What happened during CES 2016

Taking notice of product launches and trade shows is a big part of blogging about technology and the annual Consumer Electronics show is a dear part of me as I have been tuning in to all the announcements for a couple of years now and frankly speaking, everything feels a little boring now. As the years go by, I begin to look away from CES just because everything about has changed. Sure, the new products are exciting but all the major announcements or headlines are basically a little overkill. So, here I am writing about a recap of what I can remember most about CES 2016.

Not going to talk too much about the overkill stuff like the Samsung fridge with a gigantic tablet display. It is the future and all but at the moment it is impractical whatsoever due to it's relatively high price tag. But instead, I am going to focus on the mobile technology part of CES 2016. Maybe a little about the cars and home appliances but generally speaking, I am not an expert or advocate of either genres. So, it's just mostly about the new tablets, computers, laptops. Fitness trackers and mobile accessories.

What's next for Samsung?

There's 7 different type of twins and probably the most commonly viewed on is the half-identical twin which basically means that their genes will partly be identical from their mother and the other half will be uniquely different. Why am I talking about genes (or Biology) and what does this have to do about technology. Well, Samsung just unwrapped two new large screened devices namely the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 edge+ which features large 5.7" displays and is categorized under the phablet umbrella.

But as much as how they look is different, they are indeed half-identical twins, their core specifications are very similar but the targeted user base is totally different. The S6 edge+ is aimed towards the mainstream market while the Note5 is targeted at those out there who wants the multitasking prowess of the S Pen. Both the S6 edge+ and Note5 improves on the industrial design introduced with the Galaxy S6 and these devices essentially still feature sandwiched glass on a metal frame.

Samsung's new Galaxy S6 edge+ comes with a big 5.7" curved display — Besides all the hardware and software enhancements, Samsung is also getting ready quite a number of accessories which are uniquely different. Continue reading.

Samsung Galaxy Note5 announced, say goodbye to plastic — The industrial design being showcased on the Note 5 looks a lot like what's implemented on the Galaxy S6 but that's actually a good thing. But Samsung didn't merely enlarge. Continue reading.

With the introduction of these two new phablets, Samsung is rounding up the year with four flagship devices specifically tailored to different kind of users. While it is a debatable whether Samsung needed to release more high end devices, it is clear that the Korean company is no longer harboring the ideas they had last year.

Samsung made a pretty stern statement earlier this year with the introduction of both the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge and the recent launch of the Galaxy Note5 merely just reinforces the idea behind the company's new strategy. While the Galaxy S6 didn't manage to rake up record sales, it still managed to convince reviewers that their design team is capable of coming up with sexy looking hardware. So, now that Samsung is making hardware that rivals the iPhone in terms of premium-ness, what is next in the chapter of Samsung's history?

Tech Update [Ep 2]

This week we started off with the closing ceremony of the London 2012 olympics, so bye bye olympics for another 4 years and see you back in Rio on 2016. Other than that we had many exciting stories this week. One of the first news this week we reported is the leak of the Apple's new dock connector which will be featured on the iPhone 5. The dock has 8 pins on both sides to make up 16 pins in total. To find out more about iPhone 5 new click here for this weeks iPhone 5 rumor roundup. This week there is also a rumor which say that Microsoft will price the Surface RT strategically at $199 which is to compete with those 7" tablets priced at $199 like the nexus 7. This week we also saw the black Galaxy S III appeared on T-Mobile's website. The Galaxy Note II was also leaked which shows a 5.5" screen and not much visual changes. Just yesterday the GTX 660 Ti launched and fills the gap in the high performance mid range graphics card, and shows the best price to performance ratio compared to any graphics card in the market now. The MSI GTX 660 Ti Power Edition got a lot of publicity right after launch because of its capabilities of triple overvolting to achieve better overclocks. The Xiaomi Phone 2 also launch and it is the first phone to feature the quad core Snapdragon S4 Pro which uses the Krait architecture. Microsoft and Nokia also sent out invitations for a joint press event in New York on September 5. And today Morning Sammobile confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note will be getting the Jellybean update in the September to October time frame. 

Blackberry 10 is slated to be officially available in Q3 2012 and RIM said that BB10 will be available for licensing, but i wonder which company will be the first one to license it. Although their company's current state is not that bad compared to nokia. Their stocks are still going down, Nokia is releasing WP8 in late Q3 but RIM is releasing BB10 in Q1 2013 which is about six months from now and anything can happen. So the question is wheter it will survive to the launch of BB10 or cease to exist in the next 6 months. Now they have standardized the resolution for the upcoming BB10 and there are only two resolutions which are 1280 X 720 for full touch devices and 720 X 720 for QWERTY devices. They took the advice from their developer community which complained about having to deal with various screen resolutions in the past and this change will make it easier for developers. The Blackberry 10 Developer Alpha unit in the other hand has an uncommon resolution of 1280 X 768 so RIM advises the people who creates the applications to use the two of the possible options in creating apps. The first one is to utilize two of the new resolutions, and the second is to letter box the apps to 1280 X 720 on the dev alpha device and thus leaving 24 pixels unused on each side of the display. 

Microsoft is slated to officially launch Windows 8 on October 26 and there are few software which are most probably going to be bundled with it, Skype is among one of them. Currently when you install skype on the windows 8 customer preview it will launch as the normal app we know and love. But now we get to see how  it will look like on the official windows 8 version. As you can see the app blends in to the Metro UI Modern UI. This image first appeared on twitter and was posted by a twitter user AdamUCF.  Soon after that the guys over at neowin has been trying out the new skype for Windows 8 and provided us the image above. Currently the app is still in preview state and still not on the final version. Head over to Neowin for more pictures of the skype app for windows 8. 

Earlier this week Stephen Elop announced that Windows Phone 8 devices will be coming in a relatively near term. Soon after that his words was backed up by Chris Weber which tweeted " Samsung Take Note, next generation of Lumia coming soon. #nokia". This evidently meant that the September debut of the Nokia WP8 devices seemingly plausible. But it seems like what Chris said is more to it than meets the eye. Apparently he said Samsung take Note, and if you have not been living under the rock you should know that Samsung has a massive phablet phone called the Galaxy Note and they recently announced that it has sold 10 million units over its lifespan. Could this mean that Nokia is making a large screened phone like the Galaxy Note or Chris really meant what he said and just warning Samsung about next gen Lumia devices. 

This year Nokia's stock faced a 18 year low of $1.69 on July 17 and ever since then the stocks went up more than 50% and now stands at $2.75 per share. The stocks are growing every day with most of the reason of this growth being the anticipation for Windows Phone 8. This growth gave a positive effect on Nokia's market cap by increasing it from a low 6.3 Billion to 9.8 Billion. The stock might just go higher until the day of their WP8 devices which is set for next month and if they impress the crowd their share might continue going up. They are still a long way more for their shares to reach $5. Nokia's fate now lies with Microsoft and if Windows Phone 8 fails nokia might not be able to see light or maybe the contingency plan which Elop does not know about will save Nokia. I hope that Microsoft could rescue Nokia like how they rescued Apple back in 1997. 

This week we reported that Microsoft is rumored to price the Surface RT at $199. This rumor then cause some disagreement from manufactures and Lenovo said that Microsoft makes good software but not so good hardware. Then Lenovo's head in North America Operations David Schmoock commented on the upcoming Windows 8 RT tablets. He told Bloomberg “RT will play in consumer and retail at very aggressive price points,”he said. “It will do well but it’s going to be more of a consumer price point play to begin with,”. Additionally he also said that Windows 8 tablets will be targeted at business users because these tablet will retail at $600-$700 which is lower than the $899 ultrabooks. Windows RT tablets will be targeted at consumers and will retail at $200-$300 which is lesser than competing products running Windows 8. Microsoft is also going to be charging licensing fees for Office and Windows RT and will evidently increase the price of the Windows RT tables. To find out more head on over to Bloomberg 

• GTX 660 Ti Prices From Different Manufactures  
• CM9 RC1 For The Samsung Galaxy Ace
• Alleged Samsung Galaxy Note II Image Revealed
• Official Samsung Galaxy S III Jellybean ROM
• Adobe Flash Player Taken Down From The Play Store
• MSI Geforce GTX 660 Ti Power Edition OC
• Samsung Galaxy S II And Galaxy Note Getting Jellybean Update 

[Source 1], [Source 2], [Source 3], [Source 4], and [Source 5]
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