CES 2025 travel-tech report: a new phone, a renewed laptop

No week in the year consistently has me work harder than the week I always spend at CES, and the devices I lean on so heavily at that giant technology gathering don’t have things any easier. So every January, I use this space to assess how the gadgets I brought to Las Vegas fared under this unforgiving use.

This year’s cast of characters led off with my newest and most-expensive-yet phone purchase, a Google Pixel 9 Pro. I had decided to treat myself a little after the unexpected demise of my Pixel 5a, with the 5x optical zoom on this model persuading me to up my phone budget a little more over the Pixel 9. A look at the 220 combined pictures and videos I took on this trip, many leaning on the reach of that telephoto lens, suggests that I prioritized correctly.

The 9 Pro’s battery life and rapid recharging also delivered on the core value of not making me anxious about when and for how long I would have to tether myself to an outlet.

My larger computer, the HP Spectre x360 I’d bought in August of 2023, performed vastly better than it had a year earlier because HP’s under-warranty replacement of its fingerprint sensor cured my worries about not being able to unlock it with a tap of a fingerprint. The laptop’s battery life was fine as well, even if I’d have more time away from an outlet with with a MacBook Air or a newer Windows laptop.

I took all my notes in Evernote as I have at events since 2010 or so. This app costs more than it did back then, but it’s also become far more reliable under its new ownership; I am okay with that value proposition. Meanwhile, this was my first CES where I could comfortably confine all of my real-time, short-form social output to Bluesky–and I am more than okay with choosing that decentralized platform over X’s polluted soup of promoted posts and the algorithmic vapidity of Threads.

I brought backup bandwidth in the form of some of the WiFi hotspots I’d just reviewed for Wirecutter, but on reflection I should have left them at home. The Inseego MiFi X PRO 5G UW loaned by Verizon provided consistently fast connectivity, but waiting more than a minute and a half for it to boot up irritated me every time; a Franklin A50 loaned by AT&T powered on faster but was still no competition for how quickly I could invoke the mobile-hotspot function on my Pixel 9 Pro.

Because CES is also where WiFi goes to die, a much smaller accessory proved more useful: the Monoprice USB-to-Ethernet adapter I’d purchased at the end of 2012, and which I turned to in CES press rooms that once again offered Ethernet cables in addition to wireless networks that sometimes balked at gracing my laptop with a working connection.

I appreciated having that wired fallback, as I have at previous trips to CES and other tech events where tech can fall down on me. But I should probably get a USB-C Ethernet adapter that I could plug into more than one port on my laptop before I inevitably pack my bags for CES 2026.

#batteryLife #ces #CESTravelTech #Ethernet #fastCharging #HPSpectreX360 #LasVegas #Pixel9Pro #Vegas #WiFi #WiFiHotspot

CES 2024 travel-tech report: a new laptop and an old phone

My messenger bag had less hardware than usual for a CES trip when I flew out Sunday morning–only one laptop and only one phone, plus their charging accessories, and no WiFi hotspots or any other review hardware to back up my own devices. In other words, I was gambling a little in Vegas.

The laptop, a 2022-model HP Spectre x360 that I purchased at about 30% off in August to replace the 2017 model that died at the end of 2021, made battery life one of my lesser worries at the show. I only recall it going into power-saving mode once, at the end of a long day that hadn’t allowed any recharging breaks.

But the HP’s fingerprint sensor became one of my bigger annoyances when it would mysteriously stop working. I’ve seen this happen before and know the fix (the old-school two step of deleting it in the Device Manager app and then having the app scan for hardware changes to restore it), but at CES this happened multiple times in a day because every tech problem gets worse at the show.

I assume that reinstalling Windows would fix this, but CES is also no time for complicated troubleshooting.
Fortunately, none was needed for the other glitch I saw: a confusing minute or two of this convertible laptop acting as if it had been folded up to use in tablet mode, ignoring physical keyboard input, that ended when I rebooted the machine.

The phone was the Google Pixel 5a I had brought to the two previous CESes. It’s aged extraordinarily well overall, thanks to Google software updates that have added such useful new features as Live Transcribe–a kind of magic for interviews and press conferences.

But two years and change is a lot of charge cycles for a smartphone’s battery–on top of which, I kept using the phone as a mobile hotspot to work around spotty or nonexistent WiFi. That left me worrying about recharging this more than the laptop. At least the 5a, like most new phones, also charges quickly, so 2024 battery anxiety isn’t like the 2014 kind.

I took all of my notes at the event in Evernote, having somewhat reluctantly renewed my subscription at the new, much higher rate. (I had thought of switching to Microsoft’s OneNote, but seeing Microsoft make it harder to switch by retiring its importer app did not make me want to fuss through moving over my notes via third-party tools.) Evernote’s new management seem to have fixed this app’s sync-conflict problems, which is great, but on the phone the app would struggle to load my increasingly long CES notes in lower-bandwidth situations.

Which came up often, between T-Mobile’s 5G network appearing over capacity in some places and various WiFi networks dropping my laptop or phone randomly. I was glad I’d brought my ancient USB-to-Ethernet adapter, which let my connect the laptop to a press-room cable instead of having to edit the saved press-room WiFi network setting to add the day’s password.

I tucked one other form of old-school hardware into my bag that I found useful at CES: business cards, a form of analog data exchange that’s stayed in style at this show even as networking at other tech events has been compressed to on-the-spot LinkedIn invitations.

#batteryLife #businessCards #ces #CES2024 #CESTravelTech #Ethernet #fastCharging #LasVegas #Pixel5a #SpectreX360 #TMobile5G #USBC #Vegas