IT Blog | Mr. HiTech Tech Blog

LAS VEGAS — What’s the buzz this year at CES, the consumer tech industry’s biggest annual showcase? Weird new TVs, even weirder modes of transportation and internet-connected pleasure devices.CES is huge — 2.9 million square feet, to be exact — but it’s no longer where the most influential tech products launch. The tech giants like Apple, Google and Amazon save the real stuff for their own events in the spring and fall. Still, we walk miles of the show floor at CES each year to hunt for emerging ideas, practical new gadgets, adorable robots, and you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it gear. (We’re looking at you, people-moving egg.)A few trends have us excited this year. We’ve not yet run out of ways to measure information about our bodies and health through wearable gadgets. TVs are getting the ability to fix their own darn picture settings, finally. And security and privacy are moving from afterthoughts to headline features and even their own products.CES is also useful for tracking progress on long-promised but still nascent technologies, including self-driving cars, artificial intelligence and augmented-reality glasses. The TV industry, the single largest exhibitor at the show, is pushing ahead into its latest reason to get you to upgrade: 8K TVs, which have four times as many pixels as ultra-HD 4K TVs. (Can you even see all that sharpness? The companies say you should just scooch your couch closer.)One trend we hope dies down: companies using fear to sell dubious security and health gadgets, and casually integrating surveillance into everyday things. Someday we’ll learn not everything gets better by putting it on the Internet, or by letting you command it by voice.Our CES favorites are usually the products that make you go hmmmm. Seeing what problems we’re trying to solve with tech reveals as much about us as it does the state of the art. This year, we’ve seen the impact of climate change and social isolation.Here are our finds for the best and weirdest products of CES 2020, which we’ll be updating throughout the week as we keep discovering more.Vertical TV: Samsung SeroPeople keep shooting video while holding their phones vertically. That works fine when you’re watching Instagram or TikTok on your phone, but it looks terrible on a horizontally oriented TV. No longer: Samsung’s latest TV rotates to switch between horizontal and vertical orientations. You sync the Sero TV to a Samsung Galaxy phone, and it automatically switches orientation to match what you’re watching. It’ll only work if it’s wall-mounted.No price yet, available in the U.S. in early 2020Smartwatch that detects sleep apnea: Withings ScanWatchAdd one more to the list of health concerns that smartwatches can detect: sleep apnea. Withings, a pioneer wearable maker, added to its new ScanWatch an SpO2 sensor that measures oxygen saturation levels and identifies when they’re too low — an indicator of the common sleep condition. (It does this by emitting and absorbing a light wave passing through blood vessels.) The ScanWatch tracks sleep length, depth and quality, and provides a nightly sleep
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