The Best New Gadgets of CES 2013

Just as there are tablets for work, there is now a tablet for play. Razer's Edge runs Windows 8, is powered not by a mobile processor, but Intel's Core i5 or i7, depending on the configuration you choose, and has a dedicated NVIDIA GPU. It's pretty much a mobile monster. You can opt for the gaming controller and a docking station to help you better play, and when you no longer want to game and need to do some work, you can use the optional keyboard dock which turns it into an Ultrabook. Simply put, it's one of the best Windows 8 tablets coming to market.

No, this is not some marketing gimmick dreamt up by Disney to promote the upcoming Star Wars film. The YotaPhone is a combination between a smartphone and an e-reader. We know what you're thinking: Can't all smartphones be e-readers? No. The YotaPhone literally has an E-Ink display on its back that mirrors anything on the real screen. The E-Ink display can run even when the battery dies, allowing you to store things on it like directions or messages that you may need throughout the day.

We thought a plant was the easiest pet to care for. We were wrong. One of the most interesting and innovative devices we came across at CES was the Parrot Flower Power, a Bluetooth-enabled device measures sunlight, humidity, and temperature and alerts you on your smartphone about what your planet needs.

Dish's Hopper made our Best Gadgets of the Year list because it offered massive space and allowed users to "hop" over commercials. Awesome. To up the ante, Dish partnered with Slingbox to create a new version of the box that lets people access content from their Hopper via their smartphone or tablets wherever there's an Internet connection. Hopefully it doesn't get sued for this one.

Is it safe to say that handheld gaming is no longer solely the domain of the Sony and Nintendo? With people doing as much-or more-gaming on their smartphones, the tide has surely changed. NVIDIA is pushing the trend further with its Project Shield: An Android powered gaming device that can run any Android game. It features a five-inch 720p display that folds down onto what looks like an XBox controller. When at home, you plug it into your TV via an HDMI cord and treat it like a full-on console. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are now on notice.

After Samsung sold millions of its Note tablet-slash-smartphones, we're sure a number of other companies are going to attempt to cash in on the newly created market. One of the first comes from Chinese manufacture Huawei. Its massive 6.1-inch Ascend is bigger than the Note and is more tablet than smartphone. Even more stunning than its display size is the size of its battery: 4050mAh, much larger than the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx's 3,3000mAh battery. The result is a device with a huge beautiful screen that can reportedly last for 48 hours. Sounds like a winner, no?

A number of companies are racing towards flexible displays, but Samsung seems to be the one that's going to first crack the nut. Not only did it preview a smartphone with a flexible display, it showed off an HDTV with curved OLED display. We don't know anything about the TV expect that it looked amazing in person, it's meant to give people in a room better viewing angles, and that it's around 50"-55" in size. Oh, and that we want one.

Since its founding, the House of Marley has delivered a great line of products made from sustainable materials. Usually this would mean they all sound like tin cans with strings attached, but thankfully that's not the case. The brand carries on tradition with the Bluetooth version of its Get Up Stand Up speaker. With two 4.5-inch sub woofers, and one-inch tweeters, it's able to crank out the same ground-shaking sound as its docked brethren.

Haier makes a bevy of products-you probably know it as the official HDTV of the NBA-but the coolest products we peeped in its booth were appliances. Yeah, you know we're getting old when we get excited about a washing machine and a blender. But, really, both were dope. Especially the blender which does away with cords and instead uses a power transmitter. Want to clean up your kitchen, this is the first step.

The problem with most iPad docks is that they position the tablet vertically. This is fine if all you're doing is playing music, but what if you wanted to watch a movie? The Belkin Thunderstorm solves that issue. Built in conjunction with Audifi, the device is more of a case than a dock. It may look discrete, but the sound it produces can fill a room with resonant audio from movies, music, or whatever else you're playing.

Parrot, the company best known for its AR. Drone, had a bit of a coming out party at CES, introducing a number of products that expand its wheelhouse past cool grown-up toys. The best? The Zik Bluetooth headphones. Elegantly designed from brushed aluminum and plush leather, the Zik's eschew buttons for touch sensors, and features active noise cancellation as well as a suite of apps the help customize the sound.

Vizio has been on a mission to take over the consumer electronics game. It started with TVs then, last year, moved on to laptops and desktops. Now it's arrived at the latest computing frontier: tablets. The company brought two to CES, both running an clean, unmolested version of Android 4.1: a seven-inch model and a 10-inch model. Guess which company it has in its crosshairs. Fast and extremely light, this will undoubtedly give other tablet manufactures a good sprint for their money.

We knew this day would come. We just didn't think it'd happen this soon. But here we are. We thought 64 GB was more than enough for a flash drive that could fit on your keychain; we were wrong. Kingston unveiled the HyperX Predator 3.0, a flash drive with one terabyte (or 1,000 GB) of storage. Crazy, right? Kingston hasn't announced pricing, but considering the 512 GB version will cost $1,750, we're sure it's not going to come cheap.

Has Sony finally created a smartphone that can compete with the big boys? We think so. The Xperia Z, with its five-inch 1080p display, is one of the best Android phones we've come across. Waterproof and dustproof, it's made from high-quality materials (glass adorns its back), and it's fast as hell thanks to the 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and 2GB of RAM. There's no word on when it's dropping or how much it'll cost, but this is already a candidate for smartphone of the year.

If you thought the Retina Display was something special, CES would have blown your mind. The buzzword this year was 4K-displays that have four times the resolution of 1080p. Meant for large TVs (50" and up), Panasonic said eff it and built a 20-inch tablet with a 4K screen. Its audacious and awesome and, yes, slightly unwieldy. But it's truly stunning. Panasonic says the Windows 8-powered tablet is meant for designers and architects, allowing them to replace their sketch pads with something digital and less wasteful. We say it's one of the coolest devices we've seen in a long time.

CES 2013 was packed full of various HDTV technologies. Everything from 4K to 8K was on display. But one of the coolest came from the former OEM manufacture Hisense: a completely transparent 3D display. It doesn't make sense until you see it in person, but that's exactly what it is. Why would any one want to buy a see-through 3D TV? Well, no one would. That's why Hisense expects the units to be sold to businesses and stores for product and advertisement displays. Still, we wouldn't mind having one in the crib.

The big story at CES this year was undoubtedly 4K television. Nearly every company touted large sets with resolutions four times that of traditional 1080p. The two standouts were Sony's and Panasonic's 56-inch OLED 4K displays, both of which are currently the largest of their kind in the world. No word on when these gorgeous displays will hit the market, but it won't be any time soon.

You know Otterbox as the company that produces those insanely protective smartphone cases that will guard your device from pretty much anything short of a bullet. It's still the same company, but now in addition to keeping your phone safe, it also wants to keep it powered up. The upcoming Defender Series features a 1450mAh battery that can effectively double the life of your iPhone. The best part, however, is the accompanying app that keeps an eye on your battery so the case doesn't overcharge, shortening its lifespan. Smart and safe.