ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEW PRODUCTS MUST-SEE SMART HOME The robots of CES 2018: Cuteness reigns supreme But we also saw the foundation for substantial innovation.

BY ANDREW GEBHART JANUARY 12, 2018 11:45 AM PST

Tyler Lizenby/CNET At first, I was annoyed with all of the buzz generated by Sony's Aibo. I dismissed Aibo as just a robot dog, and worse, a robot dog we've seen before -- Sony's original robot pet went on sale in 1999. But as cute dogs tend to do, Aibo eventually won me over. Sony's revamped dog packs a lot of cool tech into an undeniably adorable body.

Aibo uses more than 4,000 parts to act lifelike. It has a camera on its nose to identify family members and another near its tail to help it map your home. You can pet it on the head, back, and under its chin and it'll respond affectionately, and all those parts also allow it to move fluidly with the energy of a puppy.

Nevertheless, I was annoyed by Aibo because it's a toy first and foremost, and at CES 2018, we saw robots that can be so much more than that. Some of the robots are ready for consumers now, or will be in the near future. Others are still a long way off. Some were concepts that'll never be consumer products -- they're meant simply to test the boundaries of what's possible. Here are the highlights of the robots we saw, and what they can do.

206-lg-press-conference-ces-2018 15 Meet the robots of CES 2018 Movement and mapping

Speaking of cute robots, last year at CES we were charmed by Kuri -- a roaming nanny that looks like a Pixar character. Kuri was here this year too -- it actually started shipping in limited quantities in late December. (It can actually map your home in its memory, so it knows where different rooms are. It can use that information to patrol on its wheels, and Kuri's able to move pretty fluidly. By learning the actual layout of your home, Kuri can be a much more effective security bot than a stationary smart home cam.

However, Kuri obviously can't go up and down stairs. A truly autonomous robot that could actually traverse your whole home would need legs. We saw two such robots at CES.

Watch this: Robots of all shapes, sizes and abilities at CES 1:58 Sophia, meanwhile, is never going to be a consumer ready robot, but it's the closest bot I've ever seen to actually resembling a human. Sophia has skin made out of a material called "frubber." She's just under 6 feet tall, and she can walk. Sophia's pretty slow, as her new legs can only move her at 0.6 mile per hour right now.

Hanson Robotics, the company behind Sophia, hopes she'll eventually be useful in medical therapy and factories. Functioning robot legs could obviously have huge implications for an automated home assistant too.

Walker, from Ubtech, will actually be a consumer product and also has legs. Unveiled just days ago at CES, Walker can already dance and follow objects like a soccer ball. More importantly, it can traverse stairs. Ubtech's even planning to add arms to the bot by the time it launches, and it can respond to voice commands or touch on its torso. Walker isn't as quick as Kuri, but it can go places Kuri can't.

Watch this: Ubtech bipedal robot tackles stairs, soccer at CES 2018 2:07 Entertaining and helping around the house

While a walking security bot could be an extremely useful addition to a smart home, I'd prefer one that can also help with the chores. Aeolus is that robot.

With hands capable of gripping objects, Aeolus can get you a can of beer from the fridge. Like Kuri, it has wheels and can map your home. The cameras above its LED eyes can also learn faces, objects, and can associate locations with objects. That's what would allow the bot to go to the fridge and get you a beer.

aeolus-robot-product-photos-1 Aeolus can hand you objects and remember where they go. Tyler Lizenby/CNET That tech should also allow Aeolus to pick up your house. It can remember where objects go, so if it finds a toy out of place, it can pick it up and put it back. Because it can grip objects and navigate a floor, Aeolus can also mop and vacuum.

The big bot is still very much a prototype and it's not nearly as cute or consumer ready as Kuri. It's also huge and utilitarian, so it could intimidate your kids instead of charming them. It'll also be prohibitively expensive when it does launch. Still, Aeolus will theoretically be a consumer ready product, and I'm excited just by the concept of an all-encompassing helper robot.

Watch this: Aeolus is everything you want in a smart home robot 1:41 While Aeolus is likely a long way off, Keecker is here now. First shown at CES in 2014, Keecker is one of the few robots we saw that you can actually buy right now. Keecker officially launched as a completed product this year, and we got to see it in action on the show floor. Keecker maps your home like Kuri and can help with home security thanks to a 360 degree camera on top of its domed head.

Beyond what Kuri can do, Keecker has a unique twist that should make it a welcome addition to any home looking for more entertainment options. Keecker has a built-in projector and works with Google's Android TV streaming platform. Keecker responds to voice commands, so you can simply say "Keecker, go to the living room and play Netflix on the ceiling." Keecker will remember where the living room is, then it'll point up and start playing.

buddy-blue-frog-robotics-3816-001 Buddy's another friendly bot that can both dance and secure your home. Josh Miller/CNET Keecker has built-in speakers and can dance too, so it could be an awesome option if you want a robot that can essentially bring a big screen TV with it to any room of your house.

Listening and getting to know you

An ideal smart home bot needs to know your face and your voice pretty well. As far as the latter, Google and Amazon are making headway with their respective digital assistants. Both Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa can recognize your voice and customize commands accordingly. Both assistants can be fooled, but they're taking steps in the right direction.

showstoppers-2018-5 The smart display knows when you're angry. Chris Monroe/CNET At CES, we saw a robot that goes a step beyond what Amazon and Google offer as far as recognition. Titan AI recognizes your face, your voice and can even discern your mood. Titan combines a smart speaker with a touchscreen like the Amazon Echo Show, and it'll make music and movie recommendations based on how you're feeling. We couldn't test out this particular feature at CES, but the idea is cool.

The LG Hub Robot takes a different approach to helping you with artificial intelligence -- instead of getting to know you, LG's assistant named CLOi will know your appliances. The CLOi Hub Robot has big glowing eyes and will keep track of what's in your fridge to help you decide what to eat. Pick a recipe, and CLOi can start preheating your oven. (Alas, it suffered a demo fail on stage during LG's press conference.)

The concepts of more to come

LG's CLOi wasn't just integrated into the Hub Robot. CLOi is also LG's brand encompassing a whole new line of robots. LG showed off three robot concepts at CES. The Serving Robot brings you food and drinks. The Porter will handle your luggage. The Shopping Cart will scan and carry items for you in grocery stores.

3e-a18-empathy-5 20 Honda 3E robotics concepts empower, experience and empathize Honda also showed off concept robots with promising ideas. All debuted under the name "3E Concept" at CES 2018, Honda's bots include a rugged vehicle designed to carry equipment around construction sites, a huggable robot with a face meant to provide emotional support, a serving robot that learns what you need and a robotic wheelchair meant to help the disabled navigate tricky terrain.

Both LG's and Honda's robots sound very useful, but none are slated for production yet. The skills could all be important in helping robots advance beyond being novelties. Ideally, we'll soon see robots that combine a lot of these skills. Single function robots such as robot vacuums are already pretty common.

A company called Misty Robotics is working on exponentially expanding what one robot can do. It has made a bot called "Misty I" specifically designed for programmers. This robotics company is taking the long view, and isn't planning on having a consumer ready product for 10 years -- an eternity in the tech industry. In the meantime, it hopes a community of programmers will work with the Misty bot to program functions and capabilities we haven't thought of yet.

Misty's long-term gamble could pay off if we don't see an all encompassing smart home robot come to fruition in the next 10 years, but I think we're getting close. The signs were all over CES 2018.

Sony Aibo Robot Dog 14 Sony Aibo Robot Dog Of course, in order to make these products viable, designers will need to make them approachable, or even cute, so that people will want to invite these helpers into their homes. Aibo might be onto something important after all. At the very least, it deserves to be counted among the rest of the robots of CES 2018 that are taking meaningful steps toward the future.

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Next Article: Uber has a tip limit? That's news to drivers

EXCLUSIVE TECH INDUSTRY Uber has a tip limit? That's news to drivers If you want to leave a generous tip for your Uber driver, you may have to use cash because the ride-hailing app has a ceiling. Lyft has tipping limits, too.

BY DARA KERR FEBRUARY 2, 2018 5:00 AM PST

uber-tips-9872 Passengers and drivers won't discover Uber's tip limit until they run up against it. James Martin/CNET Denise can't exactly remember the number of stops she made driving an Uber passenger who needed to run a bunch of errands -- fast.

"He needed to go from A to B, then B to C, then C back to A again," says Denise, who doesn't want to use her last name. "He told me, 'Oh my God, I'm so glad you're doing this. You're making my day so much easier.'"

She drove him around Los Angeles for more than 90 minutes, yet traveled only 35 miles or so in that time. And since Uber primarily uses mileage to calculate its fares, the ride didn't cost much. The grateful passenger said he wanted to give her a big tip: $20.

He tapped the tip into the app -- and paused, "You gotta be kidding me," he told her. "It's saying it's over the limit."

Uber's app refused to let Denise's passenger tip $20 (or more), and he didn't have any cash on him. He ended up giving her the most the app would allow: $14.80.

Denise has been a full-time Uber driver for six years and never saw a tip limit before. But then, it's only been possible to tip Uber drivers from the app for the past six months.

Watch this: Uber limits how much you can tip drivers 1:56 Drivers had asked the company for years to include tipping, but Uber insisted passengers appreciated the convenience of a tip-free ride. Finally, after months of scandals, executive shakeups and strained driver relations, Uber launched in-app tipping in June.

"You told us what you want and it's time we step up and give you the driving experience you deserve," the company wrote on its website at the time. "Because simply put, Uber wouldn't exist without you,"

Generosity should be something that you have no limit on. Denise, Uber driver It was a move meant to showcase a new Uber, an Uber that appreciates its drivers. But the company didn't say anything about a ceiling for those tips. For some, the omission is a sign that Uber still doesn't "get" drivers. Others see it as classic tone deafness in a company that's working to move beyond lip service. No matter how you look at it, though, it's clear Uber needs to address this issue, which could push drivers to defect.

Uber limits

A glance through driver forums, blogs and social media groups shows that the tip limit has caught many Uber drivers by surprise. Dozens of drivers posted stories similar to Denise's, asking what gives.

"I figured it was just an early-on glitch. It seemed like a bunch of drivers kept emailing us about this," says Harry Campbell, who drives for both Uber and Lyft and runs the popular Rideshare Guy blog. "They never said anything about there being a limit."

Uber confirmed to CNET it does have a limit to safeguard against "fat fingers." You know the problem: You want to tip $10 but accidently type $100 or $1,000. This way, you won't have to go through the pain and hassle of getting your money back.

Uber's tipping limit is "200 percent of the total, up to $100," a company spokesman says. That lets a passenger, say, tip $50 on a $25 fare. "Of course, riders are free to tip additional amounts in cash if they'd like."

uber-tip-limit Uber's limit for tips is 200 percent of the fare or $100. This ride's fare was $13.40 -- the tip maxed out at $26.80. Dara Kerr/CNET Campbell thinks other reasons may have factored into the tip limit, such as avoiding scams and the 3 percent fee Uber pays credit card companies. Uber declined to confirm this.

The ride-hailing service, founded in 2009, has experienced issues with scams in the past. For example, there have been instances when riders and drivers arrange fake trips, so that Uber pays the driver but the passenger has no intention of handing over the fare.

As for the incident with Denise, Uber says it shouldn't have happened. The $20 tip was well below that ride's 200 percent limit. The company says passengers and drivers should contact customer support if they run into that problem.

Tipping can be tricky

Lyft has offered in-app tipping for more than five years, but limits gratuities to $50 or 200 percent of the cost of the ride, whichever is lower. Like Uber, it says it aims to protect riders from fat-finger typos.

But even with that $50 limit, many drivers say they make better tips with Lyft than with Uber. Driver Will Preston even did some data crunching on hundreds of past rides and wrote a blog post for the Rideshare Guy about his findings in November. Turns out he made double the tips with Lyft.

One reason may be how each app is designed. With Lyft, the app displays a picture of your driver when you reach your destination and presents the option to tip. After that, you'll be taken to another screen where you can rate your driver.

Uber's app works a little differently.

Until a couple of months ago, tipping a driver involved reopening the app once you got out of the car and clicking on the question, "How was your trip?" You'd see the option to tip only after you rated your driver.

In other words, it was kind of a pain.

In November, Uber modified its app, which the company says accounts for 15 million rides worldwide per day. Now it says it sends riders a reminder to rate their drivers when they leave the car. But customers still have to go through that rating process before they see the tip option.

THE NEW WORLD OF BEING A RIDE-HAIL DRIVER Uber tries to 'rebuild the love' with drivers. Can it work? Uber creates advisory forum to get drivers' lowdown Lyft ups its driver game, adds 24/7 phone support "Less than one-eighth of the customers ever rate a driver, and then never see the tipping option as it is hidden beneath the rating system that they rarely use," James Worley, a Los Angeles-based driver says. "They added it, sure, but do they really want the drivers to have it better or not?"

Uber's new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says everyone should give big tips -- so they can get good ratings from drivers. "I am a very aggressive tipper right now. I pick the highest tip every time," Khosrowshahi told an audience at the World Economic Forum last week. "Everybody, tip aggressively."

But with a limit, that's not always possible.

"I don't think about it too often, because, you know, my blood pressure," Denise says. "Generosity should be something that you have no limit on."

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Next Article: Apple iPhone sales miss, but profit still breaks record anyway

PHONES Apple iPhone sales miss, but profit breaks record anyway The earnings report answers a lot but doesn't settle the question about how the iPhone X is selling.

BY ROGER CHENG FEBRUARY 1, 2018 2:55 AM PST

iphone-x-iphone-8-plus The iPhone X and the iPhone 8 were the big drivers of Apple's holiday season. Óscar Gutiérrez/CNET Just how well the iPhone X performed remains a mystery. Still, one thing's for sure: Apple sold boatloads of iPhones but not quite enough.

The Cupertino, Calif., consumer electronics giant said Thursday that it sold 77.3 million iPhones, down 1 percent from a year ago. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi had pegged the company to sell around 79 million iPhones in the period.

While Apple doesn't break out the sales figures for specific iPhone models (which include the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and older units), the decrease should do little to quell the chatter about whether the iPhone X was a flop during the holiday season. The expectation was for the iPhone X to be a hard-to-find item after it launched in November, but many customers were able to easily get one after the first few weeks, suggesting demand wasn't as strong as expected.

Watch this: Apple iPhone sales drop slightly 1:57 Then there's the talk that iPhone X sales have dropped even further in the new year, with several reports pointing to Apple halving the production run of the phone to 20 million units. On Monday, Sacconaghi cut his estimate for iPhone sales in the current quarter to 53 million from 66 million.

The pricier iPhone lineup still drove the company to post all-time records in quarterly profit and revenue. And CEO Tim Cook says the iPhone X remains the top seller. And the average selling price was higher than expected at $796 -- suggesting a higher mix of iPhone X sales.

"iPhone X surpassed our expectations and has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in November," he said in a press release.

A rough holiday

Apple ended 2017 in unusual fashion.

There was, of course, the split timing of the release of its new iPhones, with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus debuting on Sept. 22 and the iPhone X launching on Nov. 3. Apple also pushed the iPhone X's starting price to $999 -- unchartered territory for a super-premium phone.

Watch this: Apple may have slashed iPhone X production in half 1:16 In December, Apple admitted it issued a software update that allowed the company to slow down older iPhones to better deal with aging batteries and cold conditions. That sparked a huge consumer backlash, causing Apple to cut the price of its battery replacement service by $50, to $29. The US Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice are investigating how the company disclosed the information. Apple said it's responding to the government inquiries.

The bad publicity and the fact that consumers could swap out the battery on their existing iPhone on the cheap may have had a negative effect on iPhone demand.

Cook, however, said he didn't know what the impact of the lower battery replacement cost would be.

"We did not consider in any shape or form what it would do to the upgrade rate," he said on a call with analysts. "We did it because we thought it was the right thing for the customer."

The unit sales decline suggests Apple could have potentially lost market share in phones in the period, according to Moor Insights analyst Patrick Moorhead.

Bottom line

The move to the more expensive iPhone did help its revenue. The company's iPhone unit generated $61.58 billion in revenue, up 13 percent from a year ago.

The company's iPad sales also saw continued improvement, with its 13.2 million units shipped up 1 percent amid a 6 percent increase in revenue. The company is seeing a flicker of life come back to the tablet business, largely for education and business use. While the iPad was wildly popular a few years ago, consumers feel less of a need to upgrade to a new version, preferring to spend their money on other gadgets -- like a new phone.

Apple said there are 1.3 billion active installed devices out there, an increase of 30 percent in 2 years.

Its second most important contributor to revenue was its services business, which includes Apple Music and its App Store. It generated $8.47 billion in revenue, up 18 percent from a year ago.

Apple noted that the previous year's fiscal first quarter lasted 14 weeks, while this past fiscal first quarter was 13 weeks, affecting the comparison between periods.

Apple's net income rose to $20.07 billion, or $3.89 a share, from $17.9 billion, or $3.36 a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose to $88.29 billion from $78.35 billion.

Analysts had expected earnings of $3.86 a share and revenue of $87.28 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.

Looking ahead, Apple expects revenue to be between $60 billion and $62 billion in the fiscal second quarter, lower than the $65.7 billion analysts expected.

Apple shares rose 3.3 percent to $173.35 in after-hours trading.

Originally published at 4:35 p.m. PT.

Update, 2:55 p.m. PT: Includes executive and analyst comments and additional background.

The Smartest Stuff: Innovators are thinking up new ways to make you, and the things around you, smarter.

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Next Article: Google's sales boom even after culture backlash

CES 2018: The coolest gadgets we've seen

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