We've all got one: A large bowl that sits in the kitchen or the hall or
the dining room where you put all the junk you don't have any other
place for: keys, mail, rubber bands, matches, batteries, take-out menus,
whatever.
At CES, the big tech conference in Las Vegas, Intel unveiled a "smart
bowl" that could change all that forever. It's a wireless charging
bowl: You dump your phone, iPod, earpiece, Fitbit or any other gadget
that needs a charge into it and — boom! — pick it out a while later and
it's fully charged.
No more wires. No more jacks. No more plugs and sockets.
Your gadgets go into the bowl (probably with a bunch of other non-tech junk too) and voila! They're charged.
The irony of the announcement is that Intel CEO Brian Krzanich
unveiled a bunch of new, potentially game-changing initiatives at his
keynote last night: a PC the size of a golf ball called Edison and an end to the use of "conflict minerals" from African war zones in its products, among them.
But
as people left the gargantuan Venetian ballroom where he gave his
speech, and as Business Insider chatted with other people at CES who had
been at the event, it was clear that the bowl was the thing that really
caught everyone's imagination.
Basically, we're all saying the same thing: I've got a bowl full of
junk in my house, and I would totally use a smart bowl if it charged my
stuff while it was in there.
There's something else going on here too. While Intel's announcements
were impressive, they weren't perfect. Some of them had a somewhat
sinister surveillance bent to them. Intel has a smart watch coming that
allows an app user to track its wearer — like a parent tracking their
kids — for instance.
Separately, although Intel's other new devices seemed useful (like the Jarvis earpiece that can handle a conversation
and manage your phone even when it's not switched on) the design wasn't
great. Jarvis looks like a hearing aid, not something you'd actually
wear by choice.
The smart bowl, however, was sleekly designed, simple and useful.
Everyone seems to want one. Intel, however gave few details about it. You can read Krzanich's speech here, to see exactly what he said about it. And there are some technical specs here. But as far as we can tell, right now, it's simply a prototype and not a product.
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