Ok, a whole bunch of pretty big announcements to keep track of here. Really, just so many. I’ve grouped them in no particular order, and all were announced, unveiled, launched, revealed, or mentioned during CES 2022!

Sony:

• PlayStation VR2, Sony’s next VR headset, made for the PS5. We didn’t actually see the headset but it’ll have features listed as haptic feedback, eye tracking, 4K HDR, 90/120Hz frame rates, and more. There’s a new PSVR 2 game, too: Horizon: Call of the Mountain, probably some years off.
• Sony announced a new mobility division called Sony Mobility, and unveiled the Vision-S SUV, its next concept EV. It may actually hit the road as Sony warms into EVs more and more: “We are exploring a commercial launch of Sony’s EV,” said Kenichiro Yoshida, the company’s CEO.
• And earlier, Sony announced the world’s first QD-OLED 4K TV, i.e. a quantum dot organic light-emitting diode display, from Samsung, coming later this year, and said to beat OLEDs.

Intel:

• The chip-making giant announced its 12th Gen Alder Lake desktop CPU lineup, including up to 5.5GHz single-core frequency, which is pretty nuts, shipping to OEMs by the end of this quarter.
• It’s also coming to laptops: Intel announced eight new H-series 12th Gen mobile processors, with a focus on performance and coming to laptop makers like Dell, HP, Acer, Razer, and so on.
• There’s also six 12th-Gen P-series mobile processors for “thin and light laptops,” which included a peek at foldable laptops — in short, Intel says foldable screen laptop PCs are coming to market this year (Windows Central), more so than just Lenovo’s Thinkpad X1 anyway.
• And, Intel’s Evo PCs seem to have iPhone and Apple Watch integration with iMessage support.

AMD:

• AMD announced the Ryzen 6000 series of mobile CPUs for laptops, pushing Zen 3+ to a 6nm platform, and RDNA2 graphics for the first time, and a Microsoft Pluton security processor, too. AMD says 200 laptops will get the new series platform.
• AMD also had GPU news: Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 GPUs, including the RX6000S GPU series for thin gaming laptops.
• And we saw previews of the Ryzen 7000 series, based on Zen 4, and a new AM5 socket.
• More on the new type of security chip from Microsoft (Ars Technica).

Nvidia:

• A bundle of new GPUs: new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, and gaming laptop chips RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti, coming to its partners like Razer and Alienware for laptops that start at $2,500 and $1,500 respectively (The Verge).
• There’s also a new $249 RTX 3050 GPU you might actually be able to buy.

Dell

• Dell showed off a controversial new XPS design, with the XPS 13 Plus moving the design language on, adding a capacitive “touch function bar,” and doing away with the headphone jack. Huh.
• It’ll pack Intel’s latest 12th-Gen Core i7 12800P.
• The image up above is of the 13 Plus…

And a quick CES roundup:

• OnePlus filled in some more of the blanks with confirmed OnePlus 10 Pro specs, including the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, 120Hz AMOLED, 5,000mAh battery, and 80W wired charging. RAM/storage configurations to come. It’s all very flagship, a great set of specs. But prices, please, OnePlus? And where’s the software at?
• TCL launched two new 30-series phones for the US which don’t really look like enthusiast devices at all, and new TVs and soundbars as well, including the new X925 Pro, which is a star mini-LED offering at 85 inches and 8K resolution, and its family of TVs will have 144Hz refresh rates and TrueCut feature, though there’s more to learn.
• TCL also showed off version two of its wearable display glasses called NxtWear Air, intended as a secondary-display-in-glasses.
• Samsung has announced a dedicated SmartThings hub device, a tablet that’s a big remote for your smart home, coming to South Korea first. Samsung also has a new portable projector called Freestyle for $899, and its largest curved monitor yet, the 55-inch Odyssey Ark(Engadget).
• Asus unloaded tons of ROG gear at its Rise of Gamers event at CES 2022: new gaming laptops, monitors, and more.
• MSI launched new laptops for gaming and content creation, including a Meta-Ready logo for Metaverse readiness indication…
• Acer joined its rivals with new displays, laptops, and more, including the Acer Predator 2022 lineup.
• There’s a Keurig for cocktails(Gizmodo).
• John Deere has an autonomous tractor: self-driving Deere 8R (Engadget).
• Eufy’s new Security Video Doorbell Dual keeps an eye on packages.

There’s more too, but those seem to be the bigger pieces to keep your eye on for now.

😅 Strange: Qualcomm thinks Qualcomm-powered laptops are too expensive (Android Authority).

👉 Vivo V23 series launched: Two selfie cameras, color changing back (Android Authority).

⌚ Garmin Venu 2 Plus review: The first real Garmin smartwatch (Android Authority).

🔭 James Webb Space Telescope: Sun shield is fully deployed (BBC).

🟩 Are you playing Wordle? It’s not a bad little daily challenge! (NY Times, gift link).

🌪 The danger of leaving weather prediction to AI: humans still outperform (Wired).

🧀 “If I weigh 99 pounds, and I eat 1 pound of cheese, am I 1% cheese?” (r/nostupidquestions).

This list of 10 weird things scientists calculated in 2021 (LiveScience) is a fun one, including:

How many bubbles are in a glass of beer? 

• Up to two million bubbles, twice as many as champagne!
• “It turns out that the number of bubbles depends on three factors: the concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) in the glass, the volume of bubbles, and the point at which the CO2 depletes such that no more bubbles form.”

How much does all the SARS-CoV-2 in the world weigh? 

• “The particles together would weigh somewhere between 0.22 and 22 pounds (0.1 and 10 kilograms).”

What’s the fastest acceleration in the human body?

• Answer: Snapping your fingers.
• Incredibly, this happens three times faster than a pitcher’s arm in baseball.
• “When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair,” study senior author Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said in a statement. “The finger snap occurs in only seven milliseconds — more than 20 times faster than the blink of an eye, which takes more than 150 milliseconds.”

And, how long would it take to walk around the moon?

• Any guesses, first?
• Remember, it’s smaller than earth but gravity is less.
• Anyway, NASA calculated the theoretical maximum walking speed back in 2014 at 3.1mph or about 5km per hour, before you had to switch into a “loping run”. 
• At that speed, assuming you don’t stop, it’ll take 91 days to walk around the moon. But, should you for some reason not want to walk 24 hours a day, it might take as long as 1.5 years to get around it.
• …unsure if worthwhile.

Get that walking fitness up!

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor