuff like that because they were getting less and less expensive and I think maybe Google is a better way to go for those things yeah we just saw Alexa putting a sound bar and that was a really cool implementation as well a poke has done this I think they called the command bar and you can adjust the volume on the bar you can check your security you can adjust the thermostat if there's nest there's a button on the remote so you can hit it without asking for Alexa so yeah there's a lot of cool things happening with Amazon Alexa as well well there was an article actually on Digital Trends dot-com it was I think came up on Tuesday I'm trying to find it so I'll paraphrase but it was basically that they the estimation is that forty four percent of American households I believe it was will be purchasing a home assistant at some point in this next year I mean that's crazy growth over two years ago from CES like how we've seen this this whole market develop in that short amount of time and where it's gonna be you know where's it gonna be a year from now what are we gonna be seeing I'd you got you have any guesses on where you think this will go well I don't think it's gonna need to look a little hub it's probably gonna to be start you know buy a home it has Google assistant right yeah be yeah smart homes what's really I think important about if you really want it to be everywhere is third-party you know adapt adaptation because rich people can't like you know I mean the only rich people can make their whole home you know electronics so that everything is connected so you need those third-party like you had that air-conditioning thing like there's those three party ones that you know they have little ways to make your old gear yeah old stuff in your house new you know with the new the new something to retrofit yeah you really need those third-party components to make that happen for a lot of people yeah I think that it's gonna put a bunch of people out of work honestly custom integrators who come in and they hook all these things up they make them talk to each other and they program things it's gonna be harder and harder for them to find work because they are in the business of selling the devices they hook them up right but they can't make their bread and butter unless they're selling hardware and right now it's more appealing to go on Amazon go go to various online retailers and buy the stuff yourself I can go buy a nest at you know freakin Home Depot you know yeah and that stuff I can install it myself and get it connected myself it's not that hard and I think to ryan's point it's been for people who are wealthier you know but now it's not i think it's coming down in price to the point where anybody can have it and i think that yeah getting rid of the hub having the hub be in the cloud so that everything just sort of runs through the crowd cloud that's gonna be the future right they're just gonna keep expanding like that security wise that is so scary i know i mean it really is big brother in your house I mean it could be well especially when they had that truck that trouble mother savannah walks you know just somebody was hacking all the locks or locking people out of their houses and stuff like that like that's what I worry about with this stuff Noah's saying when you see smart homes becoming affordable I mean if you bought a home maybe like Julian saying where it just comes fully installed with Google home you know or something like that that's gonna be a ways up that's why it's gas those third party items that you can purchase for 70 bucks here and there hundred bucks there like that's what it's gonna be about I see what Noah's asking about and I think that one of the best things Samsung did was they tied everything together under one smart things app used to be you had an app for your fridge for your you know your oven maybe your washer and dryer and all these different your lights yeah everything was under a different app now with the smartthings hub you can tie all that stuff together and control it with just one app so you don't have to open the ring app or the nest app you just open your Samsung smartthings app and it will control all of it there's they're relying on Bixby though cuz they're not going down the Alexa or Google oh yeah we forgot to include Bixby Bixby is still there so definitely I think that's that's probably one of the biggest trends we're gonna see this year yep it's more incorporation of that we did have a quick question Julian I don't know if you can speak on this as far as smartwatches what the future of smartwatches was there any were there any big announcements Gareth is asking yeah they were actually two well in Andy box lrr you can't writer he saw this modular watch called blocks and basically the idea is that you can just replace the watch band components with different things like a battery or maybe a heart rate monitor and that was really cool but I mean sort of you know I would need to play it around with that more but I did get to try out too cool Android wear watches in and I would did want to go you know speak about how like last year a lot of fashion brands started releasing Android wear watches and that's really cool because you know a lot of people they see a SmartWatch and they're like why doesn't this do the things that my phone does and I think there just has to be a collective and conscious decision by people in that you know we don't have to treat smartwatches as a gadget it's just a watch that's that looks cool and maybe it does a couple of cool things like show your notifications where you can if you want to respond to something you can do it I don't think watches need to do everything and I think that's what all these fashion brands are following and that's what we saw with the Kate Spade scallop watch that actually I think we're getting in Kate Spade on the booth next or in a couple minutes but that was a watch for women and it doesn't you know it's it's designed for women by women and it's you don't really see a lot of dedication and details poured into a watch a Smart Watch at least for for a woman these days and you know there are female centric smartwatches but that that's why I really like the Kate Spade watch and then the other Skagen was you know just a really nice looking watch that a lot of people are you know I've just seen someone wearing it at everyone's who sees it they're like it looks great on you and and that's what I think collectively people just have to think about smart watches going forward you know yeah there's gonna be stuff like the blocks where you and the Apple watch where does so much techy stuff but yeah you know if it also just focuses on on fashion and beauty and looking good while also helping you enhance your life slightly then I think I think that's what you know what would be killer is if these smart watches could tell time there's the can the whiskey mist I know that's such a great point that you make because we haven't needed watches for at least a decade right right I mean or longer I mean you have a phone in your pocket it tells time like yeah it's good to have it right here but yeah what is that a half second so like if they're not going for style you know right or amazing functionality and how much functionality can you really have on a tiny tiny little screen yeah it's true I don't know man like I you know I've been you know checking the time with my phone for a long time and then I got the Fitbit blaze and I instantly converted to doing this again like yeah because it's more convenient than pulling it out of my pocket and that may seem like whoa why this is so hard to for you to pull your phone out of your pocket no it really isn't convenient sometimes like you know I I'm sitting at my desk and no I don't want to I like tight pants you know what I'm saying so you know it's really hard I have to pull it out of the pocket sometimes I need that SmartWatch guys yeah does like tight pants that say pants all right it's been three days what happens to your mind at about this point of the show fans okay somebody just asked Robert said and just will kind of wrap up with this where does anyone see our tech in 2030 I mean at this point I think you'll either be owned by Alexa or Google home and they will wake you up they will transport you in your bed in your autonomous vehicle to wherever they make you go work and that's pretty much what it what we're gonna be I don't know it's so hard to say at this point I think how fancy is it's not gonna be as different as we think it will be really because that's what happens all the time we think it's all this pie in the sky stuff is going to work itself out and what happens well we can't get a battery for that or whatever it might be you know it's like it's always got it's always incremental and it always moves more slowly than we think it's going to there'll be cool stuff don't get me wrong but I don't know about the flying cars and all this stuff like I don't know about that I'll be really sad if we don't have a flying car by joining do you really want to get into flying yes I want to flying cars because you're gonna explode I always of the mind when we look to the future and see where technology is going that we came pretty much bet especially within a 10-year time frame give or take that's gonna be more of what we've seen in the past and so I'm hoping for one that we have a better electric vehicle charging infrastructure that doesn't sound super fun but but if we could take electric cars and get away from them just being commuters and turned them into roadtrip vehicles where you can actually go long distances in comfort and style and you know with a relatively low cost and low carbon footprint I'd love to see that and we need that right now but I see more brands going just electric - yep absolutely I think that electric cars are gonna be more practical in the near term than the autonomous vehicles building out autonomous vehicles so that they can all coordinate with each other on the road I mean a lot of coordination needs to happen there among the different platforms and Vidia obviously with their xavier chip is pushing that forward really really fast so we could be wrong autonomous vehicles could be a very real thing very prevalent in the next five years I don't know but yeah I think transportation is a is a big tech topic and that's why we're seeing more and more car stuff at the CES show it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger in the in terms of a footprint on the show floor we keep seeing these like high-end sorry real quickly its high-end cars that are really high-performance saying we're gonna go all electric because Elon Musk made it cool to get electric that's true that's a really neat deal we'll see what you all must does in this amount of time well that's all the time we have for this so again this is trends with benefits this is our weekly round table tech podcast here at Digital Trends subscribe on iTunes or stitcher and we do a live on Facebook in YouTube every Thursday at 2:30 p.m. Pacific so join us there but we've got lots more coming for you this is our lives to es 2018 coverage we'll be back in a bit of course follow us at digital Transcom slash CES CNF you\n"