The Best of CES 2012
by Jarred Walton on January 17, 2012 6:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Lenovo
- Asus
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- Transformer Prime
- CES 2012
- Yoga 13
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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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JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
I think it does, but I can't find an image to confirm and I might be confusing it with several other laptops.EnzoFX - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
Of course every power user wants it. But the average user doesn't care, and won't care. They're used to $300-$500 laptops, and that's what they will continue to expect. Yes it's become a race to the bottom, but why would that change? I think it's much more likely that it'll remain the same because that's how the market has developed into. I think the real reasons tablets are pushing better displays is because they can't afford not to. They're supposed to have better viewing angles, and supposed to be something you can hold at any angle and distance. This is not the case with laptops. Laptops, IMO, as long as they continue to have the same form factor, will continue to have the same attributes, and the same race to the bottom.Malih - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
I think the main issue is when Ultrabooks (and any laptops above $1000) have poor display, They are nowhere near $500, yet some of them have display resolution and sometimes display quality of a $500 laptop.PubFiction - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
I will also add this. No one wants to add large amounts to the price of a laptop because they know they are going to throw it out soon. Lets leave apple users out of this because they are often less practical.People will buy very nice monitors because they can move it through a couple different desktops or add a second one. But most laptops simply do not have any reasonable option to do something similar.
There are 2 things the laptop companies could have done. They could design modular displays. Have a connection similar to the asus transformer for the display. You buy the display of your choice and are able to upgrade or replace it if damaged. Then people might go for better displays knowing they might have that option.
The other thing is maybe if laptop manufacturers had ever come up with some standards for design it would have helped too, if people had an upgrade path. This is the same reason for the cheapness of laptops. Why build a strong case when it should be replaced every 2 years?
PubFiction - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Somene of the reasons tablets are bucking the trend is because the internal components of a tablet are much cheaper. So you have something that overal is cheaper and smaller than even a netbook to produce. Second if you look at a tablet what makes it unique? Nothing other than the screen is the answer. They are so basica in design they are all almost the same. That is why they are always trying to push on the only 3 things that most people are ever going to notice. Thin, display, and price.EnzoFX - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Gotta agree, well said.name99 - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
"Second if you look at a tablet what makes it unique? Nothing other than the screen is the answer."That may be true for Android tablets. iPads come crammed with sensors, and the iPad2 has notably more sophisticated sensing (eg being able to track its 3D orientation) than iPad1.
The real problem is that Android land is utterly devoid of imagination ---- without Apple to copy they would be lost. Let me describe just some obvious addition that could be made to a tablet or phone --- and you tell me which Android (land of variety and choice) vendor has implemented them:
(a) temperature measurements (using a bolometer) for both local temperature and "remote" temperature (eg point the device at my forehead and tell me how hot I am
(b) incorporate a small laser. Now you can use the device as a laser pointer. Or as a plumbline. Or you can fire and detect a laser pulse, and use it for ranging.
(c) sensible speakers. Apple has so far stuck to mono speakers because of the device rotation issue. Some Android vendors have stereo speakers --- which work OK if you're watching a movie and suck if the device is in portrait. INTELLIGENT would be to have four speakers, one in each corner, so that you can rotate the sound to follow the orientation of the device.
Malih - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
That'll be great if people can just bring back their old laptop to upgrade the internal components and still use the old case.At least there's now hope for upgrading a laptop with an external GPU, thanks to Thunderbolt/Lightpeak.
marc1000 - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
any words from AMD about radeon 7870 ????JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
No, but I'm guessing Ryan knows and is under NDA, or that it won't be for at least two months.