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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name99 - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
"Most Blu-ray titles clock in around the 30-40 GB range for the film, so given 4x the resolution you are looking at 120-160 GB for a film of similar quality. "Not even close.
The higher you push the resolution, the higher the correlation between adjacent pixels, meaning that the material compresses better for the same level of visual quality.
Heck, even if you compressed a 4K movie into the SAME 30-40GB you'd get better results. The compressor will throw away information intelligently, whereas you can view an existing BR movie as consisting of an initial dumb transfer stage (downsampling the 4K to 1080p) followed by compression.
(This assumes, of course, that the compressor is actually intelligent and, for example, scales search domain upward to cover equivalent area in the 4K movie as in the 1080p movie. This is a obvious point, yet I've yet to see a compressor that does it properly by default, so you will have to tweak the settings to get the improvement. But I am correct in this --- with a smart compressor 4K at 40GB will look better than 1080p at 40GB.)
legoman666 - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
I was unable to find a good current-gen laptop with a 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 display for less than $1000. I eventually settled on a 3-4 year old refurbed IBM T61p with a beautiful WUXGA 1920x1200 15.4" display.I looked up the part number for the panel, a replacement is less than $100 from eBay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&... I don't know what laptop manufacturers are doing these days that prevent them from putting a decent panel in their laptops, but they need to quit it. 1366x768 @ 15"? Are you joking? My 3 year old Dell netbook had the same resolution in a 10" form factor for $350.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's disappointed.
Mithan - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
I have not bought a tablet yet because I want at least a 1080p display on them and yes, this is for surfing.As for Laptops, my last Laptop was a MSI GX640 and I specifically hunted that down because it has a good video card in it AND most importantly, it has a 1600x1080 display.
I had bought some Acer with a 768p display but it went back. What crap.
lbeyak - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
For those of you who that these low-quality displays are good enough...I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
inperfectdarkness - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
it's my money, and i need it now!!!name99 - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
You might as well just give up.As far as I can tell most tech blog commenters
(a) are completely unaware that something like Moore's law exists
(b) think everything right now is absolutely perfect and should never be changed.
Thunderbolt. Higher res iPad screens. 4K TVs. Windows File System Improvements. Cell phone system improvements. WiFi improvements.
Doesn't matter what it is, there's a chorus telling you that it will always cost too much, that it probably won't work well, and no-one will care about the improvement.
My god --- who would have thought that the hangout spot for 21st century Luddites would be the comments section of sites like Ars Technica and AnandTech?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
The problem is that we're not even getting 1080p on a lot of laptops. I want 1080p pretty much as an option on anything 13" and up. Right now it's really only there on 15.6" and 17.3" displays (and of course, Sony has one 13.1" panel on the VAIO Z).inperfectdarkness - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
i've been lamenting the watering-down of laptop screens for years. i'm bloody sick of 1080p screens. 1080p would be fine...if i had an 11" netbook. i LIKE gaming at 16:10--and i like doing it on a 15.4" screen. and for what it's worth, 17" laptops should be offering wqxga at a MINIMUM. ~300dpi should be the standard--regardless of display size.of course, part of the problem with stagnation is probably because xbox-360 has dilluted consumer expectations for gaming--which has resulted in games in which practically the entire library of new GPU's will run in 1080p at acceptable framerates. that kind of versitility didn't even exist at 1024x768 resolutions 10 years ago. the ti4600 i had back then was the ONLY card which even had a prayer of running at 1600x1200. so rather than software improving (and keeping hardware choking on rendering), we've plateaued & hardware has caught up big-time. that's also why 10 years ago, mobile gaming left a LOT to be desired. today, (at 1080p) you can't tell the difference in many cases.
here's to hoping that my 15" form-factor laptop experience will soon offer 4MP gaming at a reliable 60fps. it's been long overdue. i'm still baffled by the reverse-progress in laptop displays. you don't see people rejecting 90's cars in order to drive 80's cars. doesn't make sense why we'd do the same with laptops.