CES 2012 Rundown – The Story So Far

• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

With Apple absent from CES 2012, other manufacturers can feel a bit more confident about showing their tablet wares. However, sluggish sales of Android tablets have meant the big boys are more cautious. Toshiba has unveiled a super-slim ICS slate, the Excite X10, which at least design-wise is an improvement on the blocky Thrive tablets from late 2011.

Acer wowed the crowds with its quad-core IdeaTab S2, also running the latest Ice Cream Sandwich version of Google’s Android operating system. But Lenovo seems to have stolen the show at the time of writing with a second device, a Tegra 3-powered IdeaPad K2. Equally impressive is IdeaPad Yoga, a notebook, that converts into tablet. RIM has finally upgraded its PlayBook OS to incorporate proper email functionality, which will please anyone who recently picked up a PlayBook at firesale/Amazon Kindle Fire competitive prices.

Traditionally smartphone manufacturers tend to keep the covers on new launches until February’s Mobile World Congress, but some just couldn’t wait to unveil their new handsets. Xperia phones have launched freef from the old Ericsson branding now that the firm has been swallowed up by Sony. Thus we get the Sony Experia S, which is essentially an HD-capable Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, featuring a 4.3-inch 1280 x 700 pixel Reality Display, and a – wait for it – 12MP camera round the back. There’s also a cast-iron promise of an Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade in Q2. Sony have also launched their Xperia Ion, which is a Playstation-certified smartphone packing a 1.5GHz dualcore processor and 16GB of storage. The Ion also brandishes a 12MP rear-facing snapper.

Amongst the other smartphone firms, HTC has renewed the Titan on AT&T to give users the Titan 2, with the same whopping 4.7-inch, 1.5GHz dual-core Windows Phone, except this time the Titan’s photographics credentials have been improved to give a 16MP camera with a wide-angle lens and dual LED flash. There’s also LTE support this time around. The Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone 7 handset has been repackaged for the Americas as the Nokia Lumia 900, and his time it’s LTE supported and has a larger 4.3-inch display. The front-facing camera has also gone up a notch.

The LG Spectrum 4.5-inch IPS display features a higher pixel per inch count than the iPhone 4, which has attracted attention, while the Huawei Ascend P1 and Ascend P1 S are equipped wih Super AMOLED displays and have been noted for probably the slimmest chasses around. Notebooks are still around, but they are mostly confined to ultrabook dimensions – the Acer Aspire S5 won praise as a follow-up to Acer’s Aspire S3 ultrabook, which was widely credited as one of the best alternatives to the iconic MacBook Air in the ultrabook category. Acer also promised Windows 8 ultrabooks from Q3. Some formats seems to have fallen by the wayside at CES 2012. Very few netbooks, and no sign of chromebooks either. Lenovo has added to its excellent IdeaPad U300 and U400 notebooks with the IdeaPad U310 and U410. The Lenovo U410 will be amongst the very few ultrabooks to offer discrete graphics.

HP has unveiled the Envy 14 Spectre, yet another company determined to push the frontiers of the ultrabook design brief to include 14-inchers. Still, the 1600 x 900 14-inch display takes the thickness of the Spectre to 21mm, which is starting of qualify as chunky, at least for an ultrabook. Consumers can choose between an i5 or i7 CPU, and the Envy 14 Spectre comes with a 128GB SSD as standard. Samsung has brought the Series 5 ultrabook to the table, available in either 13- or 14- inch format and also offering Radeon HD dedicated graphics. Samsung also updated its Series 9 notebooks, slimming them down in the process, but the most far-out notebook so far must be he Nikishi, the see-through notebook with a touchpad lid which gives users access to the Metro UI even when the notebook is closed.

Related posts:

1. Lenovo IdeaPad S205 with $200 off for $499
2. Tech Predictions for 2012
3. Lenovo IdeaPad 205 won FCC approval for 4G
4. Lenovo IdeaPad A1 price update
5. Lenovo IdeaPad U300s – Review