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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speculatrix - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
given that the majority of people can't tell 720 from 1080 on their TVs as it is - it's simply not possible for the human eye to resolve the detail at their sitting distance - I think 2K and above will not catch on except for professional installations or the richest early adopters.cheinonen - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
No matter how many numbers people throw out on what resolution makes a difference, looking at the 8K set that Sharp had on display (never coming out, of course) and you'd see a huge difference from a 2K or 4K set. However, I'd still take the OLED or CrystalLED sets for their better viewing angles, contrast ratios, motion, and black levels than the extra resolution. That said, you can see the difference in resolution, but bandwidth concerns mean we won't get to see that for a long time.Fanfoot - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
I don't know why I'd want the print on my monitor to look better. I can read it perfectly fine as it is. In fact I don't know why all those printer manufacturers don't stop making printers at 600dpi or even 1200dpi. That's stupid. Who needs anything that readable? Everything should top out at 150dpi or so. Anybody who suggests otherwise is being unreasonable.pixelstuff - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
Printers use the higher resolution to get better gradations and color blending. Apparently you've never seen print out from the early 360dpi printers from the early '90s. 720dpi, 600dpi, 1200dpi, 1440dpi, and 4800dpi printers have gotten noticeably better with each upgrade in resolution from those early 300 dpi versions.Perhaps some people can see finer resolution than others.
EnerJi - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
I think you missed the sarcasm...B3an - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Pretty obvious it was a sarcastic comment.adonn78 - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
i would love to know the aspect ratio of the 4K displays. Also were there any curved displays. I remember the Ostendo CRVD that was awesome from back in CES 2009. They have not updated the display have they? Would lvoe to see a high res curved display for gaming rather than a bunch of panels with their bezels.pixelstuff - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
I wrote Ostendo Technologies about the CRVD last September asking them about a higher resolution version. Something like 3840x1200 (two 1920x1200 monitors), because 900px high is practically useless on a desktop computer.They said they were out of stock on the current model and had no plans to build more. However my request for a higher res version had been noted, and I could get their newsletter to know about future announcements.
Maybe if enough people email them about a high res version they will try again with something more useful.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
As I mentioned in the text, the 4K display I saw ran at 4096x2160, so it's a 1.896 AR (compared to 1.778 for 16:9 and 1.6 for 16:10). I've also seen some info saying we'll see 4096x2304 4K displays (16:9), and I neglected to get a picture of the resolution but I swear there was at least one 4K display that I saw that had a >2.0 AR.jjj - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
I hate TN panels so yay for non TN but i view the resolution game in phones and tablets as mostly marketing BS and it creates additional problems.Prices go up (and this is why the industry likes the idea) gaming gets slower and battery life is lower (or ,for tablets,you shove in a bigger battery and then the price goes up some more).Is it really worth it?4k TV's sure but i would rather see prices for 30" monitors come down a lot.
Thin laptops with the CPU perf of systems costing half as much,GPU perf lower than terrible,poor battery life .... no thanks.Funny how intel tries to do what they already did years ago with the ULV line except this time they added some more shine and doubled the price.Touch screens on laptops,folks should realize how much that will add to the retail price before getting too excited.