Now more than halfway through our CES 2018 road trip, Matt and Nick are nearly to Las Vegas, driving there in style.
Future’s brand new New York City office was the official starting line. We won’t be at the CES finish line for seven whole days, with stops in Washington D. C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Memphis, Tennessee (it’s a long state), Oklahoma (the middle of the country); a lunch-time pit-stop in Amarillo, Texas; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Monument Valley, Arizona (which is in almost every Western you’ve ever seen).
The first leg of our adventure to get to CES in Las Vegas involved traveling from a hungover Manhattan, which just celebrated New Year’s Eve 2018, to the nation’s capital, Washington, D. C. We’re now driving to Oklahoma City – halfway there.
Here’s what the TechRadar team has experienced so far.
We’re taking four different phones with us to CES 2018, all for different reasons. The first is a foldable phone, the ZTE Axon M, which may be the future of the smartphone. It’s the first modern smartphone to fold in half and, full disclosure, ZTE helped sponsor TechRadar’s travel across America for CES.
The foldable phone era is about to begin, with Samsung rumored to be following the new trend in 2018 and even Apple patents hinting at a bendable iPhone in the distant future. Early adopters should get ready for more changes beyond an all-screen smartphone. That was just the beginning.
How does it match up against the Google Pixel 2 and iPhone X? We tested that out in the video below. We’ve also brought the original iPhone 1 with us to show how far phones (and, specifically, the camera) has advanced in ten years.
What are the differences over the course of a decade? Watch for yourself:
What’s the rush? This is our longest leg of the trip: 8 hours of driving, and that’s without stops. It’ll take us at least 10 hours to get to our destination.
On the bright side, we were able to eat at the famous Big Texan Steak Ranch in the middle of I-40 in Amarillo, Texas, and we talked about Texas-sized CES 2018 predictions. What do we think will be there? Matt and Nick dissect the show in the vlog below.
We’re halfway through our CES 2018 road trip today, rolling through Memphis, Tennessee, the “Home of the Blues” and the birthplace of Rock ‘n Roll.
What better time to retool our playlists? And being tech-savvy folks, we all have different platforms: Google Play Music, Spotify, and Tidal. That’s been two tech editors and a videographer.
What attracted us to our respective music apps?
“I wanted to hear the new JZ album and I ended up keeping Tidal,” said Paul Encinas, our videographer. Clearly Tidal’s exclusivity angle works. Though it pays $10 a month, not the pricey $20 a month for the high-def FLAC version.
“I love the social component of it,” said Nick Pino. “It’s great top see what my friends are listening to. That’s how I find a lot of my new music.”
What does Knoxville have to do with CES? Well, besides a natural hotel stop in our long journey across America, it hosted the 1982 World’s Fair.
What remains of the 1982 World’s Fair is an iconic 266ft (81m) high shimmering gold-colored Sunsphere. Here’s Matt and Nick talking about the gadgets they brought across the US and what we’re looking forward to at CES 2018.
Just how frozen was Day 2 of our road trip to CES 2018? Well, we were able to walk across the iconic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
We got to take photos – with various smartphones – of Mr. Lincoln. We didn’t get the same opportunity to take pictures with President Trump. Twitter said he was busy.
But we put all of our photos to good use, testing our four phones to see how far the smartphone camera has come, from the iPhone 1 to today’s all-screen and dual-screen phones
The first 24 hours on the road to CES ended with us headed further south, toward Knoxville, Tennessee. Time to break out the Chicken and Waffles. Las Vegas is in our sights.
Proof that the weather is rather unpleasant:
We still managed to make it out of a frigid Manhattan in one piece in a car that’s not our own. Another crisis adverted. Our first big hurdles of attending CES 2018 via a cross-country road trip were over and done with.
Five hours later, we ended up in an equally frozen Washington, D. C. And, with a little sleep, we tested out some smartphone cameras to take photos of the famous monuments.
This is the car we’ve driving to CES 2018. It’s the latest Genesis G80 Sport courtesy of Genesis, and it’s our amazing ride for the next seven days.
It’s $57,750 (about £42,480, AU$73,946) and it drives like a dream. At first Nick and I were worried because it’s the first time either of us drove in Manhattan (I just moved here, after all), and we’ve be doing it in a bigger car than we’re used to. Well, the larger interior of the G80 Sport doesn’t really translate to a “boat,” like everyone has told us in the weeks prior to today. It’s also filled with enough sensors and safety features to keep us free from dinging anyone in Manhattan.
Crisis adverted, right? Well… just wait until you see what awaits us on Day 1.
