Pebble Steel
Pebble made a gigantic splash last year at CES 2013. There were smartwatches out before Pebble, like Metawatch, but none of them were very good. They usually either thrust a mess of information at you and cannot handle notifications, or can handle notifications but cannot give you enough information. Pebble's original model smartwatch was the first to handle everything just right. It could give you notifications well enough, it was always on, had great battery life, and it even had a slew of cool watch faces. The only real complaint with the Pebble was that it had a relatively cheap look and feel. You couldn't wear the candy colored, glossy plastic Pebble with a suit or out to dinner. Pebble has heard these complaints and fixed them with their new smartwatch, the Pebble Steel. Like the name implies, the Pebble Steel is like the original Pebble, but made of steel. You can buy it in black matte or brushed stainless. A metal band and a leather band are included in the box to keep the premium feel. It also has a shorter lug-to-lug distance, which makes it more comfortable to wear on your wrist. Inside, the Pebble Steel has all the same specs and display as the original Pebble. The only difference inside is that the Pebble Steel has twice the storage at 8MB compared to the original's 4MB. There is also a notification LED, which should open many cool opportunities to developers. Even though there are many improvements, there is one small flaw with the Pebble Steel. The original Pebble used the standard 22mm, but the Pebble Steel uses a different kind of band. It is still a standard kind of band, but it is harder to find. At $250, the Steel is a substantial $100 more than the original $150 Pebble but it is a great improvement. A classier design, premium feel, great comfort, and more developer options make this a great buy. The Pebble Steel is the best smartwatch you can buy today and if the price is too much, then the original Pebble is your other best choice.
Engadget: Pebble Steel, The Verge: Pebble Steel
Oculus Rift Crystal Cove
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, stars of CES 2013 was Oculus Rift. It was a prototype of VR goggles for playing video games that were able to provide a pretty amazing experience. The video game image would turn as you turned your head. It is hard to explain, but it essentially puts you in the video game. You feel like you are in the video game world, and it provides a surreal experience. Everyone, and we mean everyone, loved Oculus Rift. Since it was a prototype, there were a few issues with it. The screens were not too sharp or good, images were laggy, and it made most people feel very sick. With Oculus's latest Crystal Cove prototype, Oculus comes even closer to a final device. There are new and sharper OLED screens in Crystal Cove, image lag is less, and there is better position tracking. Crystal Cove has an array of white dots on the outside to track the position of your head better. This makes images less laggy when you turn your head, and you could duck and Crystal Cove will track it. You still get the same surreal in-game experience that the Oculus Rift provided, and it is even better. The screens are sharper, but it still doesn't compare to what you could get on a good gaming monitor. After all, this is still a prototype device. Everyone that tried Crystal Cove was completely happy using it, and no one wanted to stop using. Yes you still get dizzy and a feel a little sick, but that won't stop the smile on your face. This hardware is good enough to let Oculus work on making enough games to debut it with. Since you have two different images to work with and no set viewing point, making content for the Oculus Crystal Cove is very complex. It is not like a movie where they know where you will be looking at all the time. With Oculus's virtual reality headset, you can be looking anywhere at anytime. We ourselves cannot wait till Oculus debuts a final model, and we would honestly buy Crystal Cove right now if there was enough content. You should definitely be excited for Oculus Crystal Cove, because it is the future of gaming. No questions about it.
The Verge: Oculus Rift Crystal Cove
Archos smartwatches
There were a lot of smartwatches announced and unveiled at CES 2014, but there were only a few that piqued our interest. Archos has been making decent products for a very long time, and they are now entering the wearables space. They might not have names for their smartwatches yet, but they do look promising. They are not feature-rich like the Samsung Galaxy Gear or Qualcomm Toq, but they do make great smartphone accessories. Like the Pebble, the Archos smartwatches handle your notifications, control your music playback, and of course show you the time. Archos is somewhat changing the smartwatch landscape by offering their smartwatches at different pricing tiers. The cheapest model is priced at $50, the mid-range is $100, and the top of the line model is $130. The $50 smartwatch has a 1.55 inch black and white LCD, and frankly looks pretty cheap. For $100, you get a color capacitive display and a larger 1.8 inch display. Finally for $130 you get an e-ink display of the same size as the $100 model, but it is in a much nicer aluminum case. The $50 Archos smartwatch should come out this summer, but Archos has only said the other watches will come out later. These watches might not be better than the Pebble, but they do look like good options if you want an inexpensive smartwatch.
Engadget: Archos smartwatches
Metawatch
Metawatch has been in the smartwatch space for a very long time. They have had their Metawatch Frame and Strata on the market for quite some time, and they were out long before the Pebble, Galaxy Gear, and Qualcomm Toq. Metawatch was formed out of ex-Fossil employees, so they have always had good smartwatch designs. Most of the other competing smartwatches have only got decent designs now, but Metawatch smartwatches have always had style. They haven't been too popular, but Metawatch hopes to change that with their new Meta smartwatch brand. Metawatch partnered with ex-Vertu designer Frank Nuovo to make some very iconic and elegant smartwatches. Debuted at CES 2014, they are some of the most premium smartwatches on the market. The Meta smartwatches are supposed to come in many different finishes and materials, but Metawatch showed off their aluminum Meta smartwatch with a leather band this year at CES. It is definitely one of the nicest looking smartwatches, and it looks more like a regular watch than any other smartwatch. The leather band is attached to these two bars that pivot from the watch. These extra pivoting bars allow the watch to stand out less from your wrist, and they make for a more comfortable feel. Everyone that has tried on the Metawatch has said that it definitely feels more comfortable than most watches. It also has a high-contrast 126 x 126 LCD display from Sharp, which makes it very easy to see outdoors and in other lighting conditions. Metawatch has made the Meta feel like more of a quality watch than a smartwatch, but the software experience is also very important. Metawatch has new software planned for when these new Meta smartwatches come out, but they did not have it on the ones they showed off at CES. We'll have to wait until they debut the new software for our full judgement on the Metawatch. The Metawatch would have been the best one year ago, but their biggest competition has greatly improved. The Pebble Steel is much classier than the original Pebble, so Metawatch is not the only company with a pretty smartwatch. Pebble also has very good software and hardware on the Pebble Steel, so Metawatch has to make some pretty good software to be the best in smartwatches. We can't wait for Metawatch to debut their final Meta smartwatch, and see how it stacks up against the Pebble Steel.
Engadget: Metawatch, The Verge: Metawatch
Fuhu Dreamtabs
There are many, many, many tablets on the market. There are many good tablets on the market, but there are five times as many tablets that are complete garbage. To the non-tech savvy individual, it is very hard to tell what is a good tablet and what isn't. There are many small companies making tablets that look a lot like the more popular ones, making it even harder to tell the difference. Fuhu has partnered with Dreamworks to try to make a dent in the tablet market with their Dreamtab series. The Dreamtabs are Android tablets that come with some Dreamworks-themed software. A Puss in Boots themed version of Fruit Ninja, an app that teaches you how to draw characters from Kung Fu Panda, and many more Dreamworks-apps like that will be on the tablets when they hit store shelves. If you couldn't tell from their software, the Dreamtabs are going to be marketed as children's tablets. The Dreamworks software could help kids learn with Dreamworks characters, and even help parents get their kids off the tablet. Shrek, for example, can tell your child to turn off the tablet once their turn is over. Fuhu hasn't said anything on the specs of the tablets, but we expect them to be either mid-range or high-end. There are three tablets in the Dreamtab lineup: and eight inch model, twelve inch, and a desktop-sized tablet. Most kids tablets look very chunky and ugly, but the Dreamtabs surprisingly don't. Fuhu has managed to make kid-friendly tablets that actually have some style. The eight inch model has a orange silicone case that is soft, kid-friendly, and has a cool funky design. The twelve inch and desktop sized tablets have clean aluminum designs, and the desktop one has a handle-looking thing on top of it to make it easier to carry. If you want to buy your kid a tablet that is not from Leapfrog, then waiting for the Fuhu Dreamtabs will be worth your while.
Engadget: Fuhu Dreamtabs
Yellow Jacket iPhone case
iPhone cases are a dime a dozen. Thousands of companies make all sorts of cases to protect one of the most popular phones in the world. There are incredibly colorful cases, cases shaped like animals, bottle-opener cases, pocket knife cases, and cases that make your iPhone an indestructible tank. Yellow Jacket entered the iPhone case market a little while ago with their original iPhone taser case. It was for the iPhone 4/4s, and it could either give your phone a charge or stun someone. There were a few problems with the original. The stun was more of a bee sting, and you would have to decide between charging up your phone or having enough charge to stop a potential thief on your way home. This year's Yellow Jacket case for the iPhone 5c and 5s fixes those problems. It is a basic rubber case that snaps on to the stun gun attachment, but the stun is stronger this time around. It will actually hurt your attacker, and you can have enough juice to charge your phone. You can either double your iPhone's battery life, or you can tase a thief fifty times. Yellow Jacket is not limiting the case attachments to tasers, though. They say that you can potentially add a knife or flashlight. At $149 this kind of protection comes at a shockingly high price. There is a cheaper Spraytect case with built-in pepper spray for $39.95, if you want protection for a lower price. We are not exactly sure how legal this is, but it is a nice and somewhat practical way to protect yourself. What this has showed us is that there are still many different iPhone cases that haven't been made yet.
The Verge: Yellow Jacket iPhone case
Typo iPhone keyboard case
If you have been using smartphones for a long time, then you probably had a BlackBerry at some point. In board meetings from around the world, you could here the clickity clack of BlackBerry keyboard keys. Ever since the iPhone and Android devices took the smartphone lead, people have been looking at their BlackBerries with a little bit of shame. Everyone was using iPhones and they had all the apps in the world, Androids were looking very cool, and other business people were starting to change over to Windows Phone. A good majority of business people, and normals themselves, switched over to iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. These ex-BlackBerry users used to type incredibly fast on their hardware keyboards, but now they were tripping up a little with touch-typing. They could still do what they need, but not at the breakneck pace they were typing at. Some third-party companies realized this and made keyboard cases for iPhone. Most of these were just slide-out Bluetooth cases that couldn't really stand-up to the tried-and-true BlackBerry keyboards. A few years later we have Ryan Seacrest's keyboard case for the iPhone 5/5s at CES 2014. It is a regular iPhone case that you can snap into a keyboard that looks almost exactly like the BlackBerry Q10 keyboard. It covers up the home button, but there is a home button on the keyboard instead. The keyboard also feels like the Q10 keyboard, so you can type extremely fast if you are used to BlackBerry keyboards. BlackBerry is suing the Typo Keyboard company for copying their patented keyboards, so that shows how much it looks like a BlackBerry. The added length of the keyboard makes the iPhone 5 or 5s really long, so the center of balance is off and it is really awkward to handle. It might be a little weird to handle, but this is the case to buy if you are an iPhone owner longing for hardware keys.
Engadget: Typo iPhone keyboard case
Those are our favorite products from some of the smaller companies at CES 2014, but stay tuned for our best of CES 2014. There were many terrible products that we have no idea how they got to CES, but there are those few products that make you happy to use them. Pebble made smartwatches good enough for us to recommend to normal people, and their Pebble Steel makes smartwatches look elegant and classy. Oculus Rift is changing the video game world one step at a time with their new Crystal Cove prototype. Oculus isn't chained down by video games too. Movies made for Oculus Rift could be absolutely draw-dropping. You could watch movies from third person, or you could change between the minds of certain characters. You could have a video game version of Clue where you walk around and find the murderer yourself, and it could have different endings (thanks for pointing this idea out Nilay Patel). Some people come into the consumer market to make money. Other people come into the market to change everything. Here are those people.
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