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Ballmer to Reveal Microsoft/HP Slate Device During Keynote Speech

microsoft-hp-tabletAccording to The New York Times, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer will introduce a tablet-like device—dare we say ‘slate’—during his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas tomorrow.  The rumored hardware will supposedly be made by HP and is expected to be available for sale by mid 2010. Spokespeople from Microsoft and H.P. declined to comment on the product or the content of Mr. Ballmer’s speech.

There have been rumors and even mock photos of a Microsoft/HP tablet prototype device circulating for the past few months. Last September Gizmodo reported on a Microsoft mockup tablet (yep, that one in the picture), but like most non-Apple tablet stories of that time everyone shrugged it off and continued searching for iSlate news.

The New York Times reported that unnamed sources said that Mr. Ballmer will “show the as yet unnamed H.P. device” and the product will be a multi-media whiz with e-reader and multi-touch functions. We hope this big-name tablet rumor is true—if it’s not then we give up, and we’ll take a break from reporting on fictional tablets.

Dena Cassella
Former Digital Trends Contributor
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There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

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Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

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CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
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Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

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