UPDATED 13:27 EDT / JANUARY 09 2013

Breaking Analysis: Panasonic, ZTE, Broadcom Intrigue Customers with New Product Standards

More intriguing announcements keep coming from CES, including a 20-inch tablet, yet another smartphone and a chip to support Ultra-HD. Panasonic revealed in its CES keynote a 20-inch Windows 8 tablet with 4K resolution. Normally 4K is used in conjunction with TV resolution, but we’ve seen 4K coming out in other products displayed at CES this week as well, including 3M’s 84-inch multi-touch table that was discussed on the Morning NewsDesk Show on Monday. SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto explained why 4K is so hot right now. “This is part of an evolution we’re seeing. It’s a new wave of displays that run at about four thousand pixels. It’s really defined as ultra high definition television.” He went on to say that in many cases, it has twice the horizontal and vertical resolution of 1080p HDTV format, so suffice it to say, it’s an incredibly detailed display.

See all CES coverage here!

Not many details were available about the tablet, but what we do know is that it supports stylus input and real-time cloud collaboration tools, making this product seemingly more for business than the individual consumer. With such a large screen, Feledy asked Casaretto if this could really be called a tablet, since Lenovo was classifying their 27-inch IdeaCentre Horizon product as a “portable desktop PC.” Casaretto stated that this is where the lines get tested between tablets and PCs, and basically, what consumers want and what they will accept will drive the market as to where the line gets drawn.

Also out of CES, ZTE has a new flagship phone called the Grand S, which is comprised of high-end features such as a Snapdragon processor, LTE support, 2GB of RAM and a 13-megapixel camera. Casaretto speculated that these high-end specs will eventually become the industry standard for basic phones going forward as smartphones continue to evolve. He said when compared to other phones emerging on the market, it paints a picture that more high-quality features are coming to the phones and it’s really bringing up the entire
market to a whole new level. He observed, “The actual phone part of it is becoming less and less of an important thing and more of the connectivity is the biggest thing we’re seeing in these phones.”  Unfortunately, the Grand S will only be available in China, with no plans to break into the U.S. market.

Broadcom announced a new chip at CES which is designed for net-connected video devices and is among the earliest to support a new video compression technology widely known has H.265, MPEG-5 and HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). It’s the successor to the largely used H.264, also known as AVC and MPEG-4 Part 10.  Casaretto listed its capabilities of being able to play high quality video at half the bandwidth it required before, it supports ultra-HD video and quadruples the number of pixels on displays. See the entire segment with Kristin Feledy and John Casaretto on the Morning NewsDesk Show.


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