The Best of CES 2026 - DTNS 5181

0:07This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 8th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you some context, and try gosh darn it to help each other understand. It's the last day live from the floor of CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. And what's the best tech at CES this year? Well, we've got CNET's David Katzmeyer, Digital Media Zones' Richard Gunther, and the amazing Tricia Hershberger here to tell us. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rod Dumoulin. I'm Tricia Hershberger. Back at headquarters in Los Angeles, I'm Sarah Lane. And also remote, I am Roger Chang. Well, the best of CES has been named and CNET's editor-in-chief, David Katzmeyer, is here to tell us all about the winners.

0:46And that is our big story.

0:52David, you survived. I can't believe it's the last day of CES. I feel like I've been here for pretty much all year. Yeah, you get that feeling like you live here. Yeah. You have really been there pretty much all year. Well, I guess technically, but, you know, maybe even 2025. Yeah. point. So CNET has been awarding the official Best of CES awards for a while now. Can you run through a little bit about what that means, how they're selected? What's the selection process, all of that? Right. So the idea is these are the awards that are sanctioned by the CTA that puts on CES. And, you know, there's a bunch of other websites mentioning Best of CES.

1:25You know, no shade on any of those, but we're the official ones. So the idea is CNET in partnership with PCMag, Mashable, Lifehacker, and ZDNet, which are all owned by Ziff Davis, Media Group, got together. And this is the first time we've really ever gone this hard. So we have 22 categories. And we had to pick at least, you know, two to three finalists for each category. And then we put out that story, it was yesterday morning, it feels like again, a week ago. And then we ended up later in the day going on stage here in the Central Hall and announcing the winners among those categories. Yeah, I ran into Ayaz Akhtar, who was doing the travel category, and he was, like, furiously taking notes and, like, running all over the place.

2:11It is a scramble. Yeah, it is. So, best overall, Samsung Galaxy Fold. What was the thinking behind giving that the sort of the overall win? Yeah, so, I mean, CES is just a grab bag. There's everything here. There's robots that are never going to come out. There's salt spoons. There's, you know, bizarre AI companions. Vibrating knives. Right. And there's a lot of stuff that's like really kind of industry, if you will. Right. Never going to see the consumer's hands. This is not. This is something that's coming out this year. It's a tri-folding phone. You know, basically standard folding phone folds open like a book in half.

2:47This folds open three ways. And it's pretty much the size of a tablet. Right. So I love the promise of being able to take one thing. Like we've been talking about this for a long time. Like how many things do we have to take? We got a laptop. We got our phone. You know, potentially another iPad or whatever it is. this device promises, you know, to potentially replace all that. And I just like the idea of having a big ass screen, Tom, to me, that's like, just give me as much screen as I can on a phone. Yeah, absolutely. And then when you fold it up, it's, it's, you know, generally it's a little bit thicker, regular phone size, but Samsung has come so far in the durability of the hinges and the thinness of the individual, you know, pieces of the accordion, if you will.

3:26So it really feels to us like that kind of solid product. And, you know, they've been doing folding phones for a while. So we're really excited to get our hands on it and try it out, you know, in the real world. And cool to be able to give it to a shipping product. Right, right. Well, that was a lot of a lot of the things that ended up winning. So another category was, you guys have seen this because it was one of the big splashes. The show was a Lego smart brick, right? So this is like a real thing. And it's like a super innovative thing that Lego did is allowing, you know, communication between bricks and activations of sound and lights and proximity sensors, accelerometers.

4:01It has this little charging mat that you put the bricks on and I can imagine a kid like assembling a thing and like just experimenting with a minifig that walks up and like sets off a trap or whatever it is, you know, and these things are shipping in March and they start at 70 bucks. So, I mean, it's really cool that they're doing this. So, we try to highlight real products. It's so real. There's already a backlash against it, Yeah. Which means it must be legitimate. Yeah. I also we're we're not going to go through all 22 categories. You need to go to CNET for that. And I highly encourage you to do so.

4:28But I was curious about Willow. I didn't actually get to see that one. That's like wireless power. Yeah. So, again, this is there's we talked about the real products. This is a product that is so cool that we really hope it's real. So these guys, it's a startup, you know, not proven in any way. But it's essentially, imagine, like a charging force field that sets up in a place and whatever you bring into it magically starts wireless charging. So obviously we know wireless charging today, a little limited. You've got to have a thing that works with your thing, especially to maximize full charging speed and capacity and all that.

5:00This promises to eliminate all of that dongles, charging wires and everything. So it's, again, kind of pie in the sky, but we want to take a flyer on it. And the demo really impressed Katie Collins, one of our editors. because we've seen people trying to do this before, but it seems like this one might actually be close to actually working. Right, and there, of course, what companies like this have to do is talk to device manufacturers, talk to the Samsungs and Apples of the world and the accessories on the charging side and try to figure out how to get this implemented in the market, which is always the hard thing, especially with mobile.

5:32Because it does have to have hardware in the device to be able to take advantage of it. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, who wouldn't want to just wirelessly charge by walking into a room? It's honestly very three-body problem, and I love it. Yes. Also, I thought it was interesting and kind of heartening that Intel Core Ultra 300, a.k.a. Panther Lake, got the deep computing. I mean, it was – that was – so we're in our room, 40-plus editors, right? Like, we bring in people – it was a six-hour process, right? And we literally sit as editor-in-chiefs, like, kind of like we're hearing the dissertation, right?

6:05So there's cohorts, we call them, of three editors often mixing all these different publications that I mentioned. They'll come, sit down, and present a list. And they have like, okay, here's what should win. Here's second. Here's third. And usually we're like, yeah, that's good. And this one was I think the shortest deliberation ever of all of the categories. We're like, yep, slam dunk, bye. Like it was not even close. And by the way, the other thing in that category was NVIDIA's Rubin, which was, you know, the big splashy announcement of the show. But, you know, again, we're a consumer facing publication.

6:40AI NVIDIA won last year, by the way, for our best of CES. You know, that's not a disqualifier. It's fine. But at the end of the day, Rubin is just like, you know, it's another AI data center chip that can do this. This is, again, kind of taking, you know, a real consumer product. These Panther Lake chips, I was talking to my laptop's editor, Josh Goldman. He's like, look, what's cool about this? It's going to be in everything. and every time a laptop guy talks about how great their laptop is, the reason is because Panther Lake, right? All the 2026 laptops are going to get this and it's going to improve everything, battery life, speed.

7:11He was talking about a 43-hour battery life laptop, for example. So those are the kind of things that this is just going to spread. It's going to raise all tides. And I think what the Windows computer guys are hoping is that it's going to start to compete with Apple's M chips. And Intel needs that. Yes, absolutely. No doubt. Sarah, what on this list caught your eye? So mentioning travel tech, so I guess I as is on the case there, but the JitLife rideable luggage caught my eye because I did not know rideable luggage was a thing. Apparently in certain markets, people at airports are very used to seeing somebody sit on their carry on luggage and be able to scoot around an airport.

7:48Depends on how big the airport is, of course, where if you don't know, you've got a bad back or whatever it is. But I guess these guys can go up to eight miles an hour. That's pretty fast. Yeah. And by the way, I see what you did there. You know, rideable luggage is it's a travel tech category that I didn't know existed either until I was in LaGuardia earlier coming out here. I saw a little kid with like a little, you know, tiny little, you know, basically a bicycle attached to a suitcase. This is the suitcase with a motor. And, you know, you talk about speed. This was able to support Jordan, another editor in chief for Ziv Davis, 250 pound guy, 6 '3".

8:24Yeah, it can go up to 250 is what the company said. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. So he's, he's, but he's, he's almost there. He's a really big dude. And, and he's like sitting on this thing like, yeah, I'm moving. You know, it's really cool. I mean, it's, it's, you look at the, again, I haven't seen this in person, but you look at the photos and videos and you think, uh, this, I mean, you're going to get stared at. That's for sure. Um, but, uh, yeah, it, I, I just, I had no idea this was a product category. I would like one. Yeah. That's what CES does. You're like, really this exists and why didn't it exist until now?

8:56Yeah. So Sarah, fun story. I wrote it around CES yesterday. Did you? Yeah. I went to their booth and I was like, is it okay if I try this and like film a little bit for social media? And they were all about it. Love that. And yeah, it goes so much faster than you think it does. Like I sat on it and I like gently started and it's like a throttle, like a motorcycle. And the more you twist, like that eight miles per hour feels really fast. It was really funny. I mean, if you were like power walking eight miles an hour is pretty fast. I mean, imagine getting that with like one of those moving walkways like those.

9:28Those can go pretty fast sometimes in the newer thing. And you're just like, it's got to have a horn. Right. I don't know. I didn't test it, but that would be great. One of the questions I had and Tricia, you would probably know is, I mean, is there a place to put your feet or do they just kind of. Yeah, no, there's foot pegs. So you put your feet on there and then there's these little handlebars that, again, just kind of feels like an e-bike or something like that with a little throttle. but it's really funny and you know how crowded CES is so I didn't hit anyone I felt pretty good about that as I was riding around CES but all I could think is I need one of these for the airport yeah or not even the airport like the show floor like imagine the last day you're catching a flight you have to bring your freaking suitcase around the show floor to meet your meetings you know and then get on the airport this you're just riding around the show floor you know that'd be perfect is is it able to be carried on can you remove the battery or is it I don't know it has It has to be a carry-on because otherwise you would check it and not be able to use it.

10:26Right, right. They have it listed as okay for carry-on, but I didn't specifically ask what type of battery is in it. I think it would be smart to have a detachable version that you could bring on as the carry-on and have a big boy that you can check. And then when you get there, you just snap them together. So like a board that you plug your suitcase onto. Yeah. That was our other Travel Tech winner, by the way. It was a wheel that you attach to a wheelchair, right? A standard wheelchair. We talked about this yesterday. It's a really cool accessibility product because it allows you to go to another country or whatever where you can get a normal wheelchair and just strap it on and all of a sudden make it motorized.

11:02It's really cool. And there are other products like that before, but this one was just so well designed and really easy to use. It didn't take a lot of setup. The Koro was interesting. Tell me about that one. So this is our wellness winner, and this was – it's a breastfeeding monitor. And again, going back to like I can't believe they haven't thought about this already, right? So the idea is you want to – a lot of times you want to be able to track the milk that's being fed to the kid. So you're in a situation where you don't know actually and some health conditions require you to get that. Our writer was saying like this would have helped his premature baby have this tracking of the actual content going in.

11:44You can do it really easily with a bottle, but you don't get that skin to skin. You don't get the benefits of having breastfeeding. So this is essentially a little, you know, unobtrusive, you know, attachment that will allow you to track that. And then we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about robots because the Strut EV1 is technically a robot. Yes, it is. Almost everything here is a robot. Yeah, I think we had two or three different winners across various categories that ended up just being robots. That was our transportation category, which is, you know, again, it's kind of like a supercharged rascal, you know.

12:20So imagine a rascal that will drive anywhere you want autonomously, right? So you don't have to drive it, folks that have trouble navigating or whatever for any reason, or you just want to fall asleep in your rascal. Who doesn't, right? And just set this thing on go, and it'll drive you. Another maybe like dream convention center accessory. We've got to have like a separate category, best for actually covering CES. Best moving around Las Vegas. Right, right, exactly. That would be great. All right. Before I let you go, I have a soft spot for Best of CES because we used to do it at Tech TV way back in the day.

12:57And, of course, I was at CNET when CNET started to do it. And back in those days, you covered televisions and you are one of the best in the business still covering televisions. So what won the television Best of? So this year, a category close to my heart, Tom, absolutely. This was the Samsung S95H. So OLED TVs are obviously the best picture quality. This is bigger and better. They came out with this anti-glare technology a couple years ago, which I really like. It's controversial among the TV nerds set because there are some downsides. But in a room, you often have the glare catching the screen and hurting your video quality.

13:31This thing stops that, and it's supposed to be better than it was before. Samsung's OLEDs have gotten better and better. They have QD OLED technology that allows it to be brighter, better picture, and all that. So that was our winner. Again, a practical product is coming out, not like a concept thing or a gigantic TV that you can't afford. Did the judges in this category, like, make sure you were cool with it? You know, the dissertation back to that, like, I gave them a little bit of a grilling. But they're good. A little try by fire. That's fair. That's fair. Well, David, thanks so much for talking with us.

14:03Thanks for bringing the best of CES to it. By the way, David just became editor-in-chief of CNET. At CES. Thank you. Thank you. It was bizarre to walk into our war room where we're doing all these nominations and everything and have 40 plus editors find out a long, you know, I found out the day before I was getting it. And we stood up and had a nice moment. It was really good because it kicked off the show. Yeah, yeah. And well-deserved, man. I was very happy when Lindsay told me that. I appreciate it, Tom. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to it. Well, have a great rest of your show. Thanks for having me on.

14:40I'm happy to come back anytime. All right. And by the way, folks, go to CNET to get the rest of like because you said there's 22 categories. Oh, yeah. It's a long scroll. It's worth it. And then you can read all about all our coverage and video and all that related to the winners. Excellent. Thanks, man. All right. DTNS is made possible by all of you listening. Some of you are watching live or watching after the fact. Thank you to one and all. And a special thanks today to Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey and Michelle Sergio.

15:12All right, there are a few news items worth noting today. We'll just, I don't know, we'll call them the briefs, shall we? Yeah, we shall. Let's start with Google, which is bringing new Gemini features to Gmail. Gmail can give you a summary when you search your email, just like it does with web search. Pro and ultra subscribers will now get a proofreading tool that puts a dotted underline on text for which it has suggestions for revising. Trusted testers are getting an AI inbox, which puts the emails that it thinks are a priority at the top of your list and then creates a catch me up summary of what it considers less important emails.

15:47I hope this works well. Email summaries, which are on individual emails themselves, help me write and suggested replies are now rolling out to free users. Yes, free users. So do you want more Gemini in your Gmail, Sarah? No. I already feel like, why is the social tab there? There are so many things I have issues with with Gmail, but I've just used it so long, I just suffer through it. But I don't like anything that's like, hey, Sarah, this is your priority. I'm like, you don't know me. You don't know what my day is like. Don't do that. Just give it to me chronologically. Thank you. You know, it's weird.

16:25I wouldn't mind if it did like, you need to pay this bill because you get the little bill notice in your email. except that I sometimes get so much email that stuff gets buried and I miss it. And I only catch it because I get an alert. Yeah, that's true. If it was some sort of banking category that, you know, especially if you can futz with your own settings and just be like anything like that, just, you know, you know, flag it, put it at the top. I could, I could see it working if it works well. You know, it's weird because, you know, Gmail has all sorts of features, but we'll not let you add additional tabs that you can customize.

16:58Well, I turn off the tabs altogether and just go with the priority and then general boxes and not the like a not this Gemini deciding what's priority for me, but whatever Gmail has used in the past. And I can mark things priority or not. And it will remember that sender for the future, whether they're important to me or not. And I've been using it for so long now that it is fairly accurate. So I kind of don't want Gemini in there messing with a good thing. Like I figured it out already. Don't mess with it. Yeah. And this is you can turn it on and off. So you could say like, no, I don't want you messing with that.

17:29OpenAI is adding a health tab to the ChatGPT app. Information shared in the health tab will not be used in other types of chats. So that's the idea. It doesn't do anything much different than just asking a health question normally. But you can say, this is a health question. Please don't remember this when you're talking about other things. You can also go in and delete the health-related chat memories that it has within that tab. And the company says it will not be using this data to train its models. OpenAI is testing it with a small group first. You can sign up on a wait list, though. The company says it does plan to open it to all iOS and web users in the coming weeks.

18:04This is one of those things where people are using it this way. So this is Chet GPT saying, let me give you a few more options for guardrails there. Yeah, I saw a lot of hand wringing online yesterday. Like, oh, I would never, you know, this is a really bad idea. And it's like, well, I mean, it could be. Yeah. But it could also be really helpful. I think it's worse to not have this. And, you know, I guess you can make the argument that you are encouraging people to use it when you have that tab there. Right. Yeah. I personally I think I would like to see almost some HIPAA like compliance that would come into this because this is the future.

18:41We're going to be talking to AI about our health. So we have some pretty strong laws on what doctors and nurses and health professionals can do with your information. I'd like to see that spill over into the AI world as well. I mean, I might want to be able to ask it about, you know, a cut or a rash without having to worry about, you know, because that's not something that's terribly sensitive. But I might not want that in my chat history. But you should be very careful what you put in there, even if you're using the new health tab with the memories and decide whether that's worth it for you to have that in there at all or not.

19:13Yeah, I keep having chat bots say like, you know, when you get your medical reports, you can just upload them and we'll give you a summary, an explanation of what it means. And I'm like, or I could not. I have copied and pasted like very specific things and said, my father-in-law has this issue. I mean, it's sort of an argument for having a localized, you know, LLM or something. Something on device that you don't have to worry about, cloud services and all that. In a CES world filled with new robots, one of them has met its end. Oh, no. Yeah, we got to pull one out. Samsung's Bally, the little rolling ball that was introduced to CES 2020 and at last year, CES was announced that it will not be going forward.

20:04It's not going to completely be gone. Samsung, it looks like they're going to still continue to use it. And they've told Bloomberg that it has indefinitely been shelved, but they will keep it around internally. You know, just I guess to make people feel good about they work on it. It's not all the way gone. But yes, it'll be literally on a shelf internally, literally on a shelf. So keep the I mean, it was just December that TechRadar was told, yeah, we're not we're not we're not it's not going anywhere. We're still working on it. Just don't have any announcements at CES. So, yeah, bummer. There you go.

20:41All right. You may have noticed that Richard Gunther has joined us now to talk about some of the smart home stuff that he saw at CES. Richard, welcome. It's good to have you. Yeah, glad to be here. How's everybody doing? We're doing good. But I have seen a lot of smart locks out there, and it's kind of hard to tell which ones are new and which ones are interesting. And you've got one to point out to us. We are going to talk about smart locks. Yeah, so this year there has been not a whole lot of amazing, cool, new, crazy stuff, but just good evolutions and uses of technology in products we're used to seeing, products that might almost be commoditized, like locks.

21:22So as an example, really one of the favorite things I've seen out there is a new smart lock, the U400 from Acara. Acara is a Chinese company that has a bunch of products in the U.S. market, and they're starting to get much more attention now because their products are all matter-compatible. Matter is the standard that ensures that the product is going to pretty much work with anything. And that is the case with this new lock. And what's amazing, in my opinion, about this lock is all of the flexibility it adds. So you're used to seeing locks that have number keypads on them. You're used to seeing now where you can tap to unlock or you can use your finger to unlock.

22:04Of course, we've had apps and you can use the app in your voice and stuff like that. This adds something, and I think it's the first implementation of this from Apple's ultra-wideband on their iPhone. So just walking up to the door is going to unlock it. And it's smart enough to know if you're inside or outside. It's smart enough to know if you're approaching it or walking by it, whether it should lock or unlock or not. Really slick product. Like I said, it's going to be compatible with anything. It also has just a plain old key way. If you're worried about losing a key or it not working and you still want to use a key, you can do that as well.

22:42Oh, that's cool. I mentioned iPhone because it's specifically tailored to that, but you will be able to use it with your Samsung wallet later this year as well. And this is actually already available. It launched this week, and it goes for under$270, which is a fairly competitive price for all of that. I talked to the guy from Consumer Reports who reports on smart home stuff, and he loves it. They think it's a really good product, and I am excited to see it come to market. It's interesting because they're taking the approach where you want it to work with everything. And I'll contrast that with a lock that the folks from Chamberlain released recently as part of the MyQ ecosystem.

23:31It's a combination smart lock and video doorbell. And it only works with Chamberlain MyQ. Nothing else. So very different approaches that we're seeing companies take. I think it's interesting that a CARA is very simple in the sense of like, it's a lock. It's got a keypad, a key, and an ultra-wideband. It's not trying to be a video doorbell. It's not trying to be anything else. But it's open. So there's lots of ways for you to open it. Right. Exactly. And have it respond to other devices in your home through whatever ecosystem you choose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's very cool. All right. An irrigation system has caught your eye.

24:11Anybody with a lawn, listen up. So, you know, irrigation systems are usually pretty expensive. and we've seen stuff that you can tie into your hose and it'll have the water come on at certain times and such but a couple companies have come out with systems that are much smarter than that and you may recognize the name aper as a company that makes pool cleaning robots okay well they're also now in the irrigation space and they have a product called air water so yeah water exactly exactly and they now have a product called iris sense too and it's about the size of like a fire hydrant, I'd say. And I would consider it a smart water cannon.

24:50You take this thing and just put it out in your lawn, maybe centrally or maybe in a corner somewhere. And it can spray various types of sprays, depending on what it's watering up to like 12 meters away. So a pretty significant space. And you can define over a dozen zones so that it knows to what are your flowers differently and maybe even at a different time than the lawn itself and than bushes that you have on the property. It takes into consideration all the stuff that you would expect from an irrigation system, like a high-end irrigation system that knows what the weather forecast is going to be like and knows if it's actually wet out there yet already.

25:29So it's a pretty slick system. It comes in just under$500 and that's going to be coming out later this quarter. Ketnam Dinja wants to know if you can program it to spray the neighbor's dog if it tries to go in your yard well so it's funny because i did ask them if they have any plans to integrate it with sensors so that i can make sure that my dog doesn't get sprayed and that's not something that they're doing yet yeah uh it's kind of like a high-tech version of the the old plastic thing that you put in and would just rotate around it's kind of dumb right this is like oh we're we're gonna do that but we're gonna do it in a way that uses the water sensibly you're gonna use types of things in your yard appropriately.

26:12Yeah, no, that's great. I love that one. All right. You got one last one to talk about, but it's AT &T. Yeah. So I wanted to mention that people have heard about AT &T being in smart home and they kind of pulled away from it a couple of years ago because everybody thinks, oh, yay, it's a money grab. They just want something else to add to my bill. And their pricing tiers didn't argue against that theory. So now they've partnered with Abode, which is a company that makes security systems to white label a system for them that they can sell you up front in packages of devices for around your home.

26:53And you can have it installed or install it yourself. Abode is a pretty consumer friendly product line. It'll also work with anything from Google Home, anything that works as part of the Google Home ecosystem. Now, both of those services currently charge a fee for video access and monitoring and stuff like that. All AT &T is doing is putting it under one umbrella on your bill so that for a total of either$11 to self-monitor as many devices as you have around your home or$22 a month for actual physical monitoring where someone is responding and so forth, for$22 a month. And that's it. No other fees.

27:38So you don't pay the Google fee anymore. You don't pay. So if you, for example, have a Nest doorbell, you're paying a fee for that. You would not pay that anymore. You would not pay any fee for a Bode video access. It's all one fee through AT &T. I think they got it right this time. Yeah, that's it. So if I have this right, I just because it sounds almost too good to be true. I want to make sure I repeat it back to you. But if I have Google Home products like Nest Cams and Nest Doorbells and Abode products, I can get AT &T to provide the service for all of that for either$11 or$22. Correct. And there's no cell phone plan involved.

28:14This is just AT &T providing the cloud service of it, right? That's correct. Yeah. Are you sure? Yeah. Yeah. It's really impressive. And it's funny because some colleagues of mine, when I said I wanted to go talk to the AT &T folks, they're like, why?

28:33That's pretty great. I don't know Abode very well. Do they have decent products? They do. I've tested some of their home security systems. They have units that are pretty extensive. They also have just standalone things that work well in apartments. So a pretty flexible system. It's based on Z-Wave. So, you know, it's been around for a while, but that also means that it's robust. I mean, a lot of the security world is still based on Z-Wave. And Z-Wave is getting better and better now with the long-range capabilities that it offers. I wish it was Matter. Oh, I see what you did there. Roger, I feel like you have a question.

29:13No, no. I was just wondering, at what point is there a way where a consumer can just go into a big box store or whatever and just buy with confidence knowing that whatever they get is going to work with something else without necessarily having all that background information? You know, like we're like, you know, if my sister, who's not super tech savvy, can just like, hey, I need something to connect with something else, you know, like Wi-Fi. Like, oh, I have Wi-Fi. I have a laptop that uses Wi-Fi. Nine times out of ten, it's going to work with, you know, whatever. Right. And it's a fair question.

29:52I think that's what Matter is really trying to do. I think they're getting closer to that. We're seeing Matter on boxes all over the place. In fact, we're seeing Matter on boxes sometimes replacing the labels like works with Google, works with that, because if it works with Matter, it works with Matter. It works with anything that works with Matter. I think the thing they need to still educate people on and maybe simplify in terms of branding or labeling is this concept of a border router or a router, which is really a hub that makes the Matter stuff work. That's language consumers don't know or understand.

30:28So they really need to kind of help people understand, okay, you need some kind of a home base. You may already have one. Or if not, these products work that way. And then you can connect any of this stuff. Yeah. And like you said, some TVs do this. If they have an Apple TV, it does it. If they have an Echo, it does it. Like there's so many things that do it now. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the thermostats that I saw from Akara includes its own hub. So, yeah. Very nice. Well, thank you, Richard. That's good stuff. And there's so much, especially in the smart home space out there. So I appreciate you helping us kind of cut through and focus on it.

31:05Absolutely. No AIs were injured here. All right. Let's check in on some quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news. Bloomberg sources say the Chinese government plans to approve purchases of NVIDIA H20, H20, H200 chips this quarter for select commercial use. but it will prohibit military, sensitive government agencies, critical infrastructure, and state-owned companies from buying them. That begrudging like, all right, fine, we'll let you buy some stuff. European Commission has extended an order for X to retain internal documents and data related to Grok until the end of 2026.

31:44This is part of a continuing investigation of the generation of non-consensual sexual images by Grok. Alphabet's market cap, a calculation of its stock value, passed Apple this week to take the second spot for the first time since 2019. NVIDIA remains number one at the top of the list. It's not happening fast, but Apple is just slipping down and it's the stock market. So it's not necessarily means everything, but that is an interesting thing to note. Spotify announced a new messages feature Wednesday that lets users see what their friends are listening to in real time and then send requests to start a collaborative listening session called Jams.

32:24Let's jam. Let's jam, man. And Apple announced it will switch from Goldman Sachs to JPMorgan Chase as the bank behind the Apple credit card. It will remain a master card, but you will get issued a new card when this happens. If you have an Apple savings account, you'll be able to choose whether you want to stay with Goldman or switch to JPMorgan Chase. And this transition isn't happening tomorrow. It's expected to take about two years. if you've got feedback about anything that has been going on here at ces please please please let us know about it you can get in touch with us on the socials at dtns show on x instagram threads blue sky and mastodon for tiktok and youtube you can find us at daily tech news show

33:11all right trisha let's talk about what you wanted to focus on this year at ces and what stood out to you? So every year at CES, I get major FOMO because there's no way one person can see everything, which is why I love coming here and talking to all of you so that we can meet the minds and see what there is to see. But out of what I did get a chance to see this year, probably top TV for me, which I was surprised it didn't make CNET's top TV list, is TCL's SQD mini LED. It's just gorgeous. It's TCL's approach and kind of a different approach to the RGB mini LEDs that we're seeing out there. And it's just, it's super, super bright.

33:50And the picture is stunningly gorgeous. I was able to go to a press event under embargo about a month-ish ago where I looked at that TV, the SQD mini LED, next to two of the other top contenders. No names to be said there. But next to two of the other top TVs in the market. And honestly, the picture blew me away. in certain situations. So it's one of those that all these different TV technologies really shine in certain situations. So depending what you watch more, right? Like OLED, obviously, for contrast. But the best way I can describe what SQD Mini LED looks like from a viewer perspective is similar or, in some cases, almost interchangeable with OLED in terms of the contrast, but much brighter, richer colors.

34:37And so it was just stunning. I really liked it. I don't know if anybody else got a chance to see it, but it was gorgeous. I did. That TV is absolutely beautiful. And it gives you the, am I looking at a TV or am I looking out of a window until you perceive, okay, it's not 3D. It's just really clear. But, man, that thing looks good. It looks so good. Well, and if I understand it right, they have fewer dimming zones. So it's like RGB in that respect, right? They were saying up to 20 ,000 dedicated dimming zones. Or I'm sorry, more dimming zones. More. More dimming zones. Smaller dimming areas. Yeah.

35:08Yeah, smaller dimming areas, more dimming zones. Exactly. So that they can achieve some of that color control, even though they're using the blue or the white LEDs instead of the RGB ones. But that brings the price down. This shouldn't be more expensive. So they'll be able to do those nice, large-sized televisions that TCL really has made a vast jump in that part of the market for the big TVs, but with this picture quality. Yeah. Now, I know you're always on the hunt for some PC stuff. What did you find there? Always. Yeah, so I'm a PC enthusiast. I love to build strange-looking PCs. And so for that this year, what I found was Cooler Master has a case that has a little stage on the front of it.

35:52And they have a new adapter for it. So the stage before was very small. So you could put a little small figure on there. Some of the cases have an LED panel behind it. So you could, like, show a cool background behind your action figure as the front of your tower, right? And this year at CES, I saw they now have an extender for that stage. Apparently, they got enough feedback that people want to put a bigger figure. So a figure that's maybe as tall as your entire case. That's going to take a little bit more depth. So there's just a little stage extender you can pop on the front. But if you haven't seen the way that they do this, there's even little pin lighting at the top so that your action figures are perfectly displayed.

36:28I collect toys and like PCs. So this was a nice meeting of the world for me. Yeah, it was very cool. And then the other thing I saw in the PC world that was cool is from Thermaltake. They had this PC that the best way I can describe it is a bunk bed PC. So it's actually like two PCs stacked on top of each other, like two full sets, but in one case. So I've heard people describing this as like the best gaming couples PC because it's one tower you can pop in the middle and then just have two separate setups. But it was really stunning to look at. And of course, it was just an example of things you could do within this case.

37:02But it was really neat. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And it fits two power supplies. Oh, yeah. That's great. I'm interested in the extended stage because it sounds like I can probably fit my G.I. Joe with the Kung Fu grip. Yeah. Do a whole G.I. Joe-themed build. I need to see it. Oh, yeah. It's awesome. That would be amazing. All right. Gaming stuff? Did you find any good gaming stuff? Gaming stuff. I'm not sure if anybody else saw this. And this is one that, cool, maybe? HyperX paired up with another company that does like brainwave reading technology to make a gaming headset that can read your mind is how it's being pitched.

37:41Oh, so so like the ones where you can control the stuff. So it's not control. It's not giving you, you know, mental input. What it's doing is giving you real time data of your mental state. And, you know, so there's two different applications that they had suggested for it that were interesting to me. There was one for esports pros to be able to make sure that they're calm and focused before a match. And they had a software that would kind of help you get in that state a little bit, but you could monitor in real time. So know when you're ready to game. And then there was one that they had suggested for streamers potentially to use so that chat could see in real time.

38:16Like if the streamer's tired, maybe they need a break. And we're all getting these. Right. And so I just thought it was really interesting. I don't know that it's something I'm like rushing out to incorporate into my setup, but it was definitely something I hadn't seen before. So that stuck out to me. Yeah, no, that is fascinating. It's the kind of thing where I'm not sure exactly what it's for yet. Like I can kind of get the e-sports part of it, but I bet somebody is going to figure out some really interesting ways of implementing that. For sure. All right. What else? Anything else? I mean, the other thing I'd like to round it out with was just so many robots.

38:51And Rob, I hear you are on this page with me of the robot roundup at CES. So many robots does not encapsulate the number of robots that are here. So Tom and I, I think last week, week before last, we kind of just threw out, how many robots will we actually get to walk up to and see up and close? I think you said. Well, I didn't think I'd be walking around that much. So I said something in the 20s, which was like a low. You have 21. I went with 33. I stopped counting at 53. I said, OK, if I can get a full 20 over the number that I've seen, there are so many. I kid you not. I saw at least 110, 115 robots that I actually looked up and said, oh, another robot.

39:29Oh, another robot. So robots are here and we've got some pictures of them. It's you know, there's so yeah, here is a robot that cuts your grass. Thank you. But in case you've got dog toys or stuff in the yard, it's got a robotic arm that will pick stuff up and move it out of the way. When it cuts your grass, we've got robots that, you know, look like little dogs. dogs uh you know we actually look like dogs we've got robot dogs that don't look like dogs here is this one is really cool this is an actual bobcat so this is a robot bobcat so you don't have to sit out in the sun and dig the hole or move the gravel it will actually just do it for you you can stay even though bobcats have had air conditioning on them for for years probably for decades you don't even have to be in them anymore these things will just go out and do what you need them to do so just scroll through the pictures here is a drone actually i got to interview the ceo and one of the co-founders of helio yesterday so these are drones they look like these are not the dji drones that just got banned you know uh these these drones do all kind of things here are robots that just they they track your mood um they they smile at you they don't really do a whole lot they're they're not expensive but they just kind of look at you and smile just your buddy They're just your buddy.

40:42So there are all kind of drones. This one, we talked about Yardbo last year. They've built a smaller one for folks who are like, that's just a little bit too big for me. So the gist here is that there are drones, there are robots everywhere. Now, this one is really cool. I definitely wanted to get this one for my dad. So chess has, you've been able to play chess for a long time through computers, but this is an actual robot that will move the pieces for you And you can play online with anybody else in the world who either has another one of these devices or has a app that they could interface with this.

41:16And you can just play, you know, play actual chess and have the pieces physically move for you. That is so cool. I'm so sad I missed that one. I have no idea what this robot does. It looks kind of like Wally. I thought it was cute. So, so, so, so, so here is the robot dog that doesn't look like a dog, but it's actually rolling over and playing dead like a dog. So there's just robots, robots, robots, robots here at CES 2026. So many robots. I saw a robot that could make you a drink like a bartender robot. Lots of coffee robots. So many robots. And all the ones that I took pictures of are the ones that they look like robots.

41:52Most of the robots that are here don't look like robots. They are excavators. They are combines. They are cars that have level four or level five driving that we won't see here anytime in the near future. They are in everything. And if you have a device that's going out and is doing stuff autonomously on its own, it technically is a robot. This last one is a little video of robots doing dance moves in Tai Chi. And I'm just thinking, it's like, why are we so hell-bent on building Terminators? I don't know. But we have robots that can now fight each other. The viral video is the one that punches itself and then falls down onto the ground.

42:28Oh, yes. And I've seen another one where the humanoid robot just runs into a mirror repeatedly and the whole mirror is destroyed. Uh, they're almost all from Chinese companies too. That is, that is something to note more than 40 humanoid robot startups began in China in 2025. That's according to Orbach, uh, which does visual perception systems. So they, they kind of know who's making these. Uh, and the buzzword to watch is physical AI. You hear people say physical AI. You're going to hear people saying physical AI a lot more. That means putting the smarts into the machine, right? Not just the humanoid robot, but the combine and, and all of that kind of thing.

43:04And that's where all these platform companies want to go. They want to create the physical AI infrastructure to sell to those Chinese companies that are making the robots that they want to sell to us so that we don't have to fold our laundry. Yeah, I definitely saw a robot make a bed yesterday. Did it make it well? It did. It even like smoothed the comforter out when it was done. I was impressed. I put on a duvet cover yesterday and I didn't have fun. So more of that, please. Yes, please. Well, all week we've been asking for your thoughts from CES, everything that we're covering, some stuff that maybe we haven't covered.

43:39So we said, hey, send us your thoughts. And you did. Thank you for sending them. Here are a few that we thought everybody might be interested in hearing. Yeah. In response to the story of HP selling a computer and a keyboard for enterprise, Matt wrote, quote, when discussing the keyboard, I was thinking it might be useful in conjunction with glasses that act as a display, many of which you've also talked about, especially in a cramped environment like an airplane. Now, this HP keyboard, I don't think has a battery, but if you can get the power source to it, yeah, plug that X-Reel into it. That'd be awesome.

44:12Yeah. That would actually be pretty slick, actually. That's a fine use case. The mouse would be the next tricky part, but you can get wireless mouse. Yeah. Trackball. Oh, yeah, that's a good one, Amos. And if you're using the glasses, you can kind of just pinch in the air of what you want. Oh, if you get that kind of glasses. Let's go away in the future. Let's just pinch in the air. Yeah, yeah. In response to the story about Gmail sunsetting Pop 3 earlier in the week, Stim wrote, Wow, Pop 3 was still alive at Gmail? Even in a slow-moving government, we've had that turned off for years. He works for a government company.

44:47And in my for-profit industry days, I remember getting rid of POP3 was a major initiative to get to current standards, even at a small publications and fulfillment-oriented organization way back in 2010. Believe it or not, there are still a lot of folks that use POP3. Like if you get your own web hosting and you have email with it, the chances are that it's a POP3 server. So it was kind of cool that if you use Gmail as your primary email, you could use it to pull in from POP3. So you're going to have to go find another device at this point. Just use iMap. Yeah. So it's a lot more. I actually thought that there's a lot of people who are using it that I didn't think were.

45:23Just use Pine. No, nobody remembers Pine. And in response to our kickoff interview with CTA CEO Gary Shapiro, Andre wrote, I liked the mention of accessibility technology. I read a quote last week that everyone is temporarily abled. Everyone ages and has health issues, especially since people are living longer. That's so true. Very good point. Something to keep in mind if you're like, well, that doesn't apply to me. It doesn't apply to you now. And then finally, C-Spawn had some questions for us based on what we've seen over the course of the live coverage. Said thank you for the live coverage of CES.

46:02Great crew on site and in the studios, lively and fun. I'm wondering if these were items you saw at CES. consumer drones, especially because of the change with DJI sales to the U.S., and fitness hardware that works with Apple Fitness and Apple Watch. So as I am walking through the show and seeing you guys make drones, the first question is, where do you make them and what are you going to do? So DJI is, they're not here. They're not, they would normally be here in a big way. They simply aren't. But the other drone makers are like, they all have plans. They we need to talk to this person. We need to talk to this person and we'll get a waiver.

46:43So drones are not going to disappear. They will still be a thing. But it is it is on the forefront of what people are thinking about. They are all saying that they've got a story that they need to tell and figure out how to actually get their drones approved. So it's going to happen. You were I think you were talking to one company that already sources its parts within North America. So, yeah, Helio actually got a good interview of them. They actually are one of the few manufacturers that they completely are here in the United States. They do everything in Richmond, Texas. So their phones have been ringing off the hook for the last three weeks.

47:18It's actually been longer because the people who are using commercial drones have known about this for a year. It just happened, but we've been talking about doing this for a year. So because they make their drones here in the United States, they're good. And they're one of the few companies that are just so good. They don't have to do anything different than what they're doing right now. Yeah. And Insta 360, which makes really good cameras and gimbals and all that sort of thing, is right down the road here in the central hall. And they are showing off a drone as well. So that's kind of the state of the drones.

47:48Anybody see any good fitness hardware, Apple fitness hardware? I didn't. Lots of fitness hardware, but nothing specific to Apple fitness. You know, anytime I see anything that's iOS only, it's an immediate pass. Yeah. I'm so with you, Trish. Well, all right. Before we wrap up here, any last thoughts about CES in general? Like what was the overall trend? What was your overall feeling about it? Seems like obviously robots was was the not surprise trend, but it sort of dominated things. Obviously, the RGB TVs were really big on the first days of the show with all the press conferences around it. Trish, let's start with you.

48:27Do you have a thought on the overall trend? The big thing that's hard to avoid this year is AI is everywhere. Yeah. It's everywhere and it's in everything. And sometimes it's not really in everything. They're just saying it is. And differentiating between different types of AI. That's kind of the exhaustion that I feel. We had the CESs that were all the Internet of Things. And every couple of years we have a new trendy thing at CES. And right now it's like, I was laughing with some of my friends about that. I don't know if you remember the AI thermal paste. thing. It's just like, everyone's like, and it's AI, make sure you mention it's AI.

49:03And you're like, but it's not, that's a sensor. I don't know if you noticed this, but I found that there are a lot of companies trying not to use AI and just talk about functionality. That's so smart from a marketing perspective. And you can kind of tell if it's, if it's a more legitimate use of AI, because they use the word less and they talk more about like, oh, it's got a smart image sensor, It's got an algorithm that can identify this. And I noticed when just popping around, seeing like if I saw AI big on the poster, there was less to it. Yeah. But the companies that understand like, yeah, that term just gets thrown around as a little more meaningless and actually had a legitimate thing could describe that legitimate thing.

49:46Yeah. What is the end user benefit? That's what we hear about. Yeah. Mobility was big. It's kind of big every year, but it's really cool to see what companies are thinking about of how we can make life better for people. Yeah. So whether it be, you know, you know, glasses that allow someone who's visually impaired to better perceive the world by, you know, hey, this is Trish, but they can't see your face. But it knows you because they've already got you in your contacts. And you said, hey, here's Trish walking up on you. And it literally talks to you conversation like, hey, here's Trish walking up on you.

50:21It's it's it's just cool to see. We saw a lot of stuff that help people who, you know, have mobility issues, you know, with the wheelchairs. One of the you know, one of the award winners was, you know, a wheel that you can attach. That is really cool. So I thought that that was cool. And the other part, it is an A.I. show. There are so many manufacturers, especially when we go over to the South Hall, that we are building devices that interface with ChatGPT or interface with Gemini. They're just these devices. Don't know what the devices are supposed to be, but we're building them. And we're going to connect to these AI bots.

50:55And hopefully you will buy them and wear them on you, whether it be on a lapel. You put them in your pocket. You wear them around your neck. There are so many devices. Many of them, you would think that they look like phones. But they're saying, no, these aren't phones. They just look like phones. They're a little smaller than a phone. They have a screen on them, and you can talk to ChatGPT, but it's like a purpose-built device. So AI is in everything at this show. Richard, what about you? Did you identify a trend that we haven't really talked about? Yeah, well, I think last year the thing that you couldn't avoid was pool robots everywhere.

51:28And I think this year we're seeing the category of yard robotics expand dramatically. Every company out there seems to have either a yard robot that is a mower or does some other function in the yard. You mentioned the YARBO. That's one of my favorite product lines, actually. It can do everything for you, including acting as a sentry. And the pool robots are getting more clever in terms of how they approach things. I saw one that was solar-powered yesterday. It's a really huge expansion in that space. That excites me. I think it's a useful product category. Fantastic. Well, folks, this is our last day at CES.

52:16And we're leaving today, but we're definitely going to probably still be talking about it. So if you've got some thoughts, if you've been thinking about something, please give us your insight. You can share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. All right. Let's just take a breath and say well done, everybody, on the CES coverage. I mean, it's not done here yet because we've got to break all this stuff down and get it out of here. Right, Amos? Yeah. So to everybody working on the production as well. Yeah. Yeah. So Amos and Kevin helping Amos with the setup. Amos bringing all this tech in from Alaska to do it.

52:57Well done. Well done. Roger and Sarah for keeping the home fires burning. Thank you, guys. Burning fires. for showing up. Let's not talk about that. Too soon, too soon. And thank you to all our guests all week, especially Richard and Trish today. Thank you guys for coming in. Thanks to David Katzmeyer for coming in. Thanks to the CTA for accommodating us. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. It is because you listen and you support us on Substack and Patreon.com slash DTNS that we're able to do this kind of coverage. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And if you'd like to become a patron, patreon.com slash DTNS.

53:38That's a wrap. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.

53:44The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.