Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service along with corsair Memory and western digital welcome to the Corning booth where we are going to be having my lovely assistant show me just how dirty my phone is with is it sorry is it a TPA meter ATP meter alright so basically what this does is it looks for any kind of organic material on the surface of the glass of my phone and tells me not necessarily how much of it is dead or alive but simply how much there is and I mean at a show like Vegas it's probably safe to say that some of its alive and some of it is going to get me sick because I can already feel a cold coming on anyway so I'll let you go ahead and start swabbing the phone while we talk a little bit about the technology that is in corning gorilla glass with antimicrobial agent now this watch right here in the top left has a regular soda lime glass which is an inexpensive alternative to gorilla glass then in the bottom left we see what happens to that glass if you add as much antimicrobial agent as they did to their own glass it turns yellow which is undesirable from pretty much any perspective in the middle we've got corning gorilla glass at the top for reference and then at the bottom with an antimicrobial film now this might be effective but unfortunately it gives a very hazy appearance to whatever's behind it in the top right we've got regular well not regular it's awesome regular corning gorilla glass again and then the bottom we've got that same glass with their antimicrobial agent and it is just as transparent and strong and flexible and all those great things as be four so something a lot of people don't think about so we're just having the the test completed over here is that is that their phone touches not only their hands but also their face and all kinds of crazy things you lend it to someone so it can be a well I guess we'll find out basically that chart behind us is a summary of the people here at the show who have had their phones tested here at the booth so they we've had levels of ATP as low as kind of 11 2 30 and levels as high as apparently one lady Lichter phone and got a reading over 2000 not something Corning or really anyone recommends but there you have it guys that's how that's how some people want to be about it so here we go guys let's find out just how dirty my phone is the ATP once the ATP meter finishes booting up guys we're not going to cut this because we want you to know that you know this is you know how how dirty are not dirty I happen to be in the meantime let's talk about what the antimicrobial agent actually does so we had to cut this here guys because we got to be very careful what we say this is the world's first epa-approved antimicrobial glass but that you know we there certain words we can't use but what we can say is you can be comforted to know that over the duration of the lifetime of your device whether you have a high reading or a low rating you can be comforted to know that the antimicrobial agent is always working Thunderbolt to my friends available on the Mac Pro actually available on some pc stuff as well is a very very versatile standard now it's 20 gigabit per second which means you can connect all kinds of great stuff including you know high definition or even greater than high-definition cameras capture devices external pci express enclosures and all kinds of crazy stuff like that but one of the limitations are Thunderbolt right now is that particularly with the copper cables available on the market distance is a problem so if you're setting up something like I'm little mac pro studio workspace the 3-meter maximum distance you can be away from the back of the pc with a copper cable might not be enough to have an efficient workplace so corning with their expertise when it comes to materials is releasing optical Thunderbolt cables that are capable of much much thinner form factors as well as much longer distances they have a 10 meter cable now there's a 30 meter cable coming very soon that's correct okay and then they're going to have up to a 60 meter cable coming later this year now you probably know you know Lori you've heard somewhere that optimal optical cables can be very fragile don't worry about that guys they've got a demo here where they're taking their optical cable jamming it into tiny little holes tying it into knots they've got a laser pointer on the one end and you can see that on us aside from the optical signal still passing through there is no leakage at any of those not so it still maintains its integrity if it gets closed in a drawer closed in a door closed in a okay I'm not going to say any other words that rhyme with that the point is that it will maintain its data integrity pretty much regardless of what happens to it but that's not all guys Thunderbolt needs longer distance and thinner cables but so does USB 3 not to be clear this up right here is not Corning's product okay this is actually a copper-based active USB 3 extension cable it's a 15 meter cable it's extremely heavy made of copper and also very bulky for comparison my friends this is Corning's USB 3 compatible to be clear guys the USB 3 standard doesn't include anything about optical cables so they were kind of like well okay we're big company we can like engineer a solution here even though it's not in the spec so Corning is releasing their optical USB 3 compatible cables in lengths up to 50 meters and we can be expecting those later on in the year you can see they're obviously thinner obviously lighter and of course their optical so performance is going to be obviously better thank you well okay to be clear guys it'll still be 5 gigabit per second or 10 gigabit per second or whatever USB 3 ends up becoming but better in terms of you know not having signal degradation over length which is why the copper one is so bulky there there I clarified that anyway guys don't miss any of our CES 2013 2014 coverage our trip to the show this year is powered by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service as well as corsair Memory and western digital huge thanks to those guys because without them we wouldn't be able to be here