Gizmodo’s Best of CES 2026 Awards: See the Winners

Dell has brought back the XPS branding and the physical function row keys. It’s all gravy from there with its seamless trackpad and flat keyboard. The XPS 14 sport the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs and a beautiful OLED display to boot.

With a new name, a great screen, and more power, the HyperX Omen Max 16 stands out as one of the most appealing laptops at CES this year. Its shining feature is a 300W total power package. Plus, it includes a unique GaN power adapter capable of outputting 460W to power all that gaming goodness.

Asus’ revised ROG Zephyrus Duo takes its cues from the Zenbook Duo, and it’s better for it. The laptop is essentially two screens attached via a hinge. There’s a surprising number of ways you can use a laptop of this size, either vertically or horizontally.

Asus’ new prebuilt desktop is made to turn heads. You can have it configured with an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU, but the most eye-catching aspect is the 340 x 340 hologram display users can use to display their own images.

Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 chips finally made their debut at CES 2026, and they may be some of the best chips for lightweight laptops we’ve seen yet. The “X†versions of the chip contain more GPU cores, allowing them to sport surprising capabilities for graphics tasks and gaming.

Keychron cranks out an ungodly number of mechanical keyboards every year, but at CES, the company announced the Q3 Ultra 8K Wireless, which touts a ridiculous 600 hours of runtime from a single charge. The 8,000Hz polling rate is also more than fast enough for serious gaming with less latency.

Open wireless earbuds are great, but if there’s one thing people miss when they wear them, it’s noise cancellation. Shokz may be here to save the day, though. Its OpenFit Pro have a “noise reduction†feature that cancels out environmental noise when you want it and lets your ears breathe when you don’t. To top it all off, they’re comfy, they look nice, and the battery life is sturdy on paper.

Fender is officially in the over-ear headphones game and its first entrant has a lot to love. This pair of headphones is modular, allowing you to swap ear cups and headbands and pull the speakers off. It also comes with a USB-C dongle for lossless streaming. On top of all that they sound pretty darn good.

The Kallsup sounds way better, and is far more adorable, than it feels like it should be for just $10. You can connect and synchronize up to 100 of them. That’s not new in the Bluetooth speaker world, but it’s the first time we’ve ever felt like we could almost afford to buy enough of them to try it out.

Lenovo’s latest concept is the kind of laptop we never thought we wanted. The 16-inch screen extends horizontally to offer an ultrawide display as large as 24 inches.

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Trifold already launched in South Korea in December, but we finally got our first look at the dual-hinge foldable that morphs from a phone to a 10-inch tablet, and it was glorious. It’s a thick device when closed, for sure, but having a big-screen tablet, with useful multitasking modes like DeX to boot, kept us lusting over the pricey Z Trifold.

The new Clicks Power Keyboard is everything the original QWERTY phone accessory should have been: compatible with both iPhone and Android devices using MagSafe, integrated with a built-in battery for juicing up the connected device, and able to support numerous orientations (slide-out vertically like the dead Palm Pre and rotated horizontally like the also dead LG Wing). It’s not quite the return of the BlackBerry, but it might be the next best thing for people who miss a physical keyboard for dashing out messages and email.

Razer’s Project Motoko is a concept that slaps cameras on a pair of headphones. The result is something that the company thinks could rival the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. That remains to be seen, but the idea is a fun exercise in porting smart glasses-like features to other types of gadgets.

Xreal has made a big name for itself in the AR/video glasses space and it reiterated why at CES. Its Xreal 1S aren’t just $50 cheaper than their predecessor, they also come with a display that’s higher resolution and brighter—plus you can still do fun stuff like convert 2D games into 3D. Hard to argue with cheaper and better.

While display glasses are all the rage, AI glasses with no screen are arguably just as useful and Rokid’s Ai Glasses Style prove why. These smart glasses are light, weighing just 38.5g, and offer all the features you’d want in a pair of screenless smart glasses, like translation, music playback, and photos/video capture thanks to the integrated camera. Meta may have market share in the U.S. but these are a worthy competitor to Ray-Ban AI glasses.

The Pebble Round 2 offers perhaps the most expansive update to the venerable Pebble brand. The rounded, 1.3-inch watch face has a 200p display that’s glorious in its simplicity.

At its first-ever CES, The Lego Group brought what it’s calling its biggest invention since the minifig in 1978, the Smart Brick. Part of its new Smart Play sets, the 2 x 4 Lego brick is packed with sound, light, and motion sensors, allowing it to react to smart tiles that are within close proximity. The idea is that children will be able to unlock new interactive experiences that meld the physical with electronics—and after an extended demo, we think Lego is really onto something.

Crowning a best TV at CES is always hard. How do you choose between so many beautiful and bright flatscreens? However, LG’s OLED evo W6 Wallpaper TV had our jaws on the floor for longer than we’d have liked. It’s only 9mm thick (barely thicker than most flagship smartphones) and is wireless—yes, you can beam 4K video and audio to it from 33 feet away without an unsightly HDMI cable hanging out the backside.

Govee’s new ceiling light lets you put pretty pictures on your ceiling, though it offers more detail than other similar products made by the company, like its Curtain Lights. That’s thanks to its array of 616 LEDs, which give it enough granularity to make images visible even under the bright lights on the CES show floor. Also, it’s Matter-compatible, so any old smart home platform will do.

Right, so it’s a thermostat, but hear us out: the Aqara Thermostat Hub W200 does so much more. It’s a millimeter wave presence sensor; a video doorbell monitor; uses the universal digital key Aliro standard; and it supports Apple’s new Adaptive Temperature and Clean Energy Guidance features.

The Roborock Saros is the first robot vacuum that can climb and clean stairs. It’s hard to beat that. Will it come to market? Well, the Saros Z70 and its robotic arm did.

It’s not CES without robots, and ClOiD is a perfect mix of cute, functional, and probably too ambitious. ClOiD has arms for folding towels, a wheeled base for getting around, and uses AI (of course) to do all its thinking. And yes, it really can fold a towel.

There was a quite a bit of smart bird feeder competition at this year’s CES, and the Birdfy  Feeder Vista with its 360 camera bird feeder stood on top of all of them. Its camera will ensure no avian escapes your sight. Plus, it uses a unique air pump system to deliver bird feed instead of using gravity and a trough.

The Legion Go 2 may have been a little too expensive the first time around, but now it comes with a better OS and a cheaper price. What more do you want, especially when this handheld sports an 8.8-inch OLED screen.

CES 2026 was filled with more big and high-refresh-rate gaming monitors than we could lay our eyeballs on. However, LG’s monstrous 52-inch UltraGear evo G9 52G930B easily stood out with its extra-wide 12:9 aspect ratio, bonkers-sharp 5K2K resolution, and more-than-fast-enough 240Hz refresh rate for competitive gaming.

This controller is built for racing and racing only. Still, even if you don’t play many racing games, the GameSir Swift Drive feels excellent with the force feedback in its built-in steering wheel. It may be the best alternative for a full-sized, expensive racing yoke.

Everyone wants us to chat with our cars, but the AI assistants can’t keep up. That’s where Cerence AI shines. The company’s newest Cerence xUI platform is integrated with Microsoft 365 and works with several music, mapping, and other car applications. In a demo, we confirmed that speaking naturally and colloquially doesn’t trip up the system. None of this is surprising, Cerence AI has offered car voice control on its platform since at least 2019, well before it was popular.

Screens are everywhere in cars, but at least the Sony Honda Mobility’s Afeela 1 connected EV makes good use of them on its touchscreen dashboard. The Afeela 1 features a panoramic screen that’s actually two screens side by side, a smaller 12.3-inch screen and a massive 28.5-inch screen. The long, narrow dashboard upfront houses the many apps for movies, games, and music that passengers can enjoy. Passenger-side apps include a privacy filter to avoid causing distractions for the driver. Back seat passengers can also get in on the Sony-enabled fun with PlayStation Remote Play, which connects wirelessly to the back screens.

Waymo is the only Level 4 driverless car company that is actually operating in many cities, completing 14 million trips with its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxi service in 2025. Its new sensor-filled Zeekr minivan, dubbed the Ojai, will soon hit the streets, too. While many others at CES want to someday reach that level of autonomy, none of them are there yet. Waymo is the clear winner of this race, and it’s an open question whether another company can catch up to it anytime soon.

Handy’s latest male stroker is ludicrous enough on its own, until you learn you can configure it to hit 1,200 strokes per minute. The Handy 2 Pro also sports a larger battery and multiple new attachments.