Tag: CES 2026

TechCrunch Mobility: ‘Physical AI’ enters the hype machine | TechCrunch

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Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for all things “future of transportation.” To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!

It’s been a minute, folks! As you might recall, the newsletter took a little holiday break. We’re back and well into 2026. And a lot has happened since the last edition.

I spent the first week of the year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And while I wrote about this last January, it’s worth repeating: U.S. automakers have left the building.

What has filled the void in the Las Vegas Convention Center? Autonomous vehicle tech companies (Zoox, Tensor Auto, Tier IV, and Waymo, which rebranded its Zeekr RT, to name a few), Chinese automakers like Geely and GWM, software and automotive chip companies, and loads of what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls “physical AI.”

The term, which is sometimes called “embodied AI,” describes the use of AI outside the digital world and into the real, physics-based one. AI models, combined with sensors, cameras, and the motorized controls, allow that physical thing — humanoid robot, drone, autonomous forklift, robotaxi — to detect and understand what’s in this real environment and make decisions to operate within it. And it was all over the place from agriculture and robotics to autonomous vehicles and drones, industrial manufacturing, and wearables.

Hyundai had one of the busiest and largest exhibits with a near-constant line wrapped around the entrance. The Korean automaker wasn’t showing cars. Nope, it was robots of various forms, including the Atlas humanoid robot, courtesy of its subsidiary Boston Dynamics. There were also innovations that have come out of Hyundai Motor Group Robotics LAB, including a robot that charges electric autonomous vehicles, and a four-wheel electric platform called the Mobile Eccentric Droid (MobEd) that is going into production this year. It seems everyone was embracing and showcasing robotics, particularly humanoids.

The hype around humanoids, specifically, and physical AI, in general, was palpable. I asked Mobileye co-founder and president Amnon Shashua about this because his company just bought his humanoid robotics startup for $900 million: “What do you say when people tell you humanoid robots are all hype?”

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“The internet was also a hype, remember in 2000, the crisis of the internet,” Shashua said. “It did not mean that [the] internet is not a real thing. Hype means that companies are overvalued for a certain period of time, and then they crash. It does not mean that the domain is not real. I believe that the domain of humanoids is real.”

A few notable stories from CES:
Nvidia launches Alpamayo, open AI models that allow autonomous vehicles to ‘think like a human’

This is Uber’s new robotaxi from Lucid and Nuro

Mobileye acquires humanoid robot startup Mentee Robotics for $900M

Now onto the other non-CES and more recent news …

A little bird

Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

President Trump made comments this week at a Detroit Economic Club meeting about welcoming Chinese automakers into the United States that did not sit well with many in the auto industry, according to insiders I have spoken to. Specifically, I have been told the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (the industry lobbying group) is “freaking out,” one DC insider told me.

“If they want to come in and build a plant and hire you and hire your friends and your neighbors, that’s great, I love that,” Trump said, according to reporters in attendance. “Let China come in, let Japan come in.”

A couple of notes. Japanese companies like Toyota are already very much in the United States. The bigger hurdle, beyond protests from within the boardrooms of U.S. automakers, is existing law. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued a rule that restricts the import and sale of certain connected vehicles and related hardware and software linked to China or Russia. This essentially bans the sale of Chinese vehicles in the country.

Avery Ash, who is CEO of SAFE, a nonpartisan organization focused on securing U.S. energy, critical materials, and supply chains, weighed in about the dangers of allowing Chinese automakers to sell their vehicles in the United States. Side note: Ash was on my podcast, the Autonocast, which touches on some of this subject.

“Welcoming Chinese automakers to build cars here in the U.S. will reverse these hard-won accomplishments and put Americans at risk,” he said. ”We’ve seen this strategy backfire in Europe and elsewhere — it would have potentially catastrophic impacts on our automotive industry, have ripple effects on our entire defense industrial base, and make every American less secure.”

Meanwhile, Canada is opening the door to Chinese automakers. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced his country will slash its 100% import tax on Chinese EVs to just 6.1%, Sean O’Kane reports.

”Got a tip for us to share in the Little Bird section? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.

Deals!

Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

Budget carrier Allegiant agreed to buy rival Sun Country Airlines for about $1.5 billion in cash and stock.

Dealerware, which sells software services to automotive OEMs and retailers, was acquired by a group of investors led by Wavecrest Growth Partners and Radian Capital. Automotive Ventures and automotive industry executives David Metter and Devin Daly also participated. The terms were not disclosed.

Long-distance bus and train provider Flix acquired the majority share of European airport transfer-platform Flibco. Luxembourg company SLG will retain some ownership stake in Flibco. Terms weren’t disclosed.

JetZero, the Long Beach, California, startup developing a midsized triangular aircraft designed to save on fuel, raised $175 million in a Series B round led by B Capital, Bloomberg reported.

Joby Aviation, a company developing electric air taxis, reached an agreement to buy a 700,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Dayton, Ohio, to support its plans to double production to four aircraft per month in 2027.

Luminar has reached a deal to sell its lidar business to a company called Quantum Computing Inc. for just $22 million. If that seems low, you’re right. Luminar’s valuation peaked in 2021 at $11 billion.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

Bluspark Global, a New York-based shipping and supply chain software company, didn’t realize its platform was vulnerable and open to anyone on the internet. Here’s how a security researcher (and TechCrunch) got it fixed.

The Federal Trade Commission finalized an order that bans General Motors and its OnStar telematics service from sharing certain consumer data with consumer reporting agencies. Read the full story on what that means.

InDrive, the company that started as a ride-hailing platform that lets users set the price, is diversifying and starting to execute on its “super app” strategy. That means more in-app advertising across its top 20 markets and expanding grocery delivery to Pakistan. Read the full story here.

Motional, the majority Hyundai-owned autonomous vehicle company, has rebooted. When Motional paused its operations last year, I wasn’t sure it was going to survive. Other AV companies with big backers have seen their funding disappear in a blink, so it was certainly plausible. But the company is here and with a new AI-first approach. Before you roll your eyes at that term, take a read of my article, which includes a demo ride and an interview with CEO Laura Major. Then feel free to hit my inbox with your thoughts.

New York governor Kathy Hochul plans to introduce legislation that would effectively legalize robotaxis in the state with the exception of New York City. No details on this yet; I’ve been told it will all be revealed in her executive budget proposal next week. What we do know is the proposal is designed to expand the state’s existing AV pilot program to allow for “the limited deployment of commercial for-hire autonomous passenger vehicles outside New York City.” My article delves deeper into what she shared and gives an update on Waymo’s NYC permit.

Tesla is ditching the one-time fee option for its Full Self-driving (Supervised) software and will now sell access to the feature through a monthly subscription.

On-demand drone delivery company Wing is bringing its service to another 150 Walmart stores as part of an expanded partnership with the retailer.

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Kirsten Korosec

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January 18, 2026
The Best Smart Home Tech at CES 2026

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The smart home has been drifting into a world of interoperability lately that I never would have expected just a few years ago. And at CES 2026, that was on display—from smart locks that will support the new universal Aliro digital key standard to cameras that work with Matter, and therefore (eventually) with every major smart home platform in existence, there’s plenty to look forward to if you’re a fan of not being locked into any one ecosystem.

I also saw companies exploring new technologies (especially in smart locks, where on-device authentication in the form of palm vein scanning and facial recognition seemed to be everywhere), new hubs, sensors, and AI ideas that seem to make sense and aren’t the focus of the show. There was also a lot of maturation in certain categories, from robotic lawn mowers to pool cleaning bots. Even Thread, a key wireless protocol for the Matter standard that lets smart home devices form a mesh network independent of home Wi-Fi, made a good showing.

Best Smart Lock

Lockin V7 Max

No smart lock has it all, but the V7 Max feels like it’s close. Wireless optical charging, palm and finger vein scanning, facial recognition, Matter support, and indoor and outdoor touchscreens and video cameras—all in a slick-looking, slender mortise door lock—make it one of the most compelling smart locks on its way to the market. Will it be expensive? Oh my, yes—Lockin hasn’t announced pricing, but its predecessor, the V5 Max, started at 39,990 New Taiwan dollars, or around $1,270 U.S. dollars.

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Best Thermostat

Aqara Thermostat Hub W200

Smart thermostats have almost exclusively been the domain of Nest and Ecobee for years, but Aqara debuted what could be a banger of an alternative at CES 2026: the Thermostat Hub W200. It’s more than just a thermostat; it has a millimeter wave presence sensor (that’s the kind that can tell if a person is in the room even if they’re sitting still), can work as a video doorbell monitor with Aqara video doorbells, and functions as a smart home hub for both Aqara and third-party Matter devices. Aqara is also the first company to announce compatibility with Apple Home’s new Adaptive Temperature and Clean Energy Guidance features.

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Best Smart Light

Govee Ceiling Light Ultra

Govee’s new Ceiling Light Ultra lies in a murky area between smart light and display, thanks to a 616-LED array of lights sitting under its plastic cover. With these, the 21-inch light can show vibrant colors, sure, but it can also display images with a lot more detail than something like its Curtain Lights. As a result, at CES 2026, I could make out the fuzzy animated visual of a rotating Earth just under this Matter-compatible light’s cover. There was a lot of lighting at the tech show, but the Ceiling Light Ultra was the most interesting that I saw, by far.

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Best New Smart Home Feature

Philips Hue Spatial Aware

Signify’s Philips Hue didn’t have anything in the way of new products to show, but still managed to impress me with its new SpatialAware feature. The feature lets you use your smartphone’s camera and LiDAR sensor to identify where Hue lights are positioned relative to one another, in order to use that information in scenes. In the company’s CES 2026 suite, that meant that one scene spread color over many lights so that they resembled a sunset. One brighter, yellow light served as the sun, while the remaining shades of yellow, orange, pink, and red appeared to radiate out from that to the other lights, their hue depending on where they were in the room. The feature is coming in spring 2026, but only to owners of the Philips Hue Bridge Pro.

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Best Robot Vacuum

Roborock Saros Rover

The Saros Rover can climb and clean stairs, something robot vacuum companies have been racing to achieve in recent years. That potentially beats even what I saw just a few months ago with the still-unreleased Eufy Marswalker or Dreame Cyber X, both of which are little mech suits/headcrab-likes that let separate robot vacuums drive up and down stairs to get between floors, but not clean the stairs themselves. At CES 2026, we saw the Saros Rover really could climb and clean stairs (very slowly). Of course, whether it’s worth paying however many thousands of dollars that Roborock will presumably ask for the Rover depends on whether or not it’s actually a good robot vacuum besides.

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Best Smart Home Sensor

Aqara Spatial Multi-Sensor FP400

Aqara, which already makes the FP2, one of the best millimeter wave presence sensors I’ve used, is stepping up its game with the Spatial Multi-Sensor FP400. For the uninitiated, presence sensors are a bit like occupancy sensors, but more precise and able to tell if someone is in the room even if they’re not moving, and can trigger automations based on specific regions of a room. The FP400 builds on that by being able to track up to 10 people at once, and by triggering automations based on when someone stands, sits, or lies down, according to the company. Like past Aqara presence sensors, it’ll be Matter-compatible. Aqara didn’t announce a release date or pricing.

Read more

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Wes Davis

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January 9, 2026
CES 2026: Everything revealed, from Nvidia’s debuts to AMD’s new chips to Razer’s AI oddities | TechCrunch

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CES 2026 is in full swing in Las Vegas, with the show floor open to the public after a packed couple of days occupied by press conferences from the likes of Nvidia, Sony, and AMD and previews from Sunday’s Unveiled event.

As has been the case for the past two years at CES, AI is at the forefront of many companies’ messaging, though the hardware upgrades and oddities that have long defined the annual event still have their place on the show floor and in adjacent announcements. We’ll be collecting the biggest reveals and surprises here, though you can still catch the spur-of-the-moment reactions and thoughts from our team on the ground via our live blog right here.

Let’s dive right in, starting with some of Monday’s biggest players.

Nvidia reveals AI model for autonomous vehicles, showcases Rubin architecture

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered an expectedly lengthy presentation at CES, taking a victory lap for the company’s AI-driven successes, setting the stage for 2026, and yes, hanging out with some robots.

The Rubin computing architecture, which has been developed to meet the increasing computation demands that AI adoption creates, is set to begin replacing Blackwell architecture in the second half of this year. It comes with speed and storage upgrades, but our senior AI editor Russell Brandom goes into the nitty-gritty of what distinguishes Rubin.

And Nvidia continued its push to bring the AI revolution into the physical world, showcasing its Alpamayo family of open source AI models and tools that will be used by autonomous vehicles this year. That approach, as senior reporter Rebecca Bellan notes, mirrors the company’s broader efforts to make its infrastructure the Android for generalist robots.

AMD’s keynote highlights new processors and partnerships

AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su delivered the first keynote of CES, with a presentation that featured partners, including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, AI legend Fei-Fei Li, Luma AI CEO Amit Jain, and more.

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Beyond the partner showcases, senior reporter Rebecca Szkutak detailed AMD’s approach toward expanding the reach of AI through personal computers using its Ryzen AI 400 Series processors.

The standout oddities of CES

Let’s face it, by this point in the show the major announcements have been made, products have been showcased, and it’s time to eye some of the most brow-raising reveals from CES. We started our list of what stood out to us as odd and noteworthy, but we’re open to more suggestions!

Highlights from CES breakout sessions

CES isn’t all hardware showcases and show floor attractions — there are plenty of additional industry panels and speakers drawing eyeballs. We kept tabs on a few notable highlights, ranging from Palmer Luckey pushing retro aesthetics, to why the “learn once, work forever” era may be over, to previews of the new Silicon Valley-based series “The Audacity,” to the expansion of Roku’s $3 streaming service, to All-In host Jason Calacanis putting a $25,000 bounty on an authentic Theranos device.

Ford’s AI assistant debuts

Ford is launching its assistant in the company’s app before a targeted 2027 release in its vehicles, with hosting managed by Google Cloud and the assistant itself built using off-the-shelf LLMs. As we noted in our coverage of the news, however, few details were offered around what drivers should expect from their experience with the assistant.

Caterpillar, Nvidia partner on automated construction equipment

As part of the ever-present push for AI’s impact on the physical world, Caterpillar and Nvidia announced a pilot program, “Cat AI Assistant,” which was demonstrated at CES Wednesday. This system, coming to one of Caterpillar’s excavator vehicles, is happening alongside another project to use Nvidia’s Omniverse simulation resources to help with construction project planning and execution.

Hands-on with Clicks Communicator

Image Credits:TechCrunch

One of the buzziest reveals of the show is the debut phone from Clicks Technology, the $499 Communicator, which brings back BlackBerry vibes with its physical keyboard, plus a separate $79 slide-out physical keyboard that can be used with other devices.

Check out our full rundown from the show floor here, but the Communicator makes a good first impression, per Consumer Editor Sarah Perez:

“In our hands-on test, the phone felt good to hold — not too heavy or light, and was easy to grip. Gadway told me the company settled on the device’s final form after dozens of 3D-printed shapes. The winning design for the phone features a contoured back that makes it easy to pick up and hold.

“The device’s screen is also somewhat elevated off the body, and its chin is curved up to create a recess that protects the keys when you place it face down.”

Check out the Skylight Calendar 2

Image Credits:Sarah Perez

This family planning tool caught our eyes on the show floor, not just for its calendar and planning capabilities, but for its AI capabilities that are able to sync calendars from different sources, create new to-dos based off of messages or photos, appointment reminders, and more. Check out our full impressions here.

Boston Dynamics and Google partner on Atlas robots

Hyundai’s press conference focused on its robotics partnerships with Boston Dynamics, but the companies revealed that they’re working with Google’s AI research lab rather than competitors to train and operate existing Atlas robots, as well as a new iteration of the humanoid robot that was shown onstage. Transportation editor Kirsten Korosec has the full rundown.

Amazon’s AI-centric update with Alexa+ is getting the kind of push you’d expect at CES, with the company launching Alexa.com for Early Access customers looking to use the chatbot via their browsers, along with a similar, revamped bot-focused app. Consumer editor Sarah Perez has the details, along with news on Amazon’s revamp to Fire TV and new Artline TVs, which have their own Alexa+ push.

On the Ring front, consumer reporter Ivan Mehta runs through the many announcements, from fire alerts to an app store for third-party camera integration, and more.

Razer joins the AI deluge with Project AVA and Motoko

In the past, Razer has been all about ridiculous hardware at CES, from three-screen laptops to haptic gaming cushions to a mask that landed the company a federal fine. This year, its two attention-grabbing announcements were for Project Motoko, which aims to function similarly to smart glasses, but without the glasses.

Then there’s Project AVA, which puts the avatar of an AI companion on your desk. We’ll let you watch the concept video for yourself.

Lego Smart Bricks mark the company’s first CES appearance

Lego joined CES for the first time to hold a behind-closed-doors showcase of its Smart Play System, which includes bricks, tiles, and Minifigures that can all interact with each other and play sounds, with both the debut sets having a Star Wars theme. Senior writer Amanda Silberling has all the details here.

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Morgan Little

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January 8, 2026
GameSir Stuck a Steering Wheel Inside a Controller, and It’s Actually Brilliant

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Depending on how “hardcore” you want to be, an entire apparatus for a full-fledged gaming racing wheel and pedals is a must for any racing aficionado. Nothing will come close to a simulationist setup, but GameSir may have the answer to make racing with a controller feel far more tactile and, dare I say it, more enjoyable.

The GameSir Swift Drive, announced during CES 2026, is a surprisingly complete controller by itself. You’ve likely already noticed the giant steering wheel stuck into the center of the controller. When I first wrapped my hands around it, I expected to thumb a loose-feeling circle laid awkwardly in the middle of the device. In reality, the wheel hums with force feedback you usually get with high-end racing wheels. When a car rolls over gravel or rocky terrain, you’ll feel the push and pull of the wheel under your thumbs. That’s due to the miniaturized drive motor and an additional three haptic motors to offer a visceral feel. No, you won’t be tricked into imagining you’re driving a real Ferrari at 200 mph. It’s simply a more enjoyable way to take your digital car out for a drive.

© GameSir

© GameSir

I spoke with GameSir’s CEO and the controller’s lead designer, Betta Core. He told me his initial concept for the device came from his youth as a racing game player. He said he wished he could have a full-feedback racing device without the massive haul of simulationist controls you need to get there.

For the sake of that feel, the controller has to make a few sacrifices. Chief amongst those is the right thumbstick. Instead of the usual flat lily pad for your thumb, there’s a right nub you’ll use for checking your six o’clock when in a car’s cockpit. The stick and nub are both Hall effect to reduce the chance of stick drift, but you won’t use this controller for anything but racing.

The controller won’t be available until the second half of this year. The initial iteration of the design still needs a few tweaks and finishing touches. Core told me he and his team had only finished the prototype shortly before coming to CES. As for price, the designer told me GameSir was targeting a price of somewhere north of $200.

Even if you’re not a racing fan, I can imagine this controller would make dodging cops in Grand Theft Auto VI feel extra visceral. We’ll know how well both the controller and game perform when they (hopefully) launch later this year.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Kyle Barr

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January 7, 2026
Roku’s $3 streaming service Howdy will be coming to other platforms, CEO says | TechCrunch

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At CES 2026, Anthony Wood, Roku’s founder, chairman, and CEO, offered a hint about the future of the company’s newest streaming channel, Howdy, and its ambition to become a broader competitor in the market. Launched last August, the $2.99 per month streaming service offers ad-free access to library content, at a time when rival streamers are raising their prices.

“The opportunity for Howdy was — if you just look at what’s going on in the streaming world with streaming services, they’re getting more expensive. They keep raising prices, and they keep adding larger and larger ad loads,” Wood explained at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES. “And so, the part of the market where it actually started — low-cost and no ads — is gone now. There’s no streaming services that address that portion of the market.”

The exec also suggested that Roku intends to bring Howdy to a broader market than just Roku customers, saying that while it started on Roku, the company “will take it off-platform as well.”

Asked to clarify offstage if that meant mobile apps, the web, and elsewhere, Wood told TechCrunch the company has not yet said where, specifically, it plans to bring Howdy, but that “we want to distribute it everywhere.” That seems to suggest that Howdy could be an app that you one day load on any device, large or small. Wood declined to share subscriber numbers with TechCrunch, but said onstage, “I think if I just look at the market, it’s going to be a big streaming service.”

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Sarah Perez

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January 7, 2026
Ikea Will Soon Sell an Adorable, Tiny, Surprisingly Nice-Sounding Bluetooth Speaker for $10

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At CES 2026, Ikea spent its first-ever time at the tech event showing off a number of new products, including a new Bluetooth speaker it calls the Kallsup. It’s a teeny tiny cube that is, in every way that matters, far more of a delight than its $10 price tag lets on. It will be available in April in red, white, and green colors.

The Kallsup is lightweight yet solid-feeling, a plastic box with speaker holes on one face, a USB-C port on the back for charging, and two buttons astride a small LED status light for power, playback, and pairing. It was immediately charming, and not just because it’s so dang adorable; every action you do on it prompts these whimsical human-made noises—like a boop or a whooshing sound. The speakers use Bluetooth 5.3 and up to 100 Kallsup speakers can be synchronized together by doing the proper sequence of long presses of the play button between them.

© Wes Davis / Gizmodo

With a few paired together, the Kallsup cubes were able to quickly fill the room with better-than-you’d-expect sound—not tinny or muffled. They certainly didn’t push out much bass, and neither would I expect that at this size and price.

The only real criticisms I have, at first glance, spring from Ikea’s decision to only put two buttons on the box: a play button and one emblazoned with the Bluetooth logo. It’s not obvious to me that you’d long press the play button, rather than the Bluetooth one, for pairing speakers together, and neither is it clear how they’re turned off, or even if you can do that manually. If you wait long enough, though, the speakers time themselves out.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Wes Davis

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January 6, 2026
Lenovo Spins Its Latest ThinkBook Right Round (Like a Record, Baby)

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We’ve seen laptops that fold and laptops that roll, but what about a laptop that spins? Lenovo’s latest weird notebook design that’s soon to become an actual product you can buy is a new ThinkBook with a screen on a pivot. In a version of a beleaguered coder’s worst nightmare, the laptop’s screen can follow you no matter how far you try to scurry around your desk.

Previewed to Gizmodo for CES 2026, the $1,650 ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist uses a hinge that can rotate along a horizontal and vertical axis. Alongside face tracking with its webcam, the laptop can follow your movements when you’re pacing during a meeting or lounging back in your chair, watching Netflix and ignoring all the pings you’re getting on Slack. The Auto Twist should be available starting in June this year.

Lenovo also tried to position the Auto Twist as a kind of free-wheeling AI assistant. It didn’t have much to say. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

In person, the spinning mechanism is near-silent and somewhat eerie for how well it can track your body as you try to maneuver out of frame. The one issue with my demo stemmed from positioning two people in the frame at once. The Auto Twist grew confused and would follow one person or another despite how close they were to the laptop. It was the same problem with Lenovo’s Smart Motion Concept laptop holder, though the ThinkBook is far more mobile than that massive brick of a device.

Despite the odd contraption that lets the display pivot, you’re not sacrificing much for the sake of a concept-made-reality. The new 14-inch ThinkBook comes with a 2.8K OLED display that sports up to a 120Hz refresh rate. It features an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processor inside with options for a chip with 12 Xe3 GPU cores. The extra GPU headroom could be handy if you intend to make this laptop a portable workstation for some lightweight graphics tasks.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad Rollable XD concept runs away with the rolling screen by having it thread into the back of the laptop. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

If that wasn’t enough, Lenovo is also considering a revised version of its ThinkBook Gen 6 Rollable laptop from 2025. The new ThinkPad Rollable XD is another concept device built for Lenovo’s long-standing business-oriented laptops, though with a twist. It still features a 14-inch flexible screen that extends to just north of 16 inches vertically. Whereas the ThinkBook uses a mechanism to feed the screen into the laptop body, the ThinkPad uses a host of carbon fiber cables and pulleys to drag the display into the laptop lid. There’s a piece of clear plastic on the top to protect the folded display’s most sensitive part.

Putting the flexible display in the lid has a few benefits. One, it keeps the chassis available for the kind of higher-end specs and cooling apparatus you want for a pint-sized laptop. Two, the collapsing screen then becomes a secondary half-display on the back. Lenovo showed how this could be used for alerts and updates while you have the lid closed or to show off a video to people looking on the opposite side of your laptop.

Having an extra screen on the laptop lid could be handy. However, the clear plastic showing off the pulley mechanism is a very nice touch. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

That concept isn’t quite a real-life product yet. The rolling and twisting ThinkBooks have proved that Lenovo is willing to make these oddball products a reality. Sure, you may not have use for these laptops, but at least Lenovo’s staying at the front of keeping the old, staid laptop design fresh.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Kyle Barr

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January 6, 2026
Lisa Su Shows Off AMD’s High-End Chips Designed for A.I.’s ‘Yotta-Scale’ Future

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Lisa Su holds up the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, an A.I. developer platform, during AMD’s keynote at CES 2026 on Jan. 5, 2026. Caroline Brehman / AFP via Getty Images

At CES 2026, AMD CEO Lisa Su used the industry’s biggest stage to outline where the next era of A.I. is headed. The A.I. industry, she said during her keynote yesterday (Jan. 5), is entering the era of “yotta-scale computing,” driven by unprecedented growth in both training and inference. The constraint, Su argued, is no longer the model itself but the computational foundation beneath it.

“Since the launch of ChatGPT a few years ago, we’ve gone from about a million people using A.I. to more than a billion active users,” Su said. “We see A.I. adoption growing to over five billion active users as it becomes indispensable to every part of our lives, just like the cell phone and the internet today.”

Global A.I. compute capacity, she noted, is now on a path from zettaflops toward yottaflops within the next five years. A yottaflop is 1 followed by 24 zeros. “Ten yottaflops is 10,000 times more computing power than we had in 2022. There has never been anything like this in the history of computing, because there has never been a technology like A.I.,” Su said.

Yet Su cautioned that the industry still lacks the computing power required to support what A.I. will ultimately enable. AMD’s response, she said, is to build the foundation end-to-end—positioning the company as an architect of the next A.I. phase rather than a supplier of isolated components.

That strategy centers on Helios, a rack-scale data center platform designed for trillion-parameter A.I. training and large-scale inference. A single Helios rack delivers up to three A.I. exaflops, integrating Instinct MI455X accelerators, EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking and the ROCm software ecosystem. The emphasis is on durability at scale, with systems built to grow alongside A.I. workloads rather than locking customers into closed, short-lived architectures.

AMD also previewed the Instinct MI500 Series, slated for launch in 2027. Built on next-generation CDNA 6 architecture, the roadmap targets up to a thousandfold increase in A.I. performance compared with the MI300X GPUs introduced in 2023.

Su stressed that yotta-scale computing will not be confined to data centers. A.I., she said, is becoming a local, everyday experience for billions of users. AMD announced an expansion of its on-device A.I. push with Ryzen AI Max+ platforms, capable of supporting models with up to 128 billion parameters using unified memory.

Beyond commercial products, Su tied AMD’s roadmap to public-sector priorities. Joined on stage by Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s science and technology advisor, who is slated to speak at CES later this week, she discussed the U.S. government’s Genesis Mission, a public-private initiative aimed at strengthening national A.I. leadership. As part of that effort, AMD-powered supercomputers Lux and Discovery are coming online at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reinforcing the company’s role in scientific discovery and national infrastructure.

The keynote closed with a $150 million commitment to A.I. education, aligned with the U.S. A.I. Literacy Pledge—signaling that, in AMD’s view, sustaining yotta-scale ambition will depend as much on talent development as on silicon.

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Victor Dey

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January 6, 2026
Beatbot’s New Pool Cleaning Robot Uses AI to Find Pool Debris

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At CES 2026, smart home pool cleaning robot company Beatbot has announced a new, self-cleaning pool robot system, called the AquaSense X, that it says uses AI to identify up to 40 common types of pool debris, from the bottom of a pool up to the water’s surface. It’s available to preorder now.

The AquaSense X is a two-part system. First there’s the cleaning bot itself, called the AquaSense X AI Robotic Pool Cleaner. The company says the pool cleaner uses cameras along with infrared and ultrasonic sensing to navigate and identify and clean debris, as well as identify steps, edges, and shallow platforms. It isn’t Matter-compatible, but gets voice control—for things like starting a clean, checking its battery, or getting voice alerts at the end of a clean—through Google Home, Alexa, and Siri.

© Wes Davis / Gizmodo

The second part is the Beatbot AstroRinse Cleaning Station, which features an automatic filter-cleaning system. It’s not self-docking—owners will have to put it in its dock themselves—but once in there, it can clear debris from the robot. The AstroRinse can hold up to 22 liters, which Beatbot says can “hold up to two full cleaning cycles per week for as long as two months” before it needs owners to empty it.

© Beatbot

Beatbot also announced that it has made some improvements to its RoboTurtle, an aquatic robot that looks like a sea turtle and, uh, swims around your pool. The company showed it at CES 2025, but since then it says it has updated it so it swims more like a real sea turtle and uses cameras and other sensors to avoid objects and respond to “select hand gestures.” Alas, for those to whom a robot sea turtle appeals, the company gave no word on availability or pricing.

The AquaSense X is available to preorder for $4,250, and the company says the first 500 people to preorder it—with a $250 deposit—will get bonuses like an extra year of warranty (for a total of four years), plus a one-year pool-care kit. Beatbot didn’t reveal the actual launch date of the system, but when I went through the preorder process on its website, it gave me a launch date of March 16.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Wes Davis

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January 6, 2026
Jensen Huang Shakes Vegas With Nvidia’s Physical A.I. Vision at CES

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Jensen Huang opened CES 2026 with a 90-minute keynote on Nvidia’s latest innovations. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is the biggest celebrity in Las Vegas this week. His CES keynote at the Fontainebleau Resort proved harder to get into than any sold-out Vegas shows. Journalists who cleared their schedules for the event waited for hours outside the 3,600-seat BleauLive Theatre. Many who arrived on time—after navigating the sprawling maze of conference venues and, in some cases, flying in from overseas to see the tech king of the moment—were turned away due to overcapacity and redirected to a watch party outside, where some 2,000 attendees gathered in a mix of frustration and reverence.

Shortly after 1 p.m., Huang jogged onto the stage, wearing a glistening, embossed black leather jacket, and wished the crowd a happy New Year. He opened with a brisk history of A.I., tracing the last few years of exponential progress—from the rise of large language models to OpenAI’s advances in reasoning systems and the explosion of so-called agentic A.I. All of it built toward the theme that dominated the bulk of his 90-minute presentation: physical A.I.

Physical A.I. is a concept that has gained momentum among leading researchers over the past year. The goal is to train A.I. systems to understand the intuitive rules humans take for granted—such as gravity, causality, motion and object permanence—so machines can reason about and safely interact with real environments.

Nvidia enters the self-driving race

Huang unveiled Alpamayo, a world foundational model designed to power autonomous driving. He called it “the world’s first reasoning autonomous driving A.I.”

To demonstrate, Nvidia played a one-shot video of a Mercedes vehicle equipped with Alpamayo navigating busy downtown San Francisco traffic. The car executed turns, stopped for lights and vehicles, yielded to pedestrians and changed lanes. A human driver sat behind the wheel throughout the drive but did not intervene.

One particularly interesting thing Huang discussed was how Nvidia trains physical A.I. systems—a fundamentally different challenge from training language models. Large language models learn from text, of which humanity has produced enormous quantities. But how do you teach an A.I. Newton’s second law of motion?

“Where does that data come from?” Huang asked. “Instead of languages—because we created a bunch of text that we consider ground truths that A.I. can learn from—how do we teach an A.I. the ground truths of physics? There are lots and lots of videos, but it’s hardly enough to capture the diversity of interactions we need.”

Nvidia’s answer is synthetic data: information generated by A.I. systems based on samples of real-world data. In the case of Alpamayo, another Nvidia world model—called Cosmos—uses limited real-world inputs to generate far more complex, physically plausible videos. A basic traffic scenario becomes a series of realistic camera views of cars interacting on crowded streets. A still image of a robot and vegetables turns into a dynamic kitchen scene. Even a text prompt can be transformed into a video with physically accurate motion.

Nvidia said the first fleet of Alpamayo-powered robotaxis, built in the 2025 Mercedes-Benz CLA vehicles, is slated to launch in the U.S. in the first quarter, followed by Europe in the second quarter and Asia later in 2026.

For now, Alpamayo remains a Level 2 autonomous driving system—similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving—which requires a human driver to remain attentive behind the wheel at all times. Nvidia’s longer-term goal is Level 4 autonomy, where vehicles can operate without human supervision in specific, constrained environments. That’s one step below full autonomy, or Level 5.

“The ChatGPT moment for physical A.I. is nearly here,” Huang said in a voiceover accompanying one of the videos shown during the keynote.

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Sissi Cao

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January 5, 2026
AMD unveils new AI PC processors for general use and gaming at CES | TechCrunch

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AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su kicked off her keynote at CES 2026 with a message about what compute could deliver: AI for everyone.

As part of that promise, AMD announced a new line of AI processors as the company thinks AI-powered personal computers are the way of the future.

The semiconductor giant revealed AMD Ryzen AI 400 Series processor, its latest version of its AI-powered PC chips, at the yearly CES conference on Monday. The company says the latest version of its Ryzen processor series allows for 1.3x faster multitasking than its competitors and are 1.7x times faster at content creation.

These new chips feature 12 CPU Cores, individual processing units inside a core processor, and 24 threads, independent streams of instruction

This is an upgrade to the Ryzen AI 300 Series processor that was announced in 2024. AMD started producing the Ryzen processor series in 2017.

Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client business, said AMD has expanded to over 250 AI PC platforms on the company’s recent press briefing. That represents a growth 2x over the last year, he added.

“In the years ahead, AI is going to be a multi-layered fabric that gets woven into every level of computing at the personal layer,” Tikoo said. “Our AI PCs and devices will transform how we work, how we play, how we create and how we connect with each other.”

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AMD also announced the release of the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, the latest version of its gaming-focused processor.

“No matter who you are and how you use technology on a daily basis, AI is reshaping everyday computing,” Tikoo said. “You have thousands of interactions with your PC every day. AI is able to understand, learn context, bring automation, provide deep reasoning and personal customization to every individual.”

PCs that include either the Ryzen AI 300 Series processor or the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor become available in the first quarter of 2026.

The company also announced the latest version of its Redstone ray tracing technology, which simulates physical behavior of light, which allows for better video game graphics without a performance or speed lag.

Follow along with all of TechCrunch’s coverage of the annual CES conference here.

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Rebecca Szkutak

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January 5, 2026
AMD’s Latest Chips Are Betting Big on Gamers

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Intel and Qualcomm are both coming to CES 2026, beating the drum hard for their next-gen lightweight laptop CPUs. Meanwhile, AMD is slipping into the party through the back door with its usual laid-back swagger, showcasing a range of new CPUs for laptops, desktops, and gaming-specific devices. The first on the list is the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series that you’ll find in a metric ton of laptops at this year’s showcase.

The AI 400 series, like 2024’s 300 series, is designed to power this generation of Copilot+ PCs. They’re running on Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture and top out with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 475 with a 12-core, 24-thread configuration. The CPU hits a 5.2GHz boost clock, and AMD promised this CPU should be slightly better at multitasking than the previous generation. The new chip’s GPU isn’t packing any of the most recent RDNA 4 GPU architecture (which means no official access to AMD’s Redstone upscaler), but instead includes 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores with a 3.1 GHz boost clock.

The highest-end CPU also comes with an NPU that hits 60 TOPS, which stands for trillions of operations per second. It’s a derived value that only vaguely approximates AI processing capabilities, so you really shouldn’t spend too much time comparing it to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2’s 80 TOPS NPU. Most chips you’ll see in laptops will max out with the Ryzen AI 7 450, an 8-core CPU with a 5.1GHz clock speed and 24MB cache with only a 50 TOPS NPU.

Overall, it’s a subdued update to one of AMD’s most prevalent CPUs. AMD promises these latest x86 chips will allow for “multi-day” battery life, though the exact numbers will depend on each laptop spec. We can already guess a majority of these chips will make their way inside this year’s slate of lightweight notebooks. However, the real dark horse of 2026 could be the Ryzen AI+ Max series. There are even more of the company’s high-end APUs (accelerated processing units) that are stressing GPU performance beyond what you normally expect from a single chip.

AMD’s latest Ryzen AI Max chips are dark horse gaming powerhouses

Did the best gaming CPU just get better? © AMD

That includes the new Ryzen AI Max+ 392 and Max+ 388. The lower-end chip is an eight-core, 16-thread chip that also manages to pack in the 40 graphics compute units (AMD’s version of core clusters) found in the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395. We’ve had plenty of experience with that APU thanks to the Framework Desktop and other devices like the Asus ROG Flow Z13. The graphics capabilities of that chip proved extra enticing. That’s why I asked AMD if the 388 was engineered for gaming.

“The 388 is an eight-core chip that’s really targeted for gamers,” AMD’s senior VP of client business Rahul Tikoo told Gizmodo during a virtual briefing. AMD implied there will indeed be more gaming-related products featuring these (hopefully) cheaper Max chips throughout 2026. The APU could be an enticing prospect for handheld gaming PCs or other lightweight designs. We can’t help but imagine some kind of Steam Machine-like device running with these specs for gaming at 1440p and 4K.

As for high-end gaming desktops, AMD also has an update to what we already called the best CPU of 2025. Just as earlier leaks suggested, AMD is pushing an update to the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with a Ryzen 7 9850X3D. The new chip uses the same layered 3D cache and eight-core Zen 5 CPU architecture, but it also has an upgraded 5.6GHz boost clock compared to 5.2GHz. That may not be such a major upgrade, though either way it will still likely be better than any other Intel- or AMD-made alternative for gaming.

AMD promises the 9850X3D pushes better performance in games upwards of 32% or 27% in titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, respectively. Is that so much better than the 9800X3D? Probably not, but if you’re looking for the best possible CPU for your gaming rig, it’ll probably be this one.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Kyle Barr

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January 5, 2026
LEGO’s ‘Smart Brick’ Gives Its Plastic Bricks the Power to See, Hear and Feel

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A presentation during the LEGO SMART Play launch event at Mandalay Bay Convention Center on Jan. 05, 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. David Becker/Getty Images for The LEGO Group

LEGO just made its most ambitious showing ever at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show—an unusual venue for a toy giant, and a telling one. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, LEGO unveiled a screen-less device called the “SMART Brick,” a bid to bring a myriad of senses to its silent, incredibly precise plastic bricks.

The SMART Brick is a standard two-by-four LEGO brick (1.6 cm by 3.2 cm) with a tiny, custom ASIC chip embedded inside. That chip allows the brick to recognize distance, color and motion, and even to interpret the “personalities” of thousands of LEGO minifigures.

The brick sits at the center of LEGO’s new “SMART Play” system, a platform designed to make physical play more interactive and fun. It’s meant to be a system “where technology seamlessly brings LEGO sets to life, responding to actions with appropriate sounds and behaviours, allowing for a truly responsive play experience,” according to LEGO. The Danish company is billing SMART Play as its most significant product innovation in 50 years, since the introduction of the minifigure in the late 1970s.

The SMART Brick, small enough to be integrated in any LEGO model, packs in far more than its size suggests. It includes responsive lights, a color-recognition scanner to sense its surroundings, a sound synthesizer capable of producing a wide range of effects, and a built-in accelerometer that tracks how the brick moves through the air in real-time.

The SMART brick works in conjunction with SMART tags and SMART minifigures. A SMART Tag is a flat, 2×2 studless tile embedded with a unique digital ID that tells a nearby SMART Brick what role it should assume in a given context. SMART minifigures, without a visible tag, also contain their own unique digital IDs that encode a character’s “personality” and guide how the SMART Brick should behave when that figure is nearby.

During a demo at CES, Tom Donaldson, senior vice president and head of Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group, placed a SMART Brick on a panel divided into four colors: red, green, blue and yellow. As the brick moved across the surface, it lit up to match the color beneath it.

“When you put that in a LEGO model, the model knows the world around it,” Donaldson said. “It knows it’s in a water bayou; it knows it’s in a jungle bayou because it’s green; maybe it knows it’s in a red fire engine over a blue police car.”

In another demonstration, Donaldson attached a SMART Brick to a LEGO yellow duck and moved it through different positions—splashing, sleeping, even flying to test whether the duck approved. The brick responded with sounds that conveyed different emotions: contentment, snoring, irritation and more.

The SMART Brick can also sense proximity. When another brick moves closer or farther away, it reacts by changing its lights or emitting sounds. When placed on or near a SMART Tag, it instantly assumes whatever role the tag assigns it—a police car, a duck, a helicopter and so on.

SMART minifigures, meanwhile, react uniquely to their environments through distinct sounds, moods and behaviors. Those reactions are played through the speaker inside a nearby SMART Brick; the minifigures themselves don’t produce sound, but instead trigger the brick to do so on their behalf.

LEGO SMART Play is set to officially launch on March 1. Preorders for an all-in-one LEGO Star Wars SMART Play set begin on Jan. 9.

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Sissi Cao

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January 5, 2026
Lego Smart Bricks introduce a new way to build — and they don’t require screens | TechCrunch

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Lego announced its new Smart Play system at CES on Monday, adding interactive, responsive Legos to the famously analog franchise.

The Smart Play system includes a 2×4 brick, Smart Tag tiles, and Smart Minifigures. The Smart Bricks and Minifigures can sense nearby Smart Tags, which are 2×2 studless tiles with unique digital IDs that tell the Bricks and Minifigures how to act.

If the Smart Tag comes in a set for building a helicopter, for example, then the Smart Brick will light up and make propeller sounds that would help bring a helicopter to life. Its built-in accelerometer would make these lights and sounds more consistent with how you’re actually playing with the helicopter, since the Brick will be able to sense when the helicopter is zooming through the sky or turned upside down.

Image Credits:LEGO

The Smart Bricks are powered by a patented ASIC chip, which is smaller than the size of a single Lego stud. The chip uses near-field magnetic positioning to recognize the Tags around it, as well as a miniature speaker, accelerometer, and LED array. Lego also developed a Bluetooth-based protocol called BrickNet, which allows multiple Smart Bricks to recognize each other and operate in tandem. The company claims that BrickNet is protected by enhanced encryption and privacy controls (all of which is necessary, but imagine a world where hacking into toys wasn’t a concern!).

There’s no setup required to pair the elements of the Smart Play system, making it easy for kids to get started — and parents will be pleased to note that there are no screens involved in the Smart system at all. However, Lego’s website says that there will be a Smart Tag for animating Lego toilets, so… there’s that.

Lego’s first two Smart Play sets — which are both Star Wars-themed — will launch on March 1, though preorders open on Friday. The “Luke’s Red Five X-wing” building set will retail for $69.99, while the larger “Throne Room Duel and A-wing” set will cost $159.99. These sets use the Smart Play system to animate characters like Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, allowing them to interact with Smart Tags, which enable Lightsaber duels among other Star Wars-related capabilities.

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Amanda Silberling

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January 5, 2026
ASUS ROG XREAL R1: AR-Gaming-Brille mit 240 Hz-Micro-OLED

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ASUS ROG XREAL R1: AR-Gaming-Brille mit 240 Hz-Micro-OLED auf der CES 2026

Mit der ROG XREAL R1 hebt ASUS Republic of Gamers Gaming-Displays auf ein neues Level. Die auf der CES 2026 vorgestellte AR-Gaming-Brille ist die weltweit erste ihrer Art mit 240 Hz Micro-OLED-FHD-Panel und richtet sich an Gamer, die maximale Performance, Mobilität und Immersion suchen – ganz ohne klassischen Monitor.

Entwickelt in Kooperation mit AR-Spezialist XREAL, kombiniert die ROG XREAL R1 modernste Display-Technologie mit hoher Kompatibilität zu PC, Konsole und dem ROG Ally Handheld.

Virtuelles 171-Zoll-Display mit 240 Hz

Herzstück der ROG XREAL R1 ist ein Micro-OLED-Display mit 1920 × 1080 Pixeln, das bei einem simulierten Betrachtungsabstand von rund vier Metern einem 171-Zoll-Bildschirm entspricht. Mit einem erweiterten 57-Grad-Sichtfeld, das rund 95 % des fokussierten Blickbereichs abdeckt, entsteht ein beeindruckend großes, räumliches Bild.

Dank einer Bildwiederholrate von bis zu 240 Hz und einer extrem niedrigen Motion-to-Photon-Latenz von nur 2 ms eignet sich die Brille ideal für schnelle Shooter, Rennspiele und kompetitives Gaming – flüssig, scharf und ohne störende Bewegungsunschärfen.

Plug-and-Play mit PC, Konsole und ROG Ally

Die ROG XREAL R1 setzt auf maximale Flexibilität. Über das mitgelieferte ROG Control Dock stehen DisplayPort 1.4 sowie zwei HDMI-2.0-Anschlüsse zur Verfügung. Damit lässt sich die Brille problemlos an Gaming-PCs oder Konsolen anschließen und per Knopfdruck zwischen den Quellen wechseln.

Besonders komfortabel ist die direkte USB-C-Verbindung zum ROG Ally: Ein Kabel genügt, um unterwegs ein riesiges virtuelles Gaming-Display zu nutzen – komplett ohne zusätzliche Einrichtung. Touch-Bedienung und Steuerung des Handhelds bleiben dabei vollständig erhalten.

Spatial Display mit 3DoF und intelligenter Anpassung

Ein integrierter X1 Spatial Co-Processing-Chip ermöglicht es, den virtuellen Bildschirm frei zu positionieren, zu skalieren oder im Raum zu verankern. Im sogenannten Anchor-Modus bleibt das Bild fest im Raum platziert, während der Follow-Modus den Bildschirm stets im Sichtfeld hält.

Für optimalen Komfort sorgen zudem elektrochrome Linsen, die ihre Transparenz automatisch an die Lichtverhältnisse anpassen. Alternativ lassen sich drei manuelle Tönungsstufen wählen – ideal für helle Umgebungen oder dunkle Gaming-Sessions.

Räumlicher Klang von Bose

Auch akustisch setzt ASUS auf Premium-Qualität. Sound by Bose liefert präzisen räumlichen Klang, der Schritte, Effekte und Umgebungsgeräusche realistisch abbildet. Das verbessert nicht nur die Immersion, sondern auch die Orientierung im Spiel – ein klarer Vorteil bei kompetitiven Titeln.

Leicht, mobil und zukunftsorientiert

Mit einem Gewicht von nur 91 Gramm ist die ROG XREAL R1 leicht genug für längere Sessions und den mobilen Einsatz. Sie positioniert sich als vielseitige Alternative zu klassischen Monitoren – ob zu Hause, unterwegs oder als Zweitdisplay für Gaming-Handhelds.

Verfügbarkeit

Die ASUS ROG XREAL R1 soll in der ersten Hälfte 2026 weltweit erscheinen. Einen Preis hat ASUS bislang noch nicht genannt.

Spezifikationen

ROG XREAL R1
Bildschirm: Sony 0,55-Zoll-Micro-OLED
Auflösung: 1920 x 1080
Bildwiederholfrequenz: 240 Hz
Sichtfeld (FOV): 57°
Motion-to-Photon-Latenz: 2 ms
Spitzenhelligkeit: 700 Nits
Farbraum: 107 % sRGB
3 Freiheitsgrade (DoF): Natives 3 DoF, 6 DoF unterstützt
Einstellbare Linsentransparenz: 3 Stufen einstellbar
Digitale IPD(Augenabstand)-Einstellung: Ja
Audio: Sound by Bose
Gewicht: 91 g

ROG Control Dock GCD01
Anschlüsse (Eingang): 2 x HDMI® 2.0, 1 x DisplayPort™ 1.4
Anschluss (Ausgang): 1 x USB-C®
Videoauflösung: 4K bei 60 Hz
Abmessungen: 215 x 100 x 25 mm
Gewicht: 230 g

Snapdragon X2 Plus vorgestellt: Qualcomms neuer KI-Chip für Copilot+ PCs

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Johannes

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January 5, 2026
Qualcomm’s Next PC Chip Promises Even Better Battery Life Than Before

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Qualcomm was so excited to talk about its most powerful ARM-based PC CPUs in 2025, it left off its lower-end, humdrum processor for the big reveal of all its partnered products. Alongside the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Elite Extreme (cue the guitar riff), Qualcomm is coming to CES 2026 with an X2 Plus chip.

Qualcomm’s sequel to its initial batch of ARM-based chips that brought us Copilot+ PCs all boast a similar strong battery life and large 80 TOPS NPU (neural processing unit) built for background and low-scale AI tasks. Compared to the previous-gen Snapdragon X Plus, the higher-end X2 Plus promises 2.3 times better GPU performance and upwards of 50% better CPU multi-core performance. All told, the chip could be better for multitasking, light photo editing tasks, and—potentially—some light gaming.

The X2 Plus comes in two flavors, one with six Oryon CPU cores and one with 10 cores. The higher-end version, specifically the X2P-64-100, sports a max multithread frequency of 4GHz with a 34MB cache. The lower-end version sports the same frequency but a lower total cache. The integrated Adreno graphics also hit a higher 1.7GHz frequency compared to the six-core variant. All that is to say, if you’re looking at an X2 Plus laptop for any photo editing or any other graphics, you want the higher-end version.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Control Panel did a lot to offer easier driver support, though you’ll occasionally run into some problems with unsupported apps from x86 to ARM. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

Devices with this chip will support up to three 4K external monitors as well as Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. The mid-range ARM chip is supposed to compete against Intel and AMD’s latest lightweight laptop CPUs. These chips won’t just have to perform well in battery life as well. Qualcomm claims its new chip demands 43% less power for the same performance as its first-gen Snapdragon X Plus.

One of Qualcomm’s big bugbears for ARM on PC has been compatibility. Late last year, the chipmaker launched its Snapdragon Control Panel, a kind of game and app launcher that was supposed to help users update access to Microsoft’s refined Prism x86 emulator and keep on top of drivers. Working on an ARM-based Windows machine is far better than it was at the Copilot+ launch in 2024. Support for Windows AVX and AVX2 extensions in the Prism emulator means it’s much easier to run previously unsupported programs and even some games on Qualcomm’s latest chips.

Still, for the sake of a PC that can keep up with the Joneses of Intel and AMD’s top-end laptop CPUs, the X2 Elite Extreme with its 18 Oryon cores (12 “prime” CPU cores and another six “performance” cores) will still offer the best overall performance. At least, there will be an interesting three-way competition for laptop supremacy in 2026.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Kyle Barr

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January 5, 2026
Sorry Tamagotchi Fans, It’s AI Time

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When they said, “Nothing in this world is sacred,” they meant Tamagotchis, too, or at least Tamagotchi rip-offs. While you might remember your virtual pets of yore with all the analog goodness that the ’90s had to offer, this is the year of our lord 2026, and everything has to have AI. Yup, everything.

While the Sweekar, which I saw at CES 2026, isn’t actually a Tamagotchi, it pretty much is in everything but name, and, as you may have already guessed from the words above, it’s centered on AI.

What exactly is that AI doing? Ya know, just normal stuff that allows it to “feel your touch” and remember “your voice, your stories, and your quirks.” It’s time to go deeper with your virtual pets, people. Clicking a few buttons until they inevitably die from neglect isn’t enough. On a hardware level, there’s some cute stuff happening. The egg one kind of vibrates and shakes and grows, which is a fun tactile experience.

© James Pero / Gizmodo

As far as capabilities go, the Sweekar allegedly “needs your love, just like a real pet,” which also means it has moods like happy, angry, sleepy, and something that Takway.Ai, which makes this little toy, is calling “sneaky smile,” which is basically just mischievous? I think? I shudder to think what else it could mean.

Just like a Tamagotchi, the Sweekar has growth cycles that include an “egg stage,” a “baby stage,” a “teen stage,” and an “adult stage.” At each stage, the pet is supposed to gain certain abilities and continually grow and understand more about you and your personality.

More than anything, though, the Sweekar is centered around using AI for memory, so it can remember your name and your favorite color and that time you forgot its birthday. This Tamagotchi’s therapy bill is going to be sizable. The people at Takway.Ai tell me that it’s using a combination of Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT to do that, and that everything you tell the Sweekar is private, though I obviously cannot verify the data practices of a company selling an AI Tamagotchi at CES.

There’s also the whole issue with AI toys having a mind of their own, which means you may want to think twice before you give this little guy to a kid.

If an AI Tamagotchi is really high on your list of things that you absolutely must have then you can eventually throw money at Sweekar’s Kickstarter in March. While there’s no official price right now, the makers of this little virtual pet say it’ll likely debut for between $150 and $200.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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James Pero

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January 4, 2026
Is This the Thinnest Tablet Ever?

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If you think the 12.9-inch iPad Pro is thin at 5.1mm, think again. At CES 2026, I came across a tablet that’s merely 3.1mm—a whole 2mm thinner than the skinniest device that Apple currently sells.

Tucked in the back sides of CES Unveiled, a mini kickoff event for the main event, is an Android-based tablet called Paper from a company called Haining Toall Technology Co., Ltd. I thought it was an external display at first or even a dummy tablet, but nope, a rep told me it’s a whole tablet.

© Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

The Paper’s main selling point is how thin it is. To achieve its slim profile, most of its components are crammed inside a section on the back left of the tablet. The ports—mini HDMI and two USB-C ports—are also jammed in there. This hump also serves as a way to grip the tablet with one hand. Because the Paper is so damn thin and the bezels surrounding the screen are also super slim, there’s really no way to hold the lightweight (400g) device comfortably. So the grip-like design actually works well.

© Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

It’s also not a new idea. Sony’s Xperia Tablet S from 2012 had a similar design.

© Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

What I don’t know is almost everything about the specs. The Chinese company reps and translator had a difficult time understanding what I was asking and gave me vague responses like “it’s Chinese innovation” or “because of miniaturization” when I asked them how they made the device so thin or for specific specs on the front-facing camera and battery life. I was able to confirm that the Paper’s screen is AMOLED. And the touchscreen seemed responsive enough when I tapped and swiped on it.

Oh, and they also told me the Paper costs $1,500. Yes, one, five, zero, zero. That’s a lot of money for a tablet from a brand that almost nobody’s heard of and for which there’s very little online info about.

© Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

Alas, this is something that’s common at CES. Vendors come from all over the world to show off their innovative products, but don’t always have answers for curious media.

As for whether the Paper is the world’s thinnest tablet right now? Maybe? I’m not aware of any tablet that’s slim. But do correct me if I’m wrong.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Raymond Wong

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January 4, 2026
Lockin’s New Smart Locks Never Need Recharging Thanks to Infrared Light

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Lockin has announced the Veno Pro Wireless and V7 Max, two new smart locks that the company says will have “zero need to recharge or replace batteries.” That’s because each uses wireless optical charging—infrared light, pointed at the lock at all times and beaming low-level power into it at a distance.

This is made possible by a separate, wall-mountable module that transmits wired power as light beamed at a small panel on the lock’s indoor portion. Lockin spends most of its press release talking about the V7 Max, which it says has a four-meter wireless charging range. Wireless charging locks like these aren’t exactly new, but they haven’t exactly been something you can just go out and buy. (The tech is apparently quite nice, though; my former colleague at The Verge, Jennifer Tuohy, has said she never wants to go back after testing such a lock from Alfred.) That’s all set to change with the Veno Pro Wireless and V7 Max, both of which Lockin says will be available for preorder soon after CES 2026 and shipping early this year.

© Lockin

Of the two, the V7 Max is the fanciest, building upon the company’s existing, similar V5 Max (which isn’t available in the U.S.). Like the V5 Max, it offers palm vein-scanning and facial recognition, but also offers finger vein, rather than fingerprint, scanning. It includes both 5-inch touchscreens and cameras on the inside and outside. The V7 Max will be Matter-compatible, which makes it usable with any major smart home platform that supports the universal standard. Finally, the V7 Max is neither a normal door handle nor a deadbolt replacement; it’s a mortise lock, which is more common in commercial buildings and would require significant rejiggering to install on the front of your house; unless you’re extremely handy, you’ll want a professional to put it in.

The Veno Pro Wireless is a redesigned version of the existing Veno Pro, which also offers palm vein and fingerprint scanning, doubles as a video doorbell, and is Matter compatible. The Veno Pro Wireless will be an easier sell for most people since it’s a simple deadbolt replacement and shouldn’t require any costly modification to install. Lockin hasn’t yet revealed specific pricing for any of the locks, but in an email to Gizmodo, Lockin says the Veno Pro Wireless will be around the same price as the $380 Veno Pro.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.

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Wes Davis

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January 4, 2026
Govee’s New Smart Ceiling Light Gives You AI Art to Look Up To

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Smart lighting company Govee announced a new pair of ceiling-mounted smart lights at CES 2026: the Sky Ceiling Light and Ceiling Light Ultra. The company says the former can “mimic daylight in a natural way,” giving the impression of a skylight. The latter is for the real Govee-pilled, thanks to a tightly packed array of 616 LEDs that lets it beam colorful, detailed images and animations at you from above.

If you’ve followed this company at all, you’ll be familiar with these sorts of excesses. Take the Govee Net Lights, which you can hang in a window or drape on a hedge to show colorful animations. The Ceiling Light Ultra is like that, except with more detail and crammed into a 21-inch-wide circle on your ceiling.

Where the Net Lights create images with “pixel” density comparable to an NES game, this light appears capable of showing intricate color detail with smooth gradients. Owners can create imagery by querying a new set of generative AI models the company says it’s adding to the Govee app soon, although the app still allows for manually creating animations or uploading GIFs to display, as it does for other Govee smart lights.

Govee Sky Ceiling Light. © Govee

When you just want it to be a basic light, the Ceiling Light Ultra produces light across a rather standard color temperature range of 2700K–6500K. Same thing goes for the Sky Ceiling Light, which is also 21 inches wide. Govee said in a press briefing leading up to CES that it is just like having a real skylight in your ceiling. We’ll see if that feels accurate once the Sky Ceiling Light is available to test.

Both smart lights will be Matter-compatible, so they should work with any major smart home platform. As usual, though, you’ll need Govee’s app to take advantage of their fancy effects. Govee hasn’t announced specific release dates or pricing.

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Wes Davis

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January 4, 2026