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[br]Walk around the Consumer Electronics Show and you’ll hear a variety of different languages. There is, however, a common tongue on the show floor—and it consists entirely of buzzwords, marketing terms, and acronyms. It can get confusing, so we put together this handy cheat sheet to help you decode the announcements, presentations, and overstatements you’ll encounter when reading about new products.[br][br]5G[br][br]The king of buzzwords at CES 2019 is 5G. It mostly refers to the next-generation wireless data network that will eventually handle the internet needs of our mobile devices and even our home networks at some point in the future. To listen to many of the CES presentations, you’d think 5G is right around the corner, but the truth is that the technology is extremely limited right now. There are very localized tests going on in a few cities, but nationwide rollout won’t happen until 2020. Even once the network falls into place, we’ll still need that can take advantage of it, which we’ll probably hear about more during Mobile World Congress at the end of February.[br]8K[br][br]TVs are always one CES’s biggest draws and this year’s theme is 8K. The name refers to a TV’s overall resolution. To be precise, 8K TVs and monitors have a resolution of 7,680 x 4,230 pixels. It’s the next step up from 4K, which is the most common ultra-HD resolution on the market at the moment. Right now, 8K TVs are mostly overkill because there’s almost zero content that supports the full high-resolution picture. Many high-end TVs like Sony’s new flagship TV do a fine job of upscaling 4K content, but 8K won’t be essential tech in 2019.[br][br]Artificial Intelligence (AI)[br][br]There are few buzzwords as broad as artificial intelligence. Products here at CES us “AI” to do everything from cook a chicken to drive a car down a crowded street. The truth is that can mean a wide variety of things. The common denominator is that computer algorithms are making some decisions within the product, likely using machine learning to be better at whatever it is they do.[br][br][br][br] |
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