CES 2017: Lenovo outs a 6TB NAS for the home

By Nicole Batac

Las Vegas - Lenovo’s smart home solution doesn’t end with the Smart Assistant. There’s also the boxy Smart Storage. And as its name suggests, it’s a network attached storage for the home. It has 6TB capacity, dual-band wireless access, and multi-device auto-sync capabilities. It can store any of your personal files and with peer-to-peer access, Lenovo promises the Smart Storage is built to be a secure NAS for the home. The focus for Smart Storage, though, looks to be photos as its integrated facial recognition software can organize your entire photo library based on faces. The Smart Storage is coming to the US in May and its retail price starts at US$139.99. 

CES 2017: Casio brings GPS to its rugged WSD-F20 Android Wear watch

By Nicole Batac

Las Vegas - Casio shows its taking its smartwatch segment seriously with the second iteration of its Android Wear-powered timepiece. Called the WSD-F20, this watch now falls under Casio’s Pro Trek Smart Series. It brings a much-needed feature: built-in GPS. What this introduces is compatibility with Glonass and Michibiki satellite systems to improve tracking further. Truly built for adventurers, it comes with coloured maps and you can download maps offline so you won’t get lost when data connection fails. Aside from that, the watch gets a new Location Memory feature. What this does is it reads your location and lets you lay down markers by hitting one of the physical buttons. You can also leave voice notes for spots you want to revisit.

This rugged smartwatch is built to military standards and is still water resistant up to 50 meters. It has a 1.32-inch dual layer LCD touchscreen (320 x 330 resolution) and has a battery life of up to a day if you have everything running and a month if you use it in normal watch mode. When you’re low on battery, it’ll go into monochrome mode. The watch also gets better activity tracking, especially for snow sports where it delivers additional data such as maximum speed for each run.

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CES 2017: Sony Xperia Agent charms its robotic ways into our heart

By Nicole Batac

Las Vegas - The smart speaker/home assistant is being considered a growth market by a lot of brands. It’s not surprising that more and more of these smart home speakers are cropping up. While Sony doesn’t have a consumer-ready version for this segment, there is a prototype that’s been making the rounds at the big conferences since last year. You may or may not have heard of Sony Xperia Agent, a tiny adorable home assistant robot with artificial intelligence. You speak to it and it can do everything from fix your calendar, play songs on connected devices, throw photos or video files from phones into big screen TVs, etc.

We caught a demo of what the robot can do at CES and see how naturally it interacts with the person it’s talking. The ‘bot learns how you speak to it so it can react accordingly. And react it does, as the camera part moves around like a human head would. It tries to see who’s interacting with it. There are lights to it that make it look like the eyes of the device. It makes it seem like you’re actually talking to someone when speaking to the Xperia Agent. It even dances along when asked to play a song.

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CES 2017: Wireless charging comes to laptops courtesy of Dell's Latitude 7285

Las Vegas - Wireless charging has been around for half a decade on various smartphones but never seemed to gain wider adoption, until now.

Dell's new Latitude 7285 2-in-1 notebook. This detacheable notebook doubles as a table and has a keyboard base which charges wirelessly when paired with Dell's charging pad. This chamelon can also be used with a slim keyboard as well as a more business-focused keyboard that adds 4 hours of battery life. Kudos to Dell, who is aiming to launch this in May, for getting creative with charging solutions. 

Source: Engadget