Vizio at CES 2013: Tegra 4 tablets, Android smartphones, 4K TVs, and Windows 8 PCs

Almost exactly a year ago, upon these parched steppes of Nevada we know as Las Vegas, Vizio told us it was keen to get into the 4K TV market, but the timing wasn't quite right yet. Vizio asked for a year's worth of patience and, atypically for an electronics company, it's back at CES with the delivery of its 4K promise.

As part of its refreshed 2013 HDTV lineup, Vizio has announced that it's joining the 4K market with three new sets. The XVT series of "Ultra HDTV" screens will on display at CES this week and will be available in 55-, 65-, and 70-inch sizes. The sets all feature LED technology, 3D, and a refresh rate of 240Hz, but unfortunately there aren't any details on when these sets will be available or how much they'll cost when they launch. That said, we're imagining Vizio will try and push the price point down from where most 4K TVs are right now — the company says its planning to bring this "expensive new technology to mainstream consumers." Hopefully by the time these sets debut, there will actually be a little bit of 4K content out there to take advantage of all those pixels. We'll be checking these sets out on the CES show floor to see how they stack up to the 4K competition.

When Vizio first announced its lineup of PCs last Spring, we wondered why touch support was missing. Windows 8 was already a known quantity, and touch was clearly the future — what was Vizio waiting for? With the 2013 models of its laptops, announced today at CES in Las Vegas, Vizio's decided that the time for touch has come. The 14-inch Thin + Light, 15.6-inch Thin + Light, and 24-inch all-in-one were all upgraded today with new internals and a few new features, though the only really notable change as we used the new machines is the addition of a ten-point touchscreen. The touchscreens worked well on every machine we tested, with excellent response both to taps and to Windows 8's edge gestures.

A few other things have changed since the PCs hit the market to a somewhat tepid response — Vizio scrapped its trackpad and started over with a new manufacturer, and it's been refining the keyboard over the last several months as well — but touch is the big change. The trackpad is definitely improved over previous models, but it's still not as good as we'd like, and the keyboard didn't strike us as much of a change at all. We like the overall look of the machines, and are glad to see Vizio not changing it, but there are some serious flaws we'd like to see ironed out a lot faster.

Vizio's only been a PC manufacturer for a few months, and it's already diversifying its product lines. Today we got our first look at the new 11.6-inch Tablet with Windows 8 — now the smallest member of Vizio's PC lineup — and it's a bit of an oddity. The most striking feature is its gorgeous 1920 x 1080 display, which looks even sharper than normal on the smaller device — it's a really good screen, but it creates some consequences. Intel's processors simply couldn't power such a dense, high-res screen, Vizio CTO Matt McRae told us, so the company used AMD chips instead. The Tablet is powered by a dual-core, 1GHz Z-60 processor, which based on our time with the device does a pretty good job powering Windows 8.

Like all of Vizio's Windows devices, the 11.6-inch Tablet runs a completely clean version of the operating system — it's called the Windows Signature installation, and it's one of the best things Vizio does. The slate comes with 64GB of solid-state storage, 2GB of RAM, Micro HDMI and mMicro USB ports, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. We weren't overwhelmingly impressed with the build quality; the lipped bezel around the display makes the device feel like two pieces were fused together rather than like a single unibody device. The whole thing is surprisingly heavy, too, but its metallic and industrial design is pretty handsome.

Two years ago, Vizio came to CES and announced the Vizio Phone, a skinned Android phone that quietly died at the hands of American carrier politics. Vizio moved on by designing and building a line of Windows PCs instead — and now that the PC line is humming along, the company is here at CES 2013 with two brand new phones... for the Chinese market.

That's Vizio's first expansion outside of North America, and while Vizio CTO Matt McRae won't come right out and say it's because of American carrier issues, he's not shy in saying that it's easier for his company to sell phones directly to Chinese consumers — unlike the carrier-dominated American market. And that's a shame, because the two phones here at CES 2013 are extremely intriguing: a high-end 5-inch 1080p device and a 4.7-inch 720p device with dual SIM slots. Both are running stock Android Jelly Bean, just like Vizio's new tablets; the 5-inch phone has an unspecified dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor with 2GB of RAM while the smaller phone has a 1.2GHz dual-core MediaTek chip with 1GB of RAM.

Vizio's 10-inch Android tablet might be one of the first Tegra 4 devices to be announced, but the California company also has a 7-inch tablet here at CES that's equally interesting: it's essentially a Nexus 7 in a package the size of a Kindle e-reader. That's a Tegra 3 processor, a 1280 x 800 IPS display, 16GB of storage, a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera, and stock Android Jelly Bean. The prototype was fairly quick to flip around the OS, and the display looked slightly better than the typically washed-out Nexus 7 display, although it's not laminated like the 10-inch tablet.

Vizio head of design Scott McManigal told me that most people use 7-inch devices for reading, so the company designed the device primarily to be held in portrait orientation with one hand. It sounds silly, but the reduction in size was quite dramatic compared to the Nexus 7 when I held the prototype — we don't have final specs because the design isn't final yet. McManigal told that jumbophones like the 6.1-inch Huawei that'll debut at CES don't worry him; he thinks small tablets need to be designed differently than phones regardless of the overall size similarity.

But the most noticeable feature of the new tablet? It's really, really light. The kind of light where we picked the tablet up and wondered immediately whether or not there was a battery inside, or anything for that matter. The rounded slate with the soft-touch back is fairly thin, too, and it adds up to a 10-inch tablet that feels considerably smaller than the iPad or a Nexus 10.

In addition to its new Windows 8 tablet PC, Vizio is announcing a refresh to its lineup laptops and all-in-one desktops for 2013 that focuses on new internals, but appears to leave the same questionable industrial design intact. As Engadget reports, the new 14- and 15-inch Thin + Light laptops offer either an Intel Core i7 processor or AMD's high-end A10 chip and feature touchscreens for full control over the clean Microsoft Signature Windows 8 installation. The larger 15-inch laptop will feature 1080p resolution, while the 14-inch will have to make do with a 1,600 x 900 display — still a great resolution for a computer of that size.

As for the desktops, the 24- and 27-inch models are now known as the All-in-One Touch, just as we saw in our recent review, but the 24-inch model will also now be available with AMD internals as well as Intel. As before, both models will include 1080p screens and Microsoft Signature Windows 8, but there aren't any other details on what's new on the hardware front yet.