Sunday, January 14, 2018

CES was basically a retread this year.


I didn't see anything that I hadn't already seen. And hell... I think I was carrying one of the only thing that other people hadn't seen. I will write about that later. Even the reviews from the gadget blogs were pretty uninspiring. From Engadget. From Lifehacker. Everything was pretty meh.

Normally whatever is at CES will be in the stores within six months. And if there is anything I've learned from CES this year - you are going to be forced to buy a lot of smart stuff you don't want. Everything is internet enabled now.

They have great new finishes on appliances. But you will be forced to have an Alexa enabled appliance to get that new finish. There is literally nothing they won't make internet enabled. I even saw a "smart saddle". Yeah....for horses. I'll post pictures later.

There were more K T.V.'s - but who cares? Last year I saw a 10K T.V. Yet we still don't even really have enough bandwidth for 4K content. At least that is why I assume I can barely rent or stream 4k television shows or movies even though I've had a 4K T.V. for at least two years.

Robots are in the same place. There are tons of delivery bots. Seen it.

There is really nothing new about all the driverless cars. Or 360 cameras. There are a ton of new lidar players on the field though.

VR might be a little better but I wasn't going to find out there. Curiously - Magic Leap did not have a presence there either.

There were also a lot of drones. But none I hadn't really seen before. Rescue drones are going to become a big deal.

Sometimes the present is more sci-fi than the future. That is where we are right now. So.... I might wind up being a fairly surly blogger this year. And I thought last year was horrible. I"m gonna flip out over this smart crap.

I had to replace a light late last year and got a light with bluetooth. You literally can not use the bluetooth unless you are two feet away from it. Now, I don't want my neighbors seeing my signal, but I do want to be able to use it at least from my living room. So there is going to be a tons of that crap. Useless smart crap.

3 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, January 16, 2018 2:36:00 PM

    The US digital TV standard is horrible -- I'd like to see that changed before anything with 4K, 8K, 10K, or whatever-the-hell-K. I can't give a crap about any of the "advanced" TV stuff until this actually gets fixed.

    I walked into a Chinese restaurant last week where the kids were watching educational television, and the TV signal fizzed out. After ordering take-out, I sat down around the TV and it still stayed fizzed out, but eventually I figured out that if anyone at all walked near the TV or sat near the TV, it'd fizz out. The kids were pretty happy when I moved back to one of the corners away from the TV -- I'm guessing most people don't actually figure it out. :-)

    You can't watch a broadcast out of North Broward County or Palm Beach County from South Dade County without noise, and when it rains, the signal's pretty much unwatchable.

    If the idea was that everyone would give up and pay for cable, those people succeeded beyond their wildest engineering mistakes.

    What I'd like to see for 2018 is a tablet with 128+ GB of internal storage that is not an Apple product -- my new phone has 64 GB, but I'm having trouble finding a decent Android tablet with even that ...

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  2. Before buying one I'd talk to people to see if their tablets are being throttled like the old iPhones. We've got a couple of tablets that seem to become almost useless after a couple of years. I suspect it's for the same reason.

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  3. My Samsung Galaxy Tab is doing great, but it's just low on internal memory.

    "Marshmallow" and "Nougat" make that even worse -- I can't even use Link2SD or Apps2SD to move the application data for some apps (such as Google Play Books) because of how I can't move and link the internal data.

    It'll recognize a 400 GB SD card, but I can't do anything about the internal memory situation, not if I actually want to continue to use internal memory. (And yes, I know all about the technical details of the dm-crypt hack that Android's developers put together to turn an SD card into replacement "internal" memory, and I'm not going to do that.)

    Also I hate this about naming OS versions after made-up crap instead of numbers ... what is "Marshmallow" anyway, rev 6.0 instead of rev 13? But that's another thing for another day. :-)

    I did have an old phone that was slowing down, but I was the one who was slowing it down with a CPU clock speed manager. The battery was overheating and I was having trouble finding an actual OEM battery to go into it. I found one, pulled off the back of the case (that said there were "no user-serviceable parts inside"), and replaced the battery, all in about three minutes. It's doing OK again with a newer A1 SD card in it and the CPU turned back up to normal.

    So yeah, I'm aware of the pitfalls, but I still want something like the Galaxy Tab with 128 to 256 GB of internal memory, just so I don't have to deal with the internal memory problem for a long while ...

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