Happy new year, and welcome to the first Week in Review of 2023. With Lance in Las Vegas (being the consummate professional, as always, and covering CES 2023 for us, not gambling away his life savings… I hope) you’re stuck with me for this week’s edition.
The aforementioned CES 2023 is our main focus this week. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s one of the largest tech shows in the world, featuring huge names such as LG, Sony, Nvidia, Intel and AMD – and Lance, of course. Mr Ulanoff, isn’t on his own, as TechRadar is out in force at the event, working hard to bring you all the biggest – and weirdest – news from the show floor, and I’ll highlight some of the coolest things we’ve spotted below.
As it’s the new year, many people are also making resolutions. One of mine is to lose the weight I managed to put on during the period from Black Friday to Christmas, during which time I fully embraced my goblin mode and scoffed down pretty much anything I could get my hands on – and the unhealthier, the better. I’m pretty sure my veins now resemble the stuffed crust of a pizza.
So, it’s fortuitous timing that our Fitness & Wellbeing Editor, Matt Evans, is running a Get Fit for ‘23 week on TechRadar, with loads of great articles designed to help all of us hit our fitness goals.
Enjoy the newsletter – and remember to drop me an email with your thoughts, including 'NEWSLETTER' in the subject line.
Matt Hanson, Managing Editor, Core Tech
Building a hardware fleet that will stand the test of time
It's more important than ever for small- and medium-sized businesses to ensure they specify computing equipment that remains useful for as long as possible. Read more.
CES 2023 is well underway in Las Vegas, and as I mentioned, several of my TechRadar colleagues are out there seeking out all the coolest new tech.
As CES – the trade show formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show – is so huge, it can be hard to keep track of everything that’s been announced, so make sure to head over to our special CES 2023 page for all the latest news and reviews from the show.
We’ve also got dedicated pages to highlight the best TVs, audio tech, laptops, smart home devices and fitness kit of CES 2023. Personally, I’m keeping a close eye on that latter category, to see what new gizmos are coming down the line that can help me lose weight, and keep me motivated.
I also love stuffing my house with smart home gadgets, so I’ve been loving reading about all the new devices that are going to make my life both less and more complex at the same time…
The essential tech supporting SMBs TechRadar Pro spoke to Sarah Burkhart, senior director of client software and experiences at Dell, about the challenges facing SMBs and how choosing the right laptops for their staff can help to protect and expand their operations. Watch the interview.
The LG Signature OLED M3 is the world's first wireless OLED TV (Future)
I love my home cinema setup, but like many people, it hides a dirty secret. At first glance it may look impressive, but if you’re brave enough to peek behind my TV unit you’ll see a horrifying mess of cables and wires that looks like the aftermath of an explosion in a zoo that specializes in housing long, thin, snakes. It’s upsetting.
LG, however, may have cracked the problem with its LG Signature OLED M3, a ‘Zero Connect’ TV that it showed off at CES. There are no HDMI ports on the TV itself; instead it uses a wireless connection to beam 4K HDR content with up to a 120Hz refresh rate. Apart from the power lead, this is a completely wireless TV – and not only does that mean fewer cables spilling from the back of it, but it should also make placing it almost anywhere in your living room much easier.
Coming in huge 77-inch, 83-inch and 97-inch varieties, and featuring LG’s cutting-edge Alpha 9 Gen 6 image processor, I expect this thing to be well beyond my budget, but the possibilities are certainly exciting. Our Managing Editor of Entertainment, Matt Bolton (I promise we’re not all called Matt at TechRadar… just most of us), saw the LG Signature OLED M3 and was suitably impressed, assuring us that there’s no hint of compromise when it comes to image quality.
Matt flags a couple of potential issues with the device – a lack of HDMI ports being one – and I’m a bit concerned about any latency added by the wireless connection when playing games, but hopefully we’ll get to learn more about this fascinating and potentially game-changing TV before it launches in 2024.
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Have we already seen the best VR headset of 2023? (HTC)
Virtual reality is a funny old thing. On the one hand, it’s an incredibly exciting medium that has been around for decades, and in the past few years has matured to offer immersive and realistic experiences that surpass some of the wildest sci-fi predictions. Despite this, it’s also fallen out of favor a bit, with many people now rather bored of the whole thing.
I’ve owned quite a few VR headsets, and despite being blown away by many of the games I played, and the overall potential of the tech, all those headsets are now gathering dust. The hassle of setting them up, the space needed and the rather lonely and antisocial way of playing VR (which requires you to shut off the outside world) meant that when it comes to PC gaming, I’ve always returned to the gold old-fashioned ‘flatscreen’ way of doing things.
However, it looks like HTC isn’t giving up on trying to get us to love VR, and its impressive Vive XR Elite headset, which it unveiled at CES, could convince me to once again venture into virtual worlds. It’s a modular headset that comes with an immersive 4K display which offers a 110-degree field of view and runs at a 90Hz refresh rate, as well as an outward-facing camera that lets you see the real world, but with augmented reality features.
HTC has also hinted that add-ons will be available to bring extra features to the headset. Despite being wary about getting yet another VR headset that could end up being shoved in a drawer and forgotten about, this does sound rather cool, and Hamish Hector, our resident VR expert, seems impressed – so this is definitely a bit of kit to keep an eye on.
POLL QUESTION:
What VR experience would get you excited about the technology again?
Over the Christmas break, TechRadar ran its annual PC Gaming Week, during which we celebrated what I consider to be the best gaming platform in the world (sorry, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch fans), and as well as highlighting some of the coolest games and mods you can play, we also featured some important and moving articles.
As you can tell from the title, this isn’t a light read, but it’s a wonderfully written tribute to the power of games, and how doing something you love can help you get through the hardest of times. Of course, without meaning to, this article is also a testament to the strength and courage of Christian as he faced such a difficult situation at such a young age. It’s no spoiler to say this story has a very happy ending, with Christian now fit and well, and writing wonderful pieces like this for us.
Sony unveiled its Project Leonardo controller at CES (Sony)
Both Sony and Microsoft have been making some great strides in ensuring that their games consoles – and the games they run – are as accessible as possible for people, and at CES 2023, Sony unveiled a new accessibility controller, codenamed Project Leonardo, which, according to Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan “will allow players with disabilities to play more easily, more comfortably, and for longer periods.”
It will be customizable, and can work with the PS5’s DualSense controller. As Rhys Wood notes in his report, Sony has a commendable history when it comes to accessibility options for its games such as The Last of Us Part 2 and God of War Ragnarok, so it’s great to see that continue – and it’ll hopefully spur its competitors, Microsoft, and especially Nintendo, to do more.
It’s early days for the controller, but I’d love to see it come out soon – and at a reasonable price – as the more people who can join in with gaming, the better, in my book.
Would you want to hear a steamy romance novel read by a robotic AI? (Apple)
Apple isn’t at CES, but that hasn’t stopped the tech giant bringing out new tech of its own. However, its latest endeavor hasn’t been particularly well received, as the company has launched a range of audiobooks that aren’t read by a human narrator, but by artificial intelligence.
Found in the Apple Books app, you get the choice of a soprano voice called Madison and a baritone voice called Jackson, depending on your preference. However, as with other instances of AI seemingly encroaching on human creativity (such as art), many people are uncomfortable with this development.
There’s obviously concern about AI threatening the jobs of voice actors and narrators, and there’s also a general wariness over how AI could pick up on emotions and nuances in the text to make for a genuinely engaging experience – I certainly wouldn’t want to listen to Siri or Alexa monotonously read a lengthy book, for example.
Speaking of Alexa, Amazon doesn’t seem to be too impressed with this development, with a spokesperson for the Amazon-owned Audible, which specializes in audio books, pointing out that “experienced voice actors are able to differentiate pretty easily between vocal characteristics by playing with pitch, intonation, volume and accents.”
Apple’s experiment seems to be mainly focused on non-fiction books, which could make the AI narration less jarring, but for the moment at least I can’t see this being too popular. Best stick to iPhones, Apple.
Humans would have to travel to a black hole before we could even think about traveling through time (solarseven via Getty Images)
Granted, the above headline probably isn't a newsflash, but all this talk of virtual reality and robots reading bedtime stories has made me wonder if we’re now living in a world where we don’t need science fiction any more – many of the wildest imaginings of Asimov, Roddenberry, Adams, and other titans of sci-fi can now be found in our day-to-day lives.
Such is the pace of evolution in the tech world that modern sci-fi can seem outdated, perhaps even quaint, after only a few years, unless authors and showrunners cast their imaginations into the far distant future.
So an article on Live Science about whether or not humans could use black holes to time-travel piqued my interest. This is prime sci-fi fodder, and time travel is definitely a genre staple that is not yet part of our everyday lives. This fascinating article explains that, in theory, time travel is possible, and gives examples of the science to help prove it.
However, before you get too excited, while in theory it could be possible, in reality it’s unlikely that humans will achieve this in the near, or even distant, future, as we’d need to be able to figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light in order to avoid getting sucked into a black hole and turned into a noodle.
So we haven’t quite outgrown the need for sci-fi just yet.
The Sign-off
That’s a wrap on this week’s newsletter! CES has certainly shown us that present-day technology is more exciting than ever, but the above story is a reminder that there are still many unknown horizons for humanity to cross, and that's also exciting – if there was nothing new to create or discover, life would quickly get boring, wouldn’t it?
I hope that 2023 has got off to a great start for you all, and that you have a great weekend – and keep the emails coming.
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