Gadgetory

every year at the Consumer Electronics Show we see more and more laptops we've seen crazy light and thin ones giant gaming ones and ones that flip and spin around so this year the laptops haven't been as insane but there's a few that give us a little glimpse about what to expect for the rest of the year so let's start with HP spectre x360 and Dells XPS 15 now these are both 15-inch laptops so what really matters is exactly what's inside which is Intel's for actual processor and in AMD's graphics this is the first time we've seen such a thing and what it basically means is we're probably gonna see gaming laptops or laptops that capable of playing games anyway at the sort of size and form factor of these two devices Dells XPS 15 21 is new this year and we've promised you seen the XPS 15 before but this one has the obviously the hinge so you can go put it into tablet mode and as you can see this is a quite a regular looking laptop but the graphics support on it so playing games or stuff like that should be a little bit better it's not gonna be amazing just yet but I think that's gonna set the stage for us having gaming laptops inside the black suits that look kind of normal now this is the first time that AMD and Intel have paired up since like the 1980s so it's also kind of interesting to see what would could happen for the rest of the year there Dells XPS 15 also includes a maglev keyboard now that sounds pretty fancy and it kind of is so what's inside is essentially magnets it underneath the keys and they hold the keys in place now that means that it's actually got a little bit less travel and but it feels and sounds a lot quicker so it's quite interesting to see that on this particular laptop and on Windows laptops in general and the keyboard is slightly thinner so something more like the Apple MacBook Pro and but it's kind of interesting you're seeing Dell doing this and that might mean we see some of the other PC makers do a similar sort of thing with their keyboards speaking of experimentation we're starting to see quite a lot less of that this year there's not so many crazy flippin laptops people are sort of settling on their own designs but what we are starting to see and we saw it in December is these new arm powered laptops now basically what that means is you're starting to see laptops they're gonna have all-day battery life that's 20 plus hours like innovators be put on standby can throw them in your bag pick them up and they're not gonna be out of battery and inside you're gonna get the similar sort of components you would any other laptop and the form factors that we've seen so far are mainly tablets and two-in-ones and but I think we're probably gonna see a lot more experimentation later in the year we might even get some just regular clamshell laptops so this is lenovo's mixed 630 as you can see it looks like a laptop stroke tablet it's kind of like a surface a two-in-one sort of thing we've seen quite a few times before what's really unique about this particular device is inside there's a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor now what that means is it's basically phone components and sighs you're gonna get LTE connectivity inside there so you'll be able to use it on the train anywhere outside the house and and it's basically it snaps off so you can use it as a tablet as well you're gonna get all the obviously the LTE connectivity it's gonna be a run about 20 hours battery life is what they're saying so that's kind of like the key thing about this it's quite a nice little device it's fin and light and so you've got the single USB type-c port on the back and so kind of like the future of tablets and laptops is what we're seeing and if it sets the stage for this and other devices like the HP one as well same sort of family devices sort of sets the stage for what we might see in 2018 which is a lot or arm powered Windows laptops so another training I've started to sees HD our laptops now HD IO is high dynamic range basically what that means is you're gonna get a little bit better detail when you're watching like a TV in a movie colors will pop the blacks will be blacker so it's really good for like viewing content and stuff like Netflix and stuff like that what we're kind of waiting to see now is for Windows to be updated Netflix and all those sort of different applications so it's still really early days but I think once that comes we're probably gonna see a lot more HD our laptops for out 2018 and beyond we didn't see many Chromebooks this year but razer is experimenting with its own Android powered phone and docking it and turning from a phone into a laptop now we've seen us a bunch of times Motorola's Atrix Samsung's Dex doc even Microsoft's phone continuum stuff on Windows Phone and a lot of those projects have failed in the past but Razer stuff is very much a prototype at the moment - I don't think we're gonna see a phone that turns into a laptop be a success this year but it's good to see another company giving it a go and try in another concept to see if we can get to that point so aside from all those laptops we also saw some regular plain old laptops this year - so Dell refresh the XPS 13 - a new white color we've kind of rose gold finish on it as well and it's one of the better Windows laptops and they've changed the design slightly but they still have the webcam placement down the bottom so it's still staring up your nose I saw also you introduced a new switch 7 and it's taken the title as the world's finished laptop now we've seen Acer experiment with being thin and light before and this particular device the keyboard doesn't feel quite as good but it's good to see a so push everyone else to do fine and like laptops there's still something that obviously a Tsar cares about and I think that's something that we like to see now aside from the hardware on the software side I think we're gonna see a lot of Amazon Alexa appearing on Windows PCs throughout the year Amazon announced at CES the Alexa we built into a bunch of different laptops from HP Lenovo a seuss and Acer now those devices are coming later this year but I'm curious to see whether we'll ever see Google assistant appear on Windows laptops it's obviously on Google's own pixel book but it'd be interesting if it made the jump over to the windows side as well so all those trends combined with Microsoft's work on Windows 10 and the updates and also their ability to push the arm that tops out makes for a really interesting 2018 for laptops now something we haven't probably seen for quite a while Jovie teasers Tavor as well