CE Week Highlights Show Consumer Is King of Everything

by Michelle Maisto

At CE Week, Hexoskin announced that its Android app is now compatible with Android smartwatches, enabling them to receive GPS information and Hexoskin biometric stats via the cloud. Hexoskin’s products include a “biometric shirt” that helps athletes train in their optimal heart rate zone, measures their recovery and tracks their resting heart rates. It has chest and waist sensors and can also track a wearer’s breathing while he or she sleeps.

Smartphone makers have their sights set on 4K displays—that’s 4,000 pixels on the horizontal and a diagonal resolution of 3,840 by 2,160—and Samsung has said it will deliver such a device in 2015. For now, anyone who wants a display as nearly as crisp as real life can check out the Aquos 4K Ultra HD LED TV that Sharp introduced at CE Week. It comes in 60-, 70-, 80- and 90-inch display options and can be controlled via apps for iOS and Android.

Straddling two trends—health-monitoring devices and smartwatches—is the Withings Activité, a Swiss-made watch that has the appearance of a classic timepiece and the smarts to connect to your smartphone and adjust itself as you travel—whether burning calories or moving between time zones. CEO Cedric Hutchings says creating a beautiful accessory that people will want to wear always was essential. “Rubbery things” we tend to try out but not wear for good, he said. “What impacts our health is what we do over the long term.”

Women tend to keep their phones in their purses, where they often don’t feel or hear incoming calls or messages. FashionTeq’s Zazzi seeks to addresses this, and more femininely than most smartwatches do. “I think there’s going to be new opportunities, and probably a new career field … to be that link between engineering and jewelry, and many other accessories,” FashionTeq CEO Judy Tomlinson said during a panel on wearables.

The blind spot of the connected car market is the piece that will seamlessly bring together and make actionable use out of the data being collected by sensors, radar and other technologies—more than a gigabyte a second, Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia, said during a connected car panel. “All these sensors are great, they’re important, but without a way to interpret [the data] you’re stuck. It’s about a huge amount of hardware but also … that software that can continue to get better over the life of the vehicle.”

Honeywell showed off Lyric, the first offering in what it says will be a family of connected home products (and a competitor to the Nest). This smart thermostat softly glows in different colors to signal, at your approach, how you might want to adjust it—orange when heating, blue when cooling and green when in energy saving mode. It can also be remotely controlled via smartphone, and Honeywell estimates that users will experience an annual savings of $125. It’ll arrive in August priced at $279.

What can the connected car market learn from smartphones? “We know with certainty that customers want to know three things: They want to know how secure is their data, they want to know what you’re doing with that data and they want to know how transparent you’re being with that data,” said Judith Bitterli, CMO of AVG, a 17-year-old company that offers security for “devices, data and people.”

Thinium is a compact wall charger that’s about the size of a small stack of business cards. It will save you from: carrying around a larger phone charger, searching for an outlet and putting your phone on the gross airport carpet while you wait for your flight. An AC plug folds down out of its back, a port that supports the phone folds out of its front, and there’s the option of a USB cable, so you can charge off of a laptop or other device in a pinch.

Spun off from Nokia in 2012, PulseOn makes heart rate monitors that turn heart rate data into “meaningful feedback on training that is personalized for each individual.” It works with Android and iOS devices, is “unbelievably stylish,” according to the company, and won CE Week’s Best In Show innovation award.