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As the first matter of business, we first needed to calibrate our eye movements with the sensor, a process that took a couple minutes to push through before we were ready to have at it. The prototype laptop is running an early build of Windows 8, so we navigated around the Metro interface, played a couple games, switched back and forth between tabs, zoomed in and out of screens and plenty more.

Eye-tracking technology hasn’t been around for incredibly long, and it still has a ways to go. There were a few occasions — seen in the video below the break — in which we tried to hit a smaller button several times before finally finding success. Bugs aside, we got the hang of the interface pretty fast after a few minutes of getting accustomed to the concept of using our eyes as the cursor. That doesn’t mean we were completely used to it by the time we left the booth, but we could see how eye-tracking can come in handy at times.

But it wasn’t all Mission: Impossible as we’d secretly hoped. Contrary to our original expectations, we discovered that using the trackpad was still an integral and necessary part of the full experience; it wasn’t a “blink twice to click” type of interface. Tobii tells us that by still using the trackpad to click on the screen (minus dragging your finger around as the cursor), you still have a natural user experience, since you’re quickly able to use your fingers to scroll or click and override the movement of your eyes if absolutely necessary. We found it easy to switch back and forth between tabs and zoom in and out of pictures — heck, we even were able to play games on the laptop by using our eyes, though admittedly we performed rather lousy and lost every time since many games require a certain amount of precision. That’s obviously a situation that would call for the ability to override the eye-tracker and switch to manual mode, of course. All in all, we were very impressed to see how far the technology has come so far, and as Tobii is still in the early stages of implementing eye-tracking into the latest laptops — CES is the company’s first time showing it off in public, after all — we’re incredibly excited to see how it looks once it’s all polished up. We’ve got plenty of pictures and a video to show off, so continue below to take a look. See what we did there?

Xpal Power (owners of Energizer and PowerSkin) has leveraged its battery-tech know-how into the SpareOne, a cellphone that can maintain its charge for up to 15 years on just a single AA battery. It’s designed to be used for sponsorship, hotel use and (most importantly) emergencies, to throw into your trunk and forget about until you need to contact roadside assistance. Now at CES we’ve had a chance to get our mitts on the device to see what it’s like in the flesh plastic. If you’re just a little bit curious, why not join us for a short trip?

We took this device back to the Engadget trailer at CES and every single member of staff played with it, fascinated by the concept. It looks like your average cheap cellphone, except where the screen would sit is a transparent plastic void where a prominently branded battery sits instead. It’s surprisingly solid and well put-together, opening the battery compartment reveals a sizable capacitor — which is what we think is the real hero behind its purportedly long life. Because of the stripped down nature of the phone, we weren’t able to understand why it wasn’t initially making calls. The two flashing LEDs indicate battery life and signal strength, but that’s all the phone’s gonna let you know. Call quality was basic and loud (like a phone from a decade ago), which sounds harsh to our ears, which have been cosseted by years of noise-canceling microphones. The only thing we weren’t able to judge was its USP: the length of its battery life is something we’ll have to address in a few year’s time, assuming the world hasn’t ended before then. But here’s the kicker — judging the phone on its merits today, would you buy one of these over a cheaper Nokia C1 (or the admittedly rare Motofone F3?). We’d be a little more confident about the phone if the warranty of the device was longer than a year, you know? Still, we’d feel reasonably comfortable keeping one of these in the first aid kit for when the Robopocalypse hits, hoping that we’d never really need to use it. It’ll be available at some point this quarter, will take any GSM SIM or microSIM (it has an adapter) and cost $50.