CES 2013: Our Top Picks From Day One

CES is in full swing and despite the world’s dire economic outlook you’d be hard pressed to tell considering some of the prices being banded around the Las Vegas convention centre. £20,000 TVs, £2,000 Flash drives and $10,000 fridges are just some of the examples of obscenely expensive tech we’ve laid our eyes on at this year’s CES.

World’s most expensive pen drive.

USB pen drives are an incredibly useful piece of tech, they’re perfect for transporting massive files around in something the size of a small keyring.

Over the years flash drives have been getting quicker and quicker, but capacity has really changed all that much. Well, those days are long gone, as Kingston has introduced what they claim is the world’s first 1TB USD 3.0 flash drive, that most importantly isn’t any bigger that the current crop of flash drives.

The aptly named DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 has impressive read/write speeds of up to 240MB/s and 160MB/s – making it the world’s largest USB 3.0 flash drive.

At the moment the pen drive is only available in 512GB version right now, while its bigger brother, the 1TB version, is expected to hit stores in Q1 2013.

Now comes the shocking part: price. Currently you can buy the 512GB version for a cool $1,750, which will likely make the 1TB version anywhere up to $3,000, which is the price of a small secondhand car. Ouch.

For less demanding users, Kingston has also launched slower and smaller USB drives, with capacities of 32GB and 64GB and read/write speeds of 150MB/s and 70MB/s.

Samsung Unveils Their Scaffold-inspired Ultra HD TV.

4K TVs, or a they should be knowns as Ultra HD (UHD), have been stealing pretty much all the headlines for the first day of CES. But Samsung’s offering has been grabbing those headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Just look at it. It’s pig ugly.

It looks like someone made the world’s largest Ultra HD set and thought “I know, we’ll make the stand out of some old scaffolding I’ve got lying around”. Picture-wise it’s stunning, but you have to wonder who thought it would be a good idea to make it look like a jungle jim? ?And according to our sources the stand cannot be removed.

The set comes will four times the resolution of a normal 1080p set and uses a quad-core processor to upscale 1080p programs into a Ultra HD resolutions. Which is all well and good, but what about actual 4K footage? No-one seems to be talking about the elephant in the room when it comes to UHDs.

Unfortunately for us it’s just too soon for Ultra HD, it might even to be too soon in 5 years time. At the moment 99% of HDTVs see very little 1080p footage due bandwidth limits on services like Sky or Netflix – so why would consumers really consider a Ultra HD screen if we can’t even get 1080p footage at the moment? Until there’s a delivery system and some content, 4K just seems like a pipe dream at the moment.

But, Samsung et al are hoping that impressive upscaling will see earlier adopters jump on the Ultra HD bandwagon sooner rather than later. The biggest barrier to UHD is price and at the moment there is no details on pricing or availability for Samsung’s offering.

Perhaps the most unremarkable feature announced for this product is its ability to link the TV with other Samsung smart home appliances. This feature will allow you to monitor your washing machine from your smart UHD, really?

It’s a highly capable TV with an impressive features list, but what was missing? Perhaps the most important thing: the availability date and a price.

Huawei goes phablet crazy.

Phablet is a new word you should probably get used to, as it a new buzz word to describe a phone/tablet hybrid. Quite frankly it’s a horrible term for a device that no-one really needs. The Galaxy Note was the first phablet, but now there’s a new phablet in town and it comes from the Chinese smartphone maker Huawei.

Measuring 6.1-inches, with the 1280x720p display, the Ascend Mate is the largest smartphone in world, and quite possibly the most ridiculous handset we’ve ever laid hands on.

Specs-wise it’s a mixedbag: there’s a snappy 1.5GHz quad-core processor and surprisingly 768MB of RAM memory, which on the face of it seems a bit on the low-end for a premium handset.

Unfortunately, you can’t take the back off the Ascend Mate as it’s a sealed unit – so there’s no access to the 4,050mAh battery housed inside - the biggest in any smartphone in the world.

Elsewhere there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, a slot for a microSim and a slot for microSD cards, which you’ll have to use as there’s only a paltry 8GB of onboard storage – which is just a crazy decision to make. On the back there’s an 8-megapixel sensor complete with LED flash and modes such as panorama and HDR.

Due to arrive in China next month, the Ascend Mate will make it to other regions around the world from March.

Lookout for more CES 2013 coverage tomorrow.