The Best of CES 2012
by Jarred Walton on January 17, 2012 6:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Lenovo
- Asus
- CES
- Transformer Prime
- CES 2012
- Yoga 13
- 4K
Lenovo’s Yoga 13: Ultrabook, IPS, Windows 8, and Convertible
Last on my list of impressive showings at CES is the Lenovo Yoga 13. This is another ultrabook, and if you weren’t at the show, let me just say that Intel is pushing ultrabooks in a major way. We’ve reviewed several shipping ultrabooks, and I can guarantee there will be many more to come. Every laptop manufacturer had one (or more) on display, and Intel’s booth used probably half of their public floor space to show off ultrabooks and related technologies. So far, none of the ultrabooks we’ve reviewed have really nailed every area, but when the Yoga 13 starts shipping that might finally change.
The short summary is that the Yoga 13 sports a 1600x900 IPS touchscreen panel, and it’s beautiful to behold. How Lenovo manages to cram touchscreen and IPS, plus a folding laptop/tablet hybrid into a 17mm thick chassis is something of a mystery. Okay, perhaps it’s not that mysterious—I expect the device will carry a pretty steep price tag, but hopefully it will be worth buying. The design felt solid in the hand, the soft-touch coating on the palm rest is great, and with an Ivy Bridge CPU and SSD performance should be there as well. The only major complaint I have is that the IdeaPad Yoga 13 won’t start shipping until the Windows 8 release, and I want to test one now (or at least when Ivy Bridge officially launches).
Best of Show Summary
I didn’t intentionally set out to find a top three of CES that all shared a common theme, but it’s there nonetheless. For anyone who uses a computer or tablet, or who watches TV and movies, the one thing you always have to see is the display. Put in a great display and you can rise above the crowd; cut corners and you enter the race to the bottom that has brought about the cheap construction and poor quality that run rampant at Best Buy, Office Depot, etc.
Long term, the higher quality displays in tablets and HDTVs are eventually going to force laptops to adopt better, higher resolution displays. What's sad is that I have a 1920x1200 laptop from five years ago, and that display probably cost the manufacturer $350 (possibly less). Today's $350 displays are almost universally worse, other than having brighter LED backlighting. Meanwhile, the $1000 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme (dual-core) CPU in the laptop is now slower than even a basic $130 Core i3-2310M in most tasks, and this formerly $4000 laptop is also slower than today's laptops that cost just $750. The price-performance ratio has shifted an order of magnitude in five years, but laptop displays continue to stagnate.
I hope we’re nearing the inflection point where consumers will start asking for better laptop displays. When all the tablets at Best Buy are WUXGA, QXGA, or even QHD/QWXGA, advertising a laptop as having a 720p panel ought to present problems for Joe Sixpack. I also hope that Windows 8 will revamp the handling of high DPI displays; Windows 7 does a bit better than Vista, and both are a big step up from XP, but I still routinely encounter applications that don’t scale with DPI settings. When such applications are written with the assumption that everything runs at 96 DPI—and worse, when they have a fixed window size—the result is text that overruns the viewable area and buttons that are unclickable. I’d guess Metro apps will all scale nicely with DPI settings, but we’ll have to see how many apps (and users) eschew Metro on desktops and laptops and stick with the familiar desktop interface.
Wrap Up
That takes care of my top three, but as I noted in the introduction I didn’t even see a fraction of the show floor. (I could also do a bottom three of CES, but that’s too easy: the taxi lines and crowds take slots one and two for me, and the pay-$12-per-day-for-lousy-Internet gets the third. But I digress.) Even with ten editors from AnandTech running around, I’m sure we missed covering a lot of cool technology and gadgets, so I’m curious to know: what do you see and/or read about at CES 2012 that impressed you most? What would you like to see us cover sooner rather than later? Let us know in the comments!
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marc1000 - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
thanks Jarred! it's nice to know anything, even if it is a "not yet"... loli will keep waiting for that card, if it gets only 1 PCIe power connector it will be my next card. if not, I will just wait until this level of performance fits this power envelope.
ty,
maglito - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
I was genuinely excited about ultrabooks too. Crap (sub 1080p resolution) is a deal breaker.I guess I'll start looking more seriously at sticking it out longer on my core2 ULV 11.6" and look towards the 2XXXx15XX resolution tablets.
What a disappointment.
Roland00Address - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
The problem is they only off this resolution on their signature sony Zs so it is about 2.8 to 3k for priceJarredWalton - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
I believe the base model Z starts at under $2000 and includes the dock, but still, it's an expensive (and beautiful I might add!) display for sure. I had one company suggest that such displays add $700 to the price of a laptop right now, and they might be right. Or they might be trying to make excuses for using crappy displays.Incidentally, did you know you can buy a 1080p 95% NTSC matte 15.6" panel online for under $150? I'm not sure how a 13.1" display would cost four times as much to make; it's just a matter of getting enough supply and demand.
Roland00Address - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
The base sony z is 1600x900You can find the base sony z for 1.8 to 2 k
To get the 1920x1080 sony z you need to upgrade to their "signature" models which cost 2.8 to 3k
JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Oh, you're right... forgot about that. Sony pricing is as "good" as Apple! :-)mckirkus - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
4K makes sense for movies if they're broadcast on a giant screen at a theater. Not at home on a 50'' screen 12 feet away from the viewer.I'm a lot more excited to see OLED displays. We need to refocus on color gamut, contrast, refresh rates, not more pixels nobody can see. On a tablet two feet from your face higher resolutions matter.
As for YouTube, 4k is a joke because the bit rates aren't high enough to take advantage of the resolution.
Fanfoot - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
Sorry, but I don't agree. If you think the TVs we've got now are as big as they're going to ever get, you're wrong. I sit some 8-10 feet from my 65" TV and it actually seems quite small. The number of degrees of arc isn't actually that great. If you want something that seems more like the experience of watching in a theater TVs need to get MUCH bigger.Already last year we saw that 80" Sharp LCD TV at $4999, way below anything we'd seen at that size previously. And with LCD TV manufacturers seeing a glut in production and prices crashing below $1000 you can't really blame them for looking forward to even larger TVs.
A "wall size" unit is still a long ways off.
mckirkus - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
The TV size sweetspot right now is 46 inches. Even for high end TVs where price isn't a concern. A lot of people apparently find massive TVs kind of tacky (have a look in a home design magazine). That may not apply to you but it means 80'' TVs will remain a niche market, regardless of how cheap they get. Which means 4k will remain a niche technology, which means it will remain expensive.Blu Ray needs 40Mbits a second to drive 1080p. If Blu-Ray is the last physical media before we're all streaming, and 4k is 4x the resolution of 1080p, then we need 150-200Mbps internet connections before this is even feasible.
EyelessBlond - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
You know where gigantic displays will eventually find a home in the, er, home? Windows. And no, I don't mean the operating system:http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/13/2705599/samsung-...
The future is a large picture window being replaced by a TV that can switch from window to giant display with a push of a button. The other alternative is advancements in flexible displays that will allow very large TVs to roll up into the ceiling, but that kind of already exists for projectors and nobody uses them, so it's not likely to be very big in the future either.