CES 2026 live: all the news, announcements, and innovations from the show floor and beyond

Oops, I did it again: I wore an exoskeleton to the world’s biggest tech show, walking the streets and casinos of Las Vegas with a robot powering my legs. I don’t mean I briefly tried a new gadget there. I mean that for the second year in a row, robotic legs helped me walk the miles it takes to do my job at CES.

But this year, I found it easier — because a fanny pack was my exoskeleton of choice.

The Lego Smart Brick won our Best in Show award at CES 2026, and it was no wonder after watching Lego designer Maarten Simons’ expert demo there. So I thought: why not let you virtually attend the same tech demo I did? Before I left Las Vegas, I snuck back into Lego’s suite to film a 15-minute uncut immersive video of what these bricks can do.

It just so happens I brought an unusual camera to Las Vegas this year: a Qoocam Q3 Ultra modded for VR180 capture by Siyang Qi. It creates spatial stereoscopic 3D video that you can experience in a headset (like the Meta Quest), or tap-to-drag on a flat screen, or even tilt using the sensors in your phone.

We spent last week running to meetings, demos, and the convention floors to see as much as we could at CES 2026. And now that we’ve (sort of) recovered, it’s time to answer any questions you still have. Did we replace Dom with his clone? Did Jen survive a robot falling on her? Is Vee tired of talking about the taint bandaid? There were so many products throughout Las Vegas last week — and so many experiences — and we want to talk all about them. At least, as much as we can.

Join part of our CES crew later today, January 13th, at 3PM ET for a subscriber-only AMA. You can start leaving questions in the comments now and we’ll start answering them when the AMA begins. See you all soon.

It’s January, which means there’s a whole year of rectangular glass slabs ahead of us. But before that happens, I managed to find phones of a different shape lurking around the corners of the CES convention center halls. They weren’t center stage, of course. That was reserved for robots doing laundry badly. But in the margins at tech’s biggest show, I saw some glimmers of hope that the future of phones might not look as same-y as it has for the past half decade — at least, if you know where to look.

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.

I picked Aqara’s Smart Lock U400 and Roborock’s Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor.

It was a banner year for smart home products, and the big trends I saw weren’t about new product categories; they were about bringing better features and lower prices to smart home staples such as smart lighting, smart locks, cameras, and TVs.

Keychron announced new mechanical keyboards with marathon battery life at CES, but this trackball stole the spotlight. The Nape Pro is Keychron’s first trackball, and its slender frame means it can work on your desk in multiple ways. You can keep it to the right or left of a keyboard like a traditional trackball, or you can tuck it in front and use it without moving your hands from the keys.

That positioning makes it a bit like a giant Lenovo TrackPoint, typically found on ThinkPad laptops but sometimes used on dedicated keyboards. And it should allow you to move your cursor, turn the Nape Pro’s rotary dial, or press one of its six fully programmable buttons — all without changing your hand positioning.

At CES this year, humanoid robots appeared to be closer than ever to moving into our homes. LG introduced CLOiD, a household robot it says can handle chores like preparing food and loading the washing machine. SwitchBot showed off the Onero H1, another home helper built to tackle everyday tasks, and Boston Dynamics, WIRobotics, Zeroth, and others debuted even more impressive humanoids.

Advances in robotics and AI have made robots smarter and more capable than ever. The question is whether they’re capable enough to do our chores. We already have robots that vacuum our floors and mow our lawns — but there’s one job they haven’t mastered: laundry.

One of the issues holding Auracast back from wider mainstream use is some companies’ lack of support for the Bluetooth technology — Apple being a prime example. With iOS having 58 percent of the market share in North America and nearly 28 percent worldwide, a decision by Apple to enable native Auracast support would potentially put millions of Auracast devices into the world with a firmware update. As of yet, Apple has made no comment on Auracast, and I’m not hopeful that we’ll get one anytime soon.

But the audio technology company Atitan thinks it has the solution. It’s developing a small disc-shaped transceiver — the splitR — that can attach to an iPhone’s MagSafe and turn it into an Auracast device capable of either transmitting or receiving an Auracast broadcast. The company’s connectR app, which will be available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play this coming summer, will allow you to see broadcasts around you, your connected devices, and create your own Auracast channels or group listening sessions. You’ll be able to interact with all of your streaming platforms to play songs and playlists. Atitan is adding in a social component, too, allowing posts and chats with friends.

AI toys, companions, and robots have been everywhere at CES this year, but among the horde of waddling plushies and light-up emoji eyes, two stood out to me. HeyMates and Buddyo are each betting that the collectible figurine boom is going to come back with an AI-powered vengeance, letting us chat to sports stars and superheroes from our desks.

The core concept to both is this: Take a cutesy figurine and stick it onto a smart base with a speaker, microphone, and maybe a flashing ring of light or two. Then use an accompanying app to power a basic LLM chatbot based on the figurine, so you can talk to Albert Einstein about relativity, or Darth Vader about crushing dissident forces, with some fun wake words and a cheesy joke or two.

We just gave the Lego Smart Brick our Best In Show award at CES 2026, and I wanted to stop by The Lego Group’s suite to get a last glimpse before I left Las Vegas.

To my surprise, the company showed off one more feature I didn’t see during my first demo, perhaps the most impressive one should these bricks make their way to adult builders: precise distance measurement.

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, it’s nowhere to be found at CES 2026.

CES isn’t a big smartphone show, but there have been more new handsets here than I expected. Samsung gave us our first hands-on look at the Galaxy Z TriFold, Motorola launched its first book-style Razr Fold, and phone keyboard company Clicks revealed its BlackBerry-esque Android phone the Communicator.

It may have been one of the smallest devices announced at CES 2026, but Lego’s new Smart Brick was also one of the most talked about debuts of the show. We’ve recognized it as the “Best in show” in our CES 2026 awards, and following the Smart Play system’s launch earlier this week, the first three sets featuring the new Smart Brick are now available for preorder.

Lego is introducing its Smart Brick to the world as part of three new sets in its popular Star Wars line that demonstrate many of the brick’s unique capabilities. The cheapest set is the $69.99, 473-piece Smart Play: Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter that includes one Smart Brick, one Smart Tag, and a Smart Darth Vader minifigure. The $89.99 SMART Play: Luke’s Red Five X-Wing is a 581-piece set that pairs the Smart Brick with five Smart Tags and Smart Luke and Leia figures.