The first day of CES 2022 has shown us why monopoly is bad and why competition is good, once more. Intel and AMD are neck to neck again after many years and it will benefit us, the consumers. The second day at CES has also some exciting news; although the announcements are focused more on the devices rather than technological leaps on chips. Here is the most interesting news from day two.
BMW: Showcasing an electric car with e-ink panels instead of paint
One of the most eye-catching announcements in CES 2022 was the color-changing BMW SUV. Normally all cars are covered with paint, plastics, or fiber-carbon, depending on the model and those are the materials that impact cars’ look. BMW brought their interesting idea of covering the car with e-ink panels, instead of painting with their iX Flow model SUV. Just watch and see how it looks:
The e-ink panel is nothing new. They are widely being used on Kindle tablets. There are physical particles that move forward or backward depending on the electrical-magnetic current, creating the visual. As the image stays static, the panels won’t need any energy; it requires energy only to change the visual. Therefore the coating on BMW iX Flow won’t consume the batteries as long as they stay static. There are even more advanced e-ink technologies with multiple colors but they might not be useable on a car yet.
Alienware: Curved OLED ultrawide monitor and in-home game streaming server
The gaming brand of Dell, Alienware, has announced its new gaming monitor that will be shipped in late March 2022. The monitor uses a Samsung OLED panel with UW-QHD (3440 x 1440 pixels with a 21:9 aspect ratio) resolution. It can go up to 175 Hz refresh rate and it’s covered with a Quantum Dot layer for better color accuracy. It has an incredible 0.1 ms response time, thanks to the OLED panel and it shows 99.3% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. This thing should be one of the best displays in the gaming monitor market.
Alienware has also shown their concept Nyx gaming server for in-home cloud gaming. Because it is currently a concept PC, the company did not share its specs. This PC is meant to do all the heavy computing for gaming itself and stream the result to target devices, just like cloud gaming services such as GeForce Now, but at home. It is already possible to create an infrastructure for this, thanks to Steam Remote Play and some other software. However, Alienware told that they are looking for possibilities of streaming up to 4 devices simultaneously, which is currently not an easy thing to do.
CyberPowerPC: A new PC case with adjustable ventilation holes
Ventilation and cooling of new gaming hardware are pretty important. As the cooling directly affects the performance, companies are trying different solutions for better cooling CyberPowerPC is bringing a whole new concept for PC cases with their intelligently changing ventilation holes. It’s not clear how durable those panels are but it has the potential to open the door for new designs in the PC case industry.
Asus: The ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 is something else
Asus has managed to become one of the best gaming laptop companies with its dedication in the last few years. The company has announced its newest product, ROG Zephyrus Duo 16, which has two screens and the highest-tier hardware. The laptop comes with recently announced AMD R9 6900HK and RTX 3080 Ti, as well as 64 GB DDR5 memory and 2 x 2 TB M.2, configured as RAID 0. The primary screen has 2560 x 1600 pixels and a mini-LED panel with 1100 nits peak brightness. Its price is currently unknown and it will be on sale in the first quarter of 2022.
Nokia: A new flip-phone has arrived
After the fail of its top-tier smartphones, Nokia is bringing more and more cheap phones to the market. Nokia 2760 Flip 4G is the new version of Nokia 2760 which was released 14 years ago. It is not a smartphone; comes with KaiOS 3.0 that has an actual app store for feature phones like this one. That means you can watch YouTube and use Google Maps on the phone. It has a screen with 240 x 320 pixels and a 5-megapixel camera. It can make connections via 4G LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS.
