CES 2020 WIRED Liveblog: Smart Vibrator, Robot Arms, and More from CES
The WIRED crew is roaming the CES 2020 show floor to find the coolest and strangest gadgets this year….
Honestly, I (and two other WIRED staffers) body-wedged our way through the crowd at Amazon Auto’s booth just to check out the Rivian R1T for our own selfish curiosity, but when I heard that the R1T (the pickup) and R1S (the SUV) will be the first production vehicles to have Alexa Home integrated with Alexa Auto, I pounced.
Few appreciate how significant of a shift it is to link automotive smart assistants to home and phone. That means you can ask your Fire TV to tell you whether your Rivian is charging, how much battery level there is, and how many miles that level will take you, said a Rivian spokesperson. And begin driving navigation to a hiking trailhead, and when you park in the visitor’s lot you can seamlessly pick up walking directions on your phone for the rest of the way. Or you could ask your Echo Show if you left something in your Rivian, which will display a live feed of the truck bed camera.
Alexa Auto is currently online-only. That’ll change with the Rivian, which will work without cell signal for requests that don’t rely on the cloud. So you won’t be able to ask Alexa to see the indoor cameras in your house or answer weird trivia questions when it’s offline, but you’ll still be able to work vehicle-specific actions, such as change system settings or pop open the front-end trunk. You’ll be able to buy the R1T for $69,000 and R1S for $72,500 at the very end of the year. No news yet if you’ll be able to buy things off Amazon with just the right combination of words as you go down the road, but knowing Amazon, it would be overjoyed if you bought two seasons of Life on Mars on the way home from work.
(Learn more about Amazon and Rivian’s partnership.)
—Matt Jancer
More OLED TVs Are Coming
Konka OLED TVsPhotograph: Parker Hall
Finally, OLED TVs are getting cheaper! Chinese brand Konka is one of a couple of brands sharing plans to launch a value-packed OLED model this year (Vizio has also announced its own model). The new OLEDs should put some pep in Konka’s step as it attempts to burst into the US market for the first time in 2020, having been a top five brand in China for years.
The company showed me two prototypes of the models that will hit shelves in the latter half of the year. One comes with a built-in soundbar, which is particularly exciting to the audio nerd inside me; I can’t tell you how often I see gorgeous TVs without a high-quality audio solution to go along with them. For shame!
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