What does the future smell like? At CES 2026 it smelled a little like hot motors, detergent, and the faint ozone of lidar — plus the unmistakable scent of show-floor ambition.
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show was less about impossible prototypes and more about machines edging toward usefulness. The headlines were stolen by humanoid robots — often charming, sometimes terrifyingly slow — but a surprising number of practical, buy-now products also arrived with price tags and order buttons. Here’s a guided walk through the themes and the standouts worth noticing.
Robots on the showroom floor
If you walked the central halls you couldn’t avoid them: humanoid bots from Chinese firms that can fold laundry, deal cards, play table tennis (badly), or — in one eyebrow-raising demo — engage in choreographed martial-arts moves. They’re clunky and slow, yes, but they’re also everywhere, and that ubiquity matters.
These machines are not replacing workers tomorrow. Instead, CES made clear that robotics companies are moving from lab curiosities toward task-oriented assistants for very specific, repeatable chores. Switchbot’s Onero H1 is a clear example: a laundry-folding humanoid whose $10,000 price and jerky motions underline how far there is to go — and where the early customers (and early cash) might sit.
At the same time, home robotics is branching out: Roborock showed a leg-wheel vacuum that can climb stairs and a LiDAR-equipped mower that navigates yards with surprising finesse. These aren’t humanoids, but they point to a future where machines handle the most boring, physically annoying home tasks.
Practical tech you can buy today
CES still did what it’s always done best: showcase what’s ready now. Several companies rolled out devices you can pre-order or buy immediately — not concepts, but real products with SKUs.
Highlights included compact essentials like Anker’s 45W Nano charger, Corsair’s Galleon 100 SD keyboard (a mechanical board fused with a 5" Stream Deck–style display), and Satechi’s Thunderbolt 5 Cube Dock for power-hungry laptops. Soundcore and Plaud brought tiny, privacy-minded recorders and AI transcription tools for meetings and interviews, while Pebble revived its slim e-paper watch design with long battery life and a focus on simplicity.
Some items leaned playful or niche: Fraimic’s E Ink art display that generates visuals from voice prompts, Vivoo’s clip-on smart toilet sensor that tracks hydration without disposable strips, and a surprisingly practical Dreamie bedside lamp that aims to replace your phone at night with sunrise alarms, soundscapes, and on-device sleep tracking.
If you’re into gaming hardware, ROG’s Xreal R1 gaming glasses offered an XR-style, monitor-replacement experience with a surprisingly wide field of view and a 240 Hz refresh rate demo that impressed onlookers. For folks who live in the VR/AR corner of the market, these gestures toward spatial computing will feel familiar; if you want to compare headsets, popular options like the Meta Quest still represent the mainstream VR experience.
(Streaming and cloud gaming also got an assist this year — see how device ecosystems are expanding to support remote play and big-screen alternatives, including accessory and streaming updates for handhelds and consoles like the PlayStation ecosystem.) For readers tracking that angle, the PlayStation Portal’s new cloud-streaming features make the handheld/streaming dance feel a lot more real: PlayStation Portal Can Now Stream Your PS5 Library.
A few products that point to bigger shifts
- Clicks Communicator: A tiny but telling trend this year was the revival of physical keyboards. Clicks’ Communicator — a pocket Android device built around a tactile keyboard and the distraction-minimizing Niagara Launcher — felt like a modern heir to the BlackBerry. It’s not for everyone, but for people who want a communication-first phone, it’s a rare mainstream contender.
- Smart locks getting smarter: Aqara’s U400 smart lock uses ultra-wideband (UWB) to unlock only when your iPhone or Apple Watch is genuinely at the door, which helps solve the flaky auto-unlock problem many have given up on. It also speaks Matter over Thread, a sign that smart-home standards are finally being taken seriously. If you’re tracking the push toward interoperable ecosystems and cheaper device entry points, IKEA’s broad Matter plan is another piece of that puzzle: IKEA’s 21-device Matter push makes smart homes cheaper and simpler.
- Tiny, focused wearables: Pebble’s Index 01 ring — a one-button dictation device — and other “streamlined” gadgets show a countertrend to ever-more-capable smartwatches. These are single-purpose tools meant to reduce friction. If that concept appeals, it sits next to other experimental input devices like the Stream Ring designers’ work on voice-first mouse alternatives: Stream Ring: A 'Mouse for Voice'.
- Sustainability + longevity: Fender’s modular headphones with replaceable batteries and Flint’s biodegradable paper batteries were reminders that CES is following regulatory and consumer pressure toward easier repairs and safer chemistry. Small promises today could mean significantly less e-waste tomorrow.
When novelty meets usefulness
Not every flashy demo will ship or land. Many humanoids moved awkwardly. Some robot vacuums with arms and hands looked clever until they knocked over a lamp. Still, the show’s tone was less speculative than in years past. Companies were bringing things to market, and many of those things solved narrow, practical problems — better chargers, quieter yard tools, a smarter bedside lamp, an actual buyable “wallpaper” OLED TV that leans into aesthetic minimalism.
That practical streak matters because real adoption rarely comes from bells and whistles. It comes from gadgets that fit into daily routines without demanding new rituals. CES 2026 felt like a turning point: more demos, yes, but also a stronger line-up of products that will reach your doorstep within months.
If you’re shopping the post-CES crop, watch for devices that combine standards (Matter, Thread, UWB) with replaceable parts or clear privacy choices. That combination — interoperability plus durability — may determine which products become parts of our lives and which end up as shelf art.