Top Five Products From CES 2013

By Mike Wheeler

By Mike Wheeler

This year’s CES didn’t throw up any curve balls or super “wow” factors as it has done in previous years, but there were still some interesting products that caught the eye even though it was easy to lose yourself in the tens of thousands of square feet of innovation and technology that was on display. In no particular order, here are our Top 5:

• In-call gloves. We’re not too sure if these gloves were just quirky, gimmicky or even  if there is a market for them. Designed for use in winter the left glove has Bluetooth technology in it. Inside the pinky finger is a microphone to talk into, while the thumb has a speaker for you to hear. Looks cute and is ideal for the cold, and almost guaranteed to get you weird stares from passers by.
• Curved screen television. Not that long ago it was all about plasma and LCD. Then it was LED. Now it is UDTV and OLED televisions that are making the noise, but we also found LG and Samsung’s curved TVs interesting. Not too sure if the concept is a sound one, but it will interesting to see if it catches on and how far they can convince us that it does indeed give a more ‘life-like’ picture.
• Hapifork. Couldn’t go past this one. Developed by a French inventor who ate his food too fast causing gastric reflux. So he invented the Hapifork, which  vibrates if you eat a mouthful of food less than 10 seconds after your last. This is supposed to help not only with digestion, but with weight loss. The weight loss angle is found in the theory that it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain you are full, so people tend to over eat. The developer believes that if you slow down the intake of food, it will give your brain time enough to catch up, therefore you’ll eat less.
• Trakdot will be popular with frequent air travellers. This little battery-powered device is thrown into your bag and will follow your bags anywhere around the world – especially handy for those that fly often enough and will no doubt lose their luggage at some stage. It uses GSM technology as American authorities will not allow these types of devices use GPS. You use it in conjunction with your mobile phone.
• Razer Edge is a Windows 8 gaming tablet. Said by many to be the future of gaming with not only top-end hardware under the hood (Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, GeForce GT 640M graphics chip from Nvidia, and a solid-state hard drive), but also has the ability to output the video to a larger screen, scale resolution up to 2560 x 1440, and is also super versatile. It does have a couple of downsides including battery life and price.