CES 2026 travel-tech report: notes on taking notes

I gambled heavily at CES 2026 in a way that could have blown up disastrously but did not. By which I mean, choosing the year’s busiest workweek to put a new note-taking app into intense service didn’t leave me struggling to reclaim lost input or untangle duplicate records.

(I also got in a little gambling of the blackjack sort; that worked out okay too.)

Evernote’s new management choosing to impose a 92 percent rate increase pushed me to migrate most of my existing 15 years’ worth of notes to Obsidian before my Evernote subscription would renew at that jacked-up $249.99/year rate Jan. 2. And then Evernote’s customer-retention offer of a year of service at the old rate came after I’d gotten over the worst of the migration, so I boarded my flight from Dulles Sunday morning with a new set of note apps on my phone and laptop.

Obsidian’s $48/year, end-to-end encrypted synchronization service didn’t allow the luxury of seeing keystrokes or onscreen-keyboard taps on one device show up on the other device’s screen almost instantly as Evernote had in recent months. But it proved reliable enough even over the iffy bandwidth at CES, with a couple of cases of the service flashing a “merging changes automatically” notice when the automatic sync lagged my device-to-device switches. I didn’t notice more than a few characters lost in the bargain.

I was less happy with some weird onscreen-keyboard misbehavior that delayed my work for a minute or less each time.

I turned to an extra app, Google’s Pixel-only on-device transcription of recorded audio, for two longer conversations that I needed to capture at length before writing them up. That more private AI service did not seem as accurate as Evernote’s cloud-based AI transcription; it looks like I’ll need a start-to-finish playback of the original recording to check the results.

The hardware I brought to Vegas, meanwhile, remained unchanged from last year’s except for my buying a smaller, faster-charging USB-C power adapter last spring. The HP Spectre x360 laptop that I’d purchased in 2023 showed its age in the form of a shorter battery life compared to last year; I don’t expect to take it to CES 2027. My much newer Pixel 9 Pro, meanwhile, continued to serve as a terrific phone for photography and for standing-up notetaking.

I wish I could be as complimentary about the T-Mobile service on my phone, but I saw my phone struggle for connectivity often enough (especially in the bandwidth hellscape that is much of the Venetian Expo) that I wished I’d repeated my earlier Wirecutter-review trick of bringing some new loaner WiFi hotspots to CES.

And then there was the time Sunday night when everything seemed to conspire against me: The crowds at a goat rodeo of a Samsung keynote seemed to crumple T-Mobile’s network, I saw no event WiFi advertised, and even my phone somehow charged at its slowest possible rate off that charger. CES regularly serves up moments like that; getting past them does make the rest of the year’s events seem easier.

#ces #consumerElectronicsShow #Evernote #HPSpectreX360 #LasVegas #noteTaking #Obsidian #Pixel9Pro #TMobile #Vegas

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

One part of my laptop is now newer than the rest of it, which should mean I don’t have to spend quite as much time with two other parts of the computer. But should I feel that good about having to send a second computer from the same vendor back to the shop?

I spent a long time pretending that I wouldn’t need this level of tech support for the HP Spectre x360 I bought last August to replace a 2017-vintage Spectre x360 that had succumbed to an apparently fatal display failure after needing its own repair under warranty.

At first, the fingerprint sensor on this 2022 model only stopped working occasionally, and I could always fix it by opening Device Manager, deleting the sensor’s entry, and then telling this app to scan for “new” hardware. But that kind of Windows 95 workaround is no way to go through computing life in 2024, and it got increasingly annoying as the sensor failed increasingly often.

This laptop includes a Windows Hello-compatible camera that can recognize my face, but I found that a poor substitute for an unavailable fingerprint sensor. The camera would often take its own sweet time to wake up and identify me–especially irritating when I was trying to unlock 1Password to log into a site–leading me to resort to the keyboard to type in the laptop-specific passcode instead.

Two things led me to drop a pattern of denial that had persisted through multiple Windows reinstalls: the impending end of my warranty coverage and having two weeks at home in which I wouldn’t need the laptop. So as I had in 2018, I opened a chat window to HP tech support and was able to make my case without having to perform yet another reinstall of Windows–because the fingerprint sensor was kind enough to fail during the chat.

The rep’s response: “Looks like this could be a hardware issue.”

HP worked impressively fast, dispatching a box to my house via FedEx two-day air in a day. After I wiped my data from the laptop, packed it up and dropped it off in the box at a FedEx shipping facility on a Tuesday evening, I got a confirmation from HP Thursday afternoon that the laptop had arrived.

Wednesday night’s e-mail from HP: “Your HP product has been repaired and is now on its way.”

It would have arrived Saturday, but of course I was no at home for that signature-required delivery. Instead, I got to unpack the returned laptop Monday morning. The receipt in the box listed “Replaced Parts” as “Finger Print Reader” and “Repair Actions” as “Replaced Part” and “Performed Extensive Testing.” 

So far, everything seems fine with the restored laptop–as in, I hope it doesn’t go sideways once I’m on the other side of the Atlantic for the IFA tech trade show in Berlin next week. But two good customer-support saves can’t override the problem of my needing customer support in the first place.

Fortunately, I shoudn’t have to make that value judgment anytime soon. Nor do I want to: The most interesting development in Windows computing, Qualcomm delivering Snapdragon X efficiency-optimized processors that can compete with Apple’s M-series Apple Silicon processors, has yet to yield convertible laptops with screens like those on my last two HPs that I can rotate all the way around to turn the computer into a somewhat hefty tablet.

Among the current selection of Snapdragon X machines, Microsoft’s Surface Pro offers some of that two-in-one utility with a detachable screen that you can prop up with a kickstand. But that stand slides off your lap far too easily–a design I’ve found unappealing since first trying a Surface computer 12 years ago.

(Apple, meanwhile, still doesn’t think people need any such thing. Or even a touchscreen in a laptop.)

Bring me a Snapdragon X laptop with a 360-degree screen that also lets me fold the device into a tent shape that eases economy-class movie viewing, and I’ll be ready to buy. Except if this machine comes from HP, in which case I’ll have to think about that for a little longer.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/08/30/a-touchy-situation-with-an-hp-laptop-hopefully-resolved/

#1Password #2In1Laptop #ARM #biometric #fingerprintSensor #HewlettPackard #HPFingerprintSensor #HPSpectreX360 #HPTechSupport #HPWarranty #laptopSecurity #passwordManager #QualcommSnapdragonXElite #WindowsHello

My home office always needs cleaning, but there’s one part of it that stays especially resistant to tidying up–the small collection of old and inoperative hardware that might have my data in a condition that might be accessible.

I think of these probably-defunct devices as my own rough equivalent of nuclear waste, but instead of radioactive isotopes they may hold old personal data that I don’t want to see leak out. That’s “may” because unlike spent reactor fuel that we know has to be kept safe, these gadgets no longer function to a degree that would let me confirm that I’d wiped my traces from them or finish that device-reset work.

The most obvious, meaning dustiest, example is the Pixel 1 I’d retired five years ago. I was all set to ship it back to Google for a trade-in offer of $25 when I bought my Pixel 5a at the end of 2021–but then I realized that it no longer charged, which zeroed out the return value.

I couldn’t remember if I’d done the right thing in 2019 and factory-reset the Pixel then. Android’s storage encryption should have meant nothing could be read off the phone anway, even if somebody could breathe electric life back into the thing–but at the end of a busy year it seemed easier to set the old phone aside and figure things out later. And “aside” is where that Pixel remains.

A year later, the HP laptop that I’d bought in late 2017 suffered an apparently fatal display malfunction that meant I could not expect to operate the thing for more than a few minutes after booting it up. That left a drive’s worth of data unprotected–for whatever stupid reason, this computer did not support Windows device encryption.

This output meltdown also left this HP unwipeable, in the sense that I couldn’t use the computer for long enough to install and run the open-source VeraCrypt disk-encryption utility. So once again, the easiest move was to set the device aside on my desk.

Thursday morning added a third device to this sad list: the Pixel 5a that apparently wasn’t aging as well as I’d thought. When I tried checking my notifications on that phone after waking up (I know, not a strong choice), it had mysteriously stopped responding to fingerprint unlocking, taps of its buttons or its screen, or any of the other troubleshooting steps outlined in a Google tech-support note.

This phone unquestionably has my information on it, but is that data in a Schrödinger-esque state of uncertainty? Or is it gone by virtue of the device’s circuitry suffering the kind of catastrophic failure that would make it so unresponsive?

As I scrapped Thursday-night plans to work this problem, I thought that I might as well take another look at the laptop that had been gathering dust on my desk for the last two years.

And after one screen freeze, that seven-year-old HP somehow booted up and kept working long enough for me to install VeraCrypt and encrypt the disk with a complex passphrase generated by 1Password. That makes the entire PC unbootable and unreadable for somebody who doesn’t have that login.

Then the old laptop obliged me further by letting me add a local account and delete my own account. Perhaps I should push my luck further by reformatting the drive and then reinstalling Windows.

Or I could declare victory and take this device to the nearest Apple Store for proper recycling… but procrastination has its own half-life, so I doubt I’ll get that errand done right away.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/08/02/a-gadget-writers-minor-equivalent-of-nuclear-waste/

#deviceEncryption #encryption #eraseDevice #factoryReset #halfLife #HPSpectreX360 #Pixel1 #Pixel5a #resetDevice #Schrödinger #secureDelete #VeraCrypt #wipeDevice

HP Spectre x360 premium thin and light laptops now available with Intel Meteor Lake and 9MP webcams

The HP Spectre x360 line of premium thin and light convertible laptops are getting a few significant upgrades this year.
The new HP Spectre x360 14 has a 2.8K OLED display, support for up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, and a 9MP webcam with support for Windows Studio Effects, among other things, while the upgraded HP Spectre x360 16 is […]

https://liliputing.com/?p=164986

#ces2024 #convertible #hp #hpSpectreX360 #hpSpectreX36014 #hpSpectreX36016 #laptop #meteorLake #webcam