A return to form

I usually write a few columns every night during the Consumer Electronics Show at the beginning of the year. This year is an exception, not out of laziness but because a post-vacation cold hit me like a truck just as the show began. It turns out my body wanted the authentic Las Vegas experience while being situated on the opposite side of the country.

Either way, I have been intently following the developments out of Las Vegas this year. These days, I like to think of CES as less of a serious trade show where all of the biggest consumer technology companies announce their latest products for the year, and more of an attraction for the press. It’s a large theme park, where the theme is artificial intelligence and the rides are exhibits, large and small. People go to CES to network and have fun, not to seriously report on technology that ought to change people’s lives in the coming months.

With that brief prologue complete, here is an unorganized list of some of my favorite “rides” from the CES show floor this year. Some may ship, most won’t, but that’s the thrill of CES.

Here’s Allison Johnson at The Verge on the Clicks Communicator, a dumb phone-esque device aimed at supplementing smartphone use:

Clicks, the company known for its keyboard cases, didn’t just launch a combination MagSafe power bank and slide-out keyboard accessory. It also launched a whole-ass phone. The Communicator leans hard into Clicks’ BlackBerry DNA, with its full keyboard and Curve-esque design. The prototype units I got to play with weren’t functional, but the keyboard keys worked, and boy did they feel nice. The interchangeable back panels are sleek, and I’m personally campaigning for a fuzzy tennis ball optic yellow option.

The Communicator isn’t necessarily trying to put your main smartphone out of a job. Its creators envision it as a companion to your daily driver, something you leave the house with when typing out an email is going to be your focus more than scrolling through a feed of vertical videos. You know, like when you’re running between meetings at a convention for four days. But you don’t have to use it that way; Clicks cofounder and marketing lead Jeff Gadway told me that they’ve been surprised by the number of people expressing interest in the phone as a primary device. And you know what? Those people might be on to something.

The Communicator runs Android but isn’t a typical Android phone. It’s quite literally a dumb phone that happens to run modern apps, like Telegram or WhatsApp, as opposed to being limited to SMS and normal telephone calls. The custom Android skin displays all of one’s text messages across apps in one “message hub,” with easy ways to filter contacts and reply. The hardware keyboard purports to make typing and keyboard shortcuts easier, and the device includes a camera and headphone jack. It’s a clever little device, albeit for a niche market. That isn’t a bad thing at all — its quirkiness is the feature. I like how it doesn’t even try to replace the smartphones people carry in their pockets anyway — Clicks’ founders have correctly realized people love their phones, but might also be interested in a secondary device strictly for communication.

It’s like if Beeper, the messaging aggregator founded by Eric Migicovsky that landed in the spotlight for bringing iMessage to Android, made a hardware device. I think it’s a neat idea, much like the regular Clicks Keyboard cases, which aim to bring a bit of nostalgia to a boring smartphone landscape. Some products are just good for the soul, and Clicks seems to have a great knack for making delightful little things.

Karissa Bell at Engadget reports on the Switchbot Onero H1, a humanoid smart home robot that the company claims can help with basic household tasks:

CES 2026 isn’t the first year we’ve seen a wave of interesting robots or even useful robots crop up in Las Vegas. But it’s the first year I can remember when there have been so many humanoid and humanoid-like robots performing actually useful tasks. Of those, Switchbot’s Onero H1 has been one of the most intriguing robot helpers I’ve seen on the show floor, especially because the company says that it will actually go on sale later this year (though it won’t come cheap).

Up to now, Chinese company Switchbot has been known for its robot vacuums and smart home devices. Much of that expertise is evident in Onero. The unexpectedly cute robot has a wheeled base that looks similar to the company’s robot vacuums, but is also equipped with a set of articulated arms that can help it perform common household tasks.

I understand but disagree with the premise of humanoid robots. Humans are inherently limited creatures, and we’ve designed a physical world to work alongside our limitations. Our living spaces and tools are designed to be used by our hands, which lack precision, and our bodies, which are large and cannot move freely in all directions. A robot vacuum doesn’t drag around a stick vacuum because that would be inefficient — a regular vacuum cleaner is designed with these human limitations in mind. To that end, arms and legs that emulate humans are destined to be slow and clunky. They just take a lot of work to get right. As Bell notes, the robot took two minutes to grab a piece of cloth and put it in a laundry basket feet away.

I don’t think the people behind this company are anything less than smart. But this is the best their robot could do in an ideal demonstration. They could have hard-coded the task and perfectly placed the clothes in the path of the robot so it would finish in a few seconds. But they did try to prove a point, and that point backfired: Humanoid robots are far from complete, and when they finally are, they’ll be inefficient.

This might sound like it’s in jest, but I’m serious: While browsing the internet, as one would while they’re sick, I stumbled across this startup that installs laundry chutes inside people’s homes, so from any room, they can toss their clothes into the chute for it to be deposited into the laundry room through pipes running in the walls. (If I could find this video, I’d link to it here, but alas, I don’t have it saved.) As preposterous and expensive as that sounds, I think it’s a better solution than this robot that takes two minutes to move a few feet. That doesn’t require “AI,” and it probably needs less engineering time, too.

Examples like robot vacuums and this weird laundry chute thing from the internet prove why humanoid robots will never be the most eloquent way to automate. (Also, it’ll be a miracle if this particular robot ever ships at all.)

Jaime Richards wrote about Samsung’s creaseless foldable display for TechRadar, which is probably a prelude to the foldable iPhone coming later this year:

Samsung just won CES 2026. If you ask me, all the other vendors and tech makers can try again next year, because nothing else at this year’s CES is going to be quite as cool as Samsung’s creaseless folding OLED display.

Rewind: what does any of that mean? To put it simply, Samsung has developed a folding display that forms a completely smooth surface when unfolded. Up until now, folding displays have always had a crease – sometimes deep, sometimes minimal – at the point they fold over. It’s long been seen as a necessary compromise, an acceptable price for the expansive screen space a folding phone offers.

One of the marquee features of the rumored foldable iPhone is that Apple has worked with suppliers for years to ensure the device has no crease in the middle of the display. I agree with this insistence — the crease is distracting and unsightly, cheapening the look and feel of an expensive device. Samsung is rumored to supply this display, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this exact technology is touted during the iPhone event come September. I also find it rather suspicious that Samsung pulled this unit mere hours after unveiling it for the press with no explanation. It’s not like it’s in a real device or anything — but what if it is? My hunch is that Apple caught wind of this panel at CES and told Samsung to stop displaying it.

The display itself looks quite convincing. While it still clearly looks like flexible plastic — Samsung insists it’s not plastic — there is no visible distraction on the display. It looks worthy of being in an Apple product, so long as it’s only looked at from the front and not from the side when it’s closed. It is a thick, unsightly panel, and I think that’ll be one of the foldable iPhone’s biggest marketing snags Apple will have to somehow contend with in the fall.

Andrew Hawkins, The Verge’s transportation editor, has some news about Sony and Honda’s Afeela vehicle, a CES staple:

Sony and Honda’s joint venture, Sony Honda Mobility (SHM), said it will start customer deliveries of the $90,000 Afeela 1 electric vehicle in the US in late 2026. The company also showed off an SUV concept that it said would inform a production model in the US for as early as 2028.

The new Afeela Prototype 2026 looked remarkably similar to the Afeela 1 pre-production unit, with short overhangs, a long wheelbase, and an overall larger footprint. No other details about the vehicle were released. SHM CEO Yasuhide Mizuno called it an “early-stage concept.”

I’ve been reporting on this story since 2022, so I felt I had to circle back this year. My official stance on this has been simple: I’ll believe it when I see it on the road. When cars are about to ship “later this year” — an oft-reported phrase in the tech media landscape — they’re usually spotted on the road in some kind of wrap disguise, being actively tested. Especially self-driving ones, like the Afeela purports to be, since all of this software is new and must be certified before it’s released. The Afeela has never been seen in public outside of CES, and the joint venture company seems to just disappear for 11 months right after the show is over, just to come back again for more attention in January.

This is classic vaporware, a term used to describe products that are unveiled but only exist conceptually. I find it even more galling that Honda and Sony have a new concept sport utility vehicle before their current $90,000 sedan even ships. And the presenters onstage seemingly had no comments about the stage of autonomy the vehicle would have on Day 1. I don’t think it’ll come even remotely close to Tesla’s Full Self Driving, a technology the company has been working on for over a decade. I can’t wait to come back to this topic next year and grade my predictions: this car won’t ship, and even if it does, it won’t drive itself.

I’ll end on a more philosophical note: CES 2026 focused heavily on robotics, a small but noticeable contrast from the last two years’ generative artificial intelligence-filled shows. This is a good thing — while CES 2024 brought ChatGPT to every consumer product and CES 2025 advanced silicon for AI inference and training, CES 2026 took CES back to its roots. CES is a show first, and AI chatbots make business people, not tech people, happy. They’re profit centers inflated by an AI bubble that’s about to burst at any minute. They don’t make for good presentations or flashy demonstrations to the press, and they don’t appear well on camera.

Robots have defined CES for decades because they do appear well on camera. They’re just plain interesting, and they also happen to include “AI,” the buzzword of the decade. Most of these robots won’t succeed, but as I said at the beginning of this article, CES is a showcase, not a serious presentation. Some do ship, however, and one of them is the Roborock Saros Z70, a normal robot vacuum with an arm attached to the top. Here’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge’s smart home editor:

Roborock has added an arm to its latest flagship robot vacuum. And this is no tiny appendage like the one the company debuted on its S8 MaxV Ultra at CES last year; it’s an actual articulating robotic arm. The arm rises from the middle of Roborock’s latest flagship bot — the Saros Z70 — and can extend out to pick up items such as socks and tissues while cleaning your floors. While it’s mildly terrifying and currently extremely slow — I can certainly see the potential in a robot vacuum that can clean up ahead of itself.

Products like these delight me and remind me what CES really is about. I own a Roomba i7+ robot vacuum, made by the about-to-be-defunct iRobot back in 2018, and even though it can navigate to rooms by itself, I still remove large items from the floor before I set the device to begin cleaning. This has just been a habit of robot vacuum owners since their conception. The newer Roborock vacuums have an “AI” vision algorithm that uses the camera at the front of the unit to detect large items and maneuver around them, but that doesn’t address the problem. This arm-fitted robot does.

No, the Saros Z70 won’t be the next hit to take on the robot vacuum market — if not for its impracticality, the nail in the coffin will be the price — but it’s emblematic of a gradual shift to CES normalcy. Perhaps the nostalgic gadget lover in me appreciates that.