For CES each year, I rely on one YouTube channel to report to me new and interesting tech that almost always appeals to me. LinusTechTips has been my guide to CES since 2013, and I also follow him for PAX, E3, and Computex (in addition to his many other wonderful tech guides and overviews). This year, some of the things that struck me were Seagate’s 7mm external USB 3.0 hard drive. It goes well with a trend I found going along with CES this year, thin. The drive itself is 500GB, using a 5mm drive itself, encased in two 1mm steel plates to create a very sturdy, rugged enclosure. Linus even demonstrates dropping the drive from about 5 feet (using Linus, who stands at about 5 feet 6 inches, as a reference), then stating that the reps at the Seagate booth said it could be dropped. He also compares it aside a 2.5 inch internal hard drive, and an (ancient) 5MB hard drive manufactured by Seagate for IBM.

Another wonderful find of CES is the collection of devices running processors from Intel’s latest Broadwell 14nm chipset. Now, Broadwell has been known for a fair amount of time now, but it is significantly thinner than the previous 22nm chip found in all processors by AMD and Intel before this revolutionary breakthrough. This year, we had tablets, laptops ranging from productivity to gaming, NUCs, and even a neat little NUC that weighs 12 grams without the heatsink, and 14 grams (2 grams less than a pound) with the copper heatsink. That device in specific can run at clock rates between 1 and upwards of 2GHz. As time goes on, I keep telling myself that this technology really exists, and have to continually do so in order to keep believing everything I see.

As always, there are tons of TVs and monitors at CES that again, just blow you away. One TV by LG this year featured a display that is flat when you want it to be flat, and curved when you need it to be curved. The switch is made just by pressing a button. The TV is 77 inches from corner to corner, and by being able to switch from flat to curved and back, tackles the issue Linus has pointed out in one of his TechQuickie channel of multiple people viewing the TV from different angle, seeing potentially distorted picture from not sitting at the very isolate ideal viewing position. Dell also debuted a 5K display that rivals the 5K iMac, and brings the 5K experience to just about any user with the hardware to power the device. The monitor, the Dell UP2715K, can only run in 5K by using 2 DisplayPort cables. No current video card is capable of supporting 5K without running multiple channels, due to limitations that were not further explained. Without researching the matter (because frankly I don’t care, as I don’t have/want/need a 5K display), I can only assume it is because DisplayPort is not capable of putting out enough bandwidth to accommodate for the massive data rate of a 5K image.

Yet another sort of cool grouping of tech was the health gear. Only one item the LinusTechTips crew went over that is not unheard of is Razer’s fitness wearable. Because wearables are not new by any means, and Razer has released a newer version of this device, I’m not going to go over it in any detail. Razer previously has the Nabu as their only fitness tracker, but at CES, announced their Nabu X, which (as most second generation devices do) built upon their first device (which in all honesty, was a horrible move for a gaming company… what gamer really needs to track their steps while sitting at a computer playing games?). The first (practical) device I saw in the CES 2015 playlist was the Mionix Naos QG. This mouse now has tracking for things such as actions (clicks/minute), movement data (pixels/second, heartbeat, and skin response. Another thing you can do is integrate this with Twitch streams, so you can display this reading on the screen. This could be pretty awesome when someone is playing horror games or games that have very high stress levels to see when your heartbeat spikes and adrenaline starts pumping. The mouse also features a 16.8 million (if I remember correctly) color LED backlight that can be changed to display your favorite color, but by default, changes color based on your heart rate. The next smart device is the Vector Mouthgard made by i1 Biometrics. The Linus Crew does a fantastic job at demonstrating what this device is meant for. Slick (one of the employees of Linus Media Group) was tackled while being recorded and wearing the mouthgard, and goes to show that, when uploaded to the software on a computer, you can see various measurements, in the form of linear acceleration, rotational acceleration, head injuries, and more. In this case, where Slick was tackled, they were able to tell that he tucked his head down and to the side, and this caused his brain to impact the other side of his skull. As Slick says during his commentary, this can be used to better athletes and help break them of bad habits they may or may not know they have fallen into.

Overall, (from what I have seen) CES this year was yet another phenomenal one. Also, please note that the devices that I have highlighted in this post are just some of my personal favorites, or ones that very well fit the criteria of this assignment. Of all the tech channels on YouTube (and we all know there is one metric butt-ton of them), LinusTechTips is easily my favorite. If anyone wishes, down below I will also post the link to the playlist of Linus and the gang at CES 2015. All the videos are well worth the watch.