Versatile Amphibian

One of the advantages of shows like CES is that you can see everything (or near enough) in a category in one place. Drones had their own 'marketplace' at the show, and also appeared dotted around other areas. What struck me more than anything else was not the innovation in the category, but its ubiquity. Drones only really began to spring up at trade shows five years ago. These were either heavyweight units the size of a small aircraft or tiny, plastic toys with no range and impossibly delicate controls. Step forward to 2016 and there are now dozens of credible manufacturers offering a wide range of styles of quad/ sexto/ octo-copters for professional and consumer use. Better still camera and computing technology means that these drones are far easier to use, able to position themselves automatically to capture that time you got great air . Intel's demonstration of RealSense as a collision avoidance device was impressive. Picture of how it sees the world below. All of...

For completeness, I'm going to write a series of short posts on other themes I saw at CES this year. First up, the connected kitchen. There's been gigantic hype around the connected home for years now, so it's little surprise that lots of tech turned up at CES. I do think that some breakthroughs are being made, mind you. On the stands of LG, Bosch, Whirlpool and Samsung I saw ranges of practical high-end kitchen appliances that offered interesting marginal gains versus their un-connected predecessors. Here's Bosch's summary of the use cases for the category: For example, Bosch's washing machine and dryer combination enables you to programme the machine far more precisely to the load being washed through a slick, user-centric iPad application. I wouldn't change my washer to get this, but I could see how it would be a selling point if I were buying a new one. Interestingly Bosch, LG and Whirlpool all avoided the temptation to put touchscreens into the de...

Car technology has grown in importance at CES in the nearly 10 years since Ford became the first automotive company to exhibit here. Much of the talk in the lead up to the show was about the pace of change towards self-driving or autonomous vehicles. Needless to say that this was an important topic for most of the manufacturers I visited, but it was far from the central focus. Here’s my summary of what I saw and chatted about with Ford, Mercedes Benz, Audi, Toyota, Fiat, Hyundai, Kia and VW. Let’s start with the elephant in the exhibit hall: Autonomous vehicles The word on the street (see what I did there?) in the run up to the show was that there would be big announcements about self-driving technology. This didn’t really materialise, although Ford did suggest that they were hoping to get a ‘Level 4’ self-driving car on the roads for public consumption around 2020. ‘Level 4’, for those of you who are not doyennes of World of Jargon, means that the driver should not be re...