Gorilla Glass 3 has been improved at the molecular level, incorporating a proprietary feature called Native Damage Resistance (NDR). According to Corning, NDR reduces the propagation of flaws, the appearance of scratches and does a better job of maintaining the overall retained strength of the glass. As a result, GG3 claims a three-fold improvement in scratch resistance, 40 percent reduction in the number of visible scratches and 50 percent boost in retained strength after the glass becomes flawed. None of this actually means your phone or tablet will survive a five-foot drop onto concrete, granted, but you'll at least feel more comfortable keeping your keys somewhere close by. The full press release can be found below.

Nvidia has just unveiled a new handheld gaming system called Project Shield. Project Shield is powered by the Tegra 4 processor and can play console-quality games while still providing a mobile experience. The processor is capable of pushing 4K resolution video over HDMI to external displays. It includes advanced sound processing that Nvidia says rivals Beats Audio-equipped laptops, and a 33Wh battery that provides five to ten hours of play time or 24 hours of HD video playback. It features a 5-inch, 720p Retinal multitouch display with 294ppi pixel density, and has a slot for micro-SD card expansion. The Shield runs Android — pure Android without a skin, as Nvidia insists — and includes Google's apps for Gmail and the Play Store.

IT SHOULD LOOK FAMILIAR TO ANYONE WHO HAS HELD AN XBOX 360 CONTROLLER

In addition to supporting all of the games available to Android devices and the games in the Tegra Zone, the Shield also has the ability to stream games from a home Windows PC equipped with a GeForce GTX 650 (or higher) graphics card to the handheld device over Wi-Fi, letting users access their library of PC games, including games in the Steam library, anywhere in their home. It access the games on the home PC and run them virtually on the Shield. In the future, Nvidia says that it will add support to stream content from the Shield to a television wirelessly, so you can watch video and play games on your TV display without being tethered by wires. Of course, with support for the standard Android platform, the Shield also has access to the hundreds of thousands of apps that are available in the Google Play Store.


Hardware-wise, the Shield has a clamshell design with a gaming controller attached below the device's display. The controller has dual control sticks, a D-pad, and multiple action buttons — it should look familiar to anyone who has held an Xbox 360 controller.

Unfortunately, Nvidia did not announce a price for Project Shield, but it says that it will be coming to the US and Canada in the second quarter of this year. Either way, it seems that things just got a bit more interesting for both the mobile gaming space and the Android gaming world.

There's something about 2013's Consumer Electronics Show that's different from every other iteration this decade. You might not realize it immediately, for it's marked by the absence rather than the arrival of a new technology, but it's there and we're all sensing it on a deep, subconscious level. And it feels good.

3D is gone.

You no longer need to pick up a pair of polarizing glasses on your way into a big company's press conference. There are no more 60-foot posters with people exploding out of flatscreen televisions. The super glitzy marketing videos now relate to the far more tangible benefits of higher resolutions, curved displays, and the beauty of OLED. The show floor space dedicated to three-dimensional imagery has been decimated, relegating a dubious technology to its proper position as a sideshow rather than a leading cause to upgrade your TV.

It's a weird and ironic dichotomy. On the one hand, 3D has become ubiquitous enough in televisions that people are unwittingly buying it when opting for a high-end new HDTV to fill their living room void — yet on the other, every big TV maker at CES has waved a clear white flag on trying to sell 3D TV as an important feature. Sony CEO Kaz Hirai spent more time during his keynote talking about professional-grade Sony cameras attracting M. Night Shyamalan over to digital recording than he did talking up 3D. In fact, I'm not sure he mentioned 3D once. Here are some quotes from our live blogs covering the big players' pre-CES events this year:

Samsung: "Surprisingly (and thankfully), nobody has handed out any 3D glasses."

Sony: "This is way better than that time Sony made us watch a 3D video of Taylor Swift playing live in front of us."

LG: "Now on to Cinema 3D TVs. 7 series and 21 total TVs for 2013."
That's it, a footnote tacked onto the end of LG's expansive TV portfolio refresh. Samsung mentioned 2D-to-3D conversion in passing, and admittedly Netflix is getting involved in a limited fashion with 3D streaming, but the technology that once defined CES is now basically an embarrassing vestige of overheated ambitions of the past.

The best way to summarize the demise of 3D TV as a technology that companies and consumers care about is by noting that even Qualcomm didn't bother to namedrop it. The chipmaker's utterly absurd CES keynote, which featured every bad pun, cliché, gimmick, and trope of the electronics industry, didn't feel the need to check off 3D.

As a technology, you're not dead when everybody hates and derides you. Neither will limited commercial sales kill off your chances. But indifference of the kind signalled by this year's CES is the truest symptom of a terminal trajectory.

The 3D TV won its tortured, protracted war — you can buy a 3D TV anywhere and at any time — and nobody could care less.