Down the hall from crowded keynotes, whirring robot vacuums and exoskeleton try-on booths, more than 40 tech experts from CNET Group crowded into a ballroom at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. There, we spent six and a half hours carefully selecting 63 finalists and one official Best of CES 2026 winner out of thousands of innovations jostling for eyeballs here at CES 2026.
Expert journalists from CNET, PCMag, Mashable, ZDNET, Everyday Health, IGN and Lifehacker evaluated the most fascinating, futuristic and sometimes wild tech, from industry behemoths to fledgling startups, which set the stage for the year ahead.
At CES, the world’s largest technology show, Las Vegas transforms into the epicenter of innovation. We at CNET Group, in partnership with the Consumer Technology Association, have the honor of awarding Best of CES awards in 22 categories and one Best Overall winner.
To be eligible for a Best of CES award, a product or service must be an official exhibitor at CES 2026 and either include a compelling new concept or idea, solve a major consumer problem, or set a new bar in performance or quality.
Here are the winners, the most inspiring, boundary-pushing tech products that will define the technology landscape this year.
Overall Winner
Overall Winner
A vanguard in melding eye-catching design with genuine utility, the Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold achieves CES’s highest honor, Best Overall. This slim device lives up to the promise of a foldable, full-size tablet-phone hybrid that’s as functional as it is pocketable. Its futuristic allure and seamless practicality elevate the tech while keeping it within reach.
Watch this: Hands-On With the Galaxy Z TriFold: A True Phone-Tablet Hybrid
03:35 Best Age Tech
This smart stove shutoff helps older adults live safely at home for as long as they can. This new version of the device uses radar to tell when a person is in the kitchen, and has a configurable 5-minute grace period. It can also report to a caregiver app if your loved one didn’t show up in the kitchen to make breakfast as usual.
Winner
Best AI
Nvidia is once again the talk of CES, and the biggest announcement by the world’s most profitable company is the Rubin AI platform. Nvidia’s six new Rubin chips work together to reduce the costs of data processed by AI, known as tokens. That’s important for big tech companies, and all of us, as AI models become more compute-intensive.
Winner
Qira is Lenovo’s answer to Apple Intelligence, a hybrid AI assistant that uses a mix of on-device processing and cloud-based models for a powerful personalized assistant that’s available anywhere, even as you switch from the phone in your pocket to the laptop or tablet in your hand.
This AI wearable brings it back to basics. You can record quick notes throughout your day by clicking on the button and speaking into the ring. Then, an LLM on the app will process what you said for easy access and even take actions for you.
Best Audio
Winner
One of the most compelling designs we’ve seen in a home speaker, it looks more like a piece of art. You can connect by Bluetooth, but it has Wi-Fi, too, letting you pair it with other Samsung speakers for whole-home audio.
xMEMS Sycamore-N loudspeaker chip
As smartglasses become more mainstream, they require an audio chip that’s as advanced as their AI features. Based on our tests, this loudspeaker chip drives a high-fidelity listening experience, and at 1mm thin, it’ll allow for thinner and lighter designs that’ll no doubt boost adoption.
LG H7 FlexConnect soundbar
As a part of LG’s Sound Suite, the Dolby Atmos H7 soundbar extends the usefulness of Dolby’s FlexConnect surround system to any TV with an HDMI input. The soundbar looks good, and it sounds great with movies. One drawback: You can only add LG-branded FlexConnect speakers to the soundbar for full surround sound.
Best Deep Computing Tech
Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus
AMD Ryzen AI Max Plus 392, AI Max Plus 388
AMD’s expanded Ryzen AI Max Plus platform democratizes workstation power with the 392 and 388 models, with 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, 60 TFLOPS of compute and 192GB unified memory. These chips bring elite local AI and GPU-free performance to thinner, more affordable devices.
Winner
Intel Core Ultra 300 (Panther Lake)
Sometimes the hype is real. Intel’s Panther Lake chips deliver bar-raising integrated graphics performance to the mass consumer market. The top chip offers up to 12 new “Xe3” Xe cores, enabling graphics and gaming workloads for a huge range of portable laptop categories through 2026 and beyond.
Best Energy Tech
Jackery’s solar energy-seeking robot can follow you around like a puppy, but its real job is to follow the sun, collecting energy with its retractable 300-watt solar panels. The idea is that this autonomous bot can always find the sun and then bring you the power when you need it.
Winner
After developing alignment-free wireless power for two years, Willo demonstrated the ability to deliver power over the air for multiple devices simultaneously, regardless of their position or movement. This represents a breakthrough in energy technology, offering wireless charging without the need for a pad, coil or dock.
A water heater that automatically generates bitcoin with daily use. It uses the excess heat generated from bitcoin mining to heat running water in a home, offsetting up to 80% of electricity and water costs with the earnings from the process. You can control and manage it with an app or web console for ease of use.
Best Future Tech
Winner
A single 2-by-4 Lego brick filled with light, sound and proximity sensors to enable new ways to play. This little block, and the tinier snap-on tab that gives it instructions, can drive anything from lightsaber duels to board games. It adds color and sound effects based on what you build and how you play.
Ixana’s Wi-R is a chip that sends data through a hyperlocal field generated by your body. This alternative to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is still a concept, but it has some upsides to conventional data protocols, such as less power drain and less potential for a clogged signal.
Best Gaming
A gaming PC with multiple monitors has become the norm, and while portable monitors have been around for a while, there haven’t been many ways to have this experience built into a laptop. Asus is no stranger to dual-screen laptops, but the Zephyrus Duo is next level. Its two 16-inch OLEDs are matched with Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series graphics.
Winner
Lenovo Legion Pro Rollable Concept
Rollable OLED displays have been a thing for a couple of years, but only on enterprise laptops, if they even come out. The Lenovo Legion Pro Rollable concept uses this tech to bring ultrawide gaming to a laptop. Will this rollable display ever be a reality? We don’t know. But if it does, it’ll be the perfect portable battlestation.
Xreal’s AR glasses are some of the best, and now Asus is partnering with Xreal to make them better, especially for gamers. These AR glasses have everything even the pickiest player needs, giving you a virtual 171-inch screen right on your face. It’s a 1080p OLED, too, but the real kicker is the 240Hz refresh rate. It’s smooth, big-screen gaming on the go.
Best Kitchen Tech
Winner
A compact combination of a portable coffee grinder and brewer, the cleverly designed Ecoldbrew slots onto its own insulated bottle and whips up a batch of cold brew coffee in 5 minutes. It’ll also easily attach to other bottles if you have one you love. Slated to launch on Kickstarter soon, it starts at an affordable $99.
C-200 UltraSonic chef’s knife
Made with a Japanese steel blade that vibrates about 30,000 times per second, the knife’s movement is so subtle you can’t see or hear it. But you will notice how it glides through food without clinging to the blade. The C-200 retails for $399, a similar price to other nice knives. The first batch ships this month.
This compact cooker uses a camera above and a scale below to ID food type and size, then it deploys a precise cooking program pulled from a deep AI algorithm. It determines the exact thickness of meat or volume of veggies like no oven before it. It can even recognize multiple types of food at once and use appropriate cooking times and temperatures for each.
Best Laptop
Winner
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura Edition
Yes, it’s clearly inspired by the MacBook Pro, but MSI’s big, redesigned Stealth pours on the special sauce. This thin rig deploys Intel’s Core Ultra 300 CPUs and up to a roaring RTX 5090, alongside amped-up cooling and airflow. Its new, subtler MSI design and 240Hz Gorilla Glass panel will excite gamers and prosumer creators alike.
It might be a niche device, but it’s the most elegant expression of a dual-screen laptop we’ve seen yet. The 2026 Zenbook Duo has matured in design and gained notable improvements: thinner bezels, a more sturdy kickstand and a better hinge. Powered with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H CPU, it’s well-equipped for diverse creative workloads.
Best Mobile Tech
Winner
The OhSnap Mcon is a Bluetooth controller with a slide-out plate to mount your iPhone (via MagSafe) or Android phone (via magnets) for a portable gaming experience. The pocketable accessory can be used in three ways: as a mounted handheld device, a wireless gaming controller and a docked gaming console when your phone is connected to an external monitor.
Best Parent Tech
This device, designed to look and work like a sippy cup, forms a small mask to seal your child’s nose. With each swallow, air flows through the nose, creating pressure that helps release trapped fluid in the ear. In a peer-reviewed study, after four weeks of Earflo use, 90% of children didn’t need ear tube surgery three months later.
In Lego’s CES debut, the company introduced the new Smart Brick and a Smart Play platform, which brings Lego creations and characters to life. The bricks have a tiny chip inside that can detect color, direction, distance, sound and more. Now Lego creations can interact more with families, enabling more time together.
Winner
Best Pet Tech
The Pawport pet door uses ultrawideband technology to detect how close your dog is to the door. That lets you customize how close your dog needs to be before the door opens, both coming in and out of the house. It also extends the collar tags’ battery life from 12 to 18 months.
Winner
Satellai’s new collar and software (Petsense AI) are proactive tools that could flag subtle behavioral shifts in your dog before they become obvious health problems. It can also warn you when your dog has left your yard, and it retails for a reasonable $79.
Petkit Yumshare Daily Feast
One of the devices debuting is the Yumshare Daily Feast, an automatic wet cat food feeder. The unit can dispense scheduled meals over seven days while monitoring consumption through an integrated camera, and it can automatically discard spoiled and leftover food.
Best Robot
Winner
The Atlas was hands-down the best of the humanoid bunch we saw at CES 2026. The prototype version demoed at the show impressed us with its naturalistic walking gait. Meanwhile, the sleek product version is ready to be deployed into Hyundai manufacturing facilities from this year, where it might just be working on your next car.
Jackery’s solar energy-seeking robot can follow you around like a puppy, but its real job is to follow the sun, collecting energy with its retractable 300-watt solar panels. The idea is that this autonomous bot can always find the sun and then bring you the power when you need it.
The RoboTurtle is both a perfect study in biomimicry and a robot with a mission. This swimming robot is designed for environmental research and, once deployed, will monitor underwater ecosystems with minimal impact on wildlife.
Best Smart Home Tech
Winner
The Saros Rover can traverse the biggest obstacle for robot vacuums: stairs. It’s the first model that can navigate to different floors on its own without the help of a separate attachment. It pulls off this feat with a pair of bendable legs that it controls independently to avoid obstacles, and it can even clean stairs as it climbs.
Instead of using a removable battery, the V7 Max smart lock uses the Lockin AuraCharge, an external device that you plug in approximately 4 meters away, sending a light beam to a receiver on the lock. The lock converts the light into energy to charge its battery.
This is the first robot vacuum that can wash and dry a carpet, just like a carpet cleaner. It comes with a core module and two modular attachments that let it switch from vacuuming and mopping to carpet washing and drying. It takes about an hour to clean a 300 to 400 square foot room and two more to dry.
Best Startup
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Pebble was the first company to popularize smartwatches in the 2010s. After several company moves, the brand is back as a startup with a new lineup of affordable watches with battery life improvements and better looks. It also has a new AI ring.
Winner
A French startup has created a $200 portable device to test food samples for allergens. Called Allergen Alert, the company only had mock-up devices at CES, but it’s licensing the tech from French biofirm bioMérieux. If the startup can pull off the food testing, the impact could be huge. Expect it to arrive in this year’s second half.
The Nirva AI jewelry is designed to continuously learn from your real-world behavior by recording your audio throughout the day. From those recordings, it offers advice on work, relationships and everyday decision-making. Nirva positions itself as a personal AI companion, designed to understand your life as you live it.
Best Sustainability
Winner
Clear Drop Soft Plastic Compactor
Anxious about plastic waste? Clear Drop’s Soft Plastic Compactor can mash your trash into dense bricks to be recycled into products like patio furniture. Clear Drop’s product and subscription ensure none of your recycled soft plating ends up in a landfill.
The RoboTurtle is both a perfect study in biomimicry and a robot with a mission. This swimming robot is designed for environmental research and, once deployed, will monitor underwater ecosystems with minimal impact on wildlife.
Cambridge Consultants Ouroboros smartwatch
Ushering in the new age of right-to-repair legislation is this concept smartwatch design from Cambridge Consultants. It’s proof that you can make a smartwatch that allows for self-repair without compromising on design or user experience.
Best Transportation
Winner
There’s plenty of talk about autonomy in cars, but Strutt brings the next-generation technology to an accessible application. The Ev1 mobility scooter can map and then navigate spaces autonomously, allowing people to get around via voice commands. It’s a rare device that combines mobility, accessibility and autonomy, and it’s hard not to be impressed.
Dolby Atmos adds a literal new dimension to car audio. However, not everyone can buy a new luxury car just to upgrade their listening experience. Pioneer’s Sphera receiver allows almost anyone to add Dolby Atmos via Apple CarPlay to the car they already own with the speakers already installed and immerse themselves in spatial audio.
Donut Labs solid-state battery
Promising huge improvements in energy density, charging speed and safety, solid state battery tech is a holy grail for electric cars, home energy, drones and a host of other applications. Donut Lab is first-to-market with a solid state battery in a production EV which can be found in partner Verge Motorcycles’ TS Pro Gen 2.
Best Travel Tech
Winner
Wheelchairs are available at airports, hotels, resorts, theme parks and cruises, but standard wheelchairs require ongoing effort, and they can be a struggle to move through difficult terrain. The WheelMove is a portable wheelchair attachment that turns any standard wheelchair into an electric one, allowing people to travel more easily wherever they are.
We’ve seen other motorized luggage over the years at CES, but Jitlife’s latest rideable carry-on bag carries up to 250 pounds and can get up to about 6 miles on a charge. Despite that it still has good interior capacity along with a removable battery, which has a 2.5-hour charge time.
Best TV or Home Theater
Winner
In a crowded field at CES, the S95H managed to rise above the pack. It’s 35% brighter than its predecessor. It can be used wired, which is great for gaming, but it has a wireless option for a cleaner look and more connections. Also, the S95H is the first OLED that can show artwork from the Samsung Art Store thanks to its anti-burn-in technology.
The 116UXS builds on the still new and promising RGB LED TV concept by adding even more color to the mix. Its mini-LED backlight array uses red, green and blue LEDs. Then it adds a fourth sky blue (cyan) LED, which Hisense says lets it cover 110% of the BT.2020 color range.
The W6 is LG’s “wallpaper” TV, an OLED TV only 9mm deep that can be mounted nearly flush against a wall. It’s one of LG’s brightest OLEDs yet, and it’s almost completely wireless and supports its Dolby Atmos FlexConnect-powered LG Sound Suite for building a spatial audio system around it.
Best Weird Tech
Winner
Lepro Ami, the AI soulmate
Having a tiny animated girl living on a small screen inside a cylindrical case is certainly extraordinarily weird. But that’s what Ami is. Although it uses AI, Ami isn’t an assistant for actual tasks. It’s designed for a lonely person looking for some interaction. You can have Ami dance and gyrate on request, upping the weirdness factor.
Suck on this lollipop and listen to a song directly from your mouth to your ears using bone-conduction technology, so you can “experience music you can taste.” CNET’s Abrar Al-Heeti tried it out, and though you had to bite down on it a bit to hear the music, it did work. It’s a weird, fun novelty item. It costs $9.
iPolish digital nail polish
iPolish touts itself as the “world’s first digital color-changing nails.” They take the form of press-on nails that you can individually put into a little wand to instantly change the color via a selection of over 400 shades on an app.
Best Wellness Tech
Winner
Perimenopause affects women transitioning to menopause, and is commonly marked by symptoms such as anxiety, hot flashes and night sweats. Peri is a wearable designed to track those symptoms, and help you make informed decisions about how to manage them — whether that’s through lifestyle changes and supplements alone, or hormone replacement therapy.
For women who experience severe pain during menstruation, this wearable uses neurostimulation to reduce symptoms and cramps. Attach it near the ear, and it delivers gentle neurostimulation, targeting the auricular branches of the trigeminal and vagus nerves.
Food allergies can be deadly. Allergen Alert is a mini, portable lab that allows you to test food for common allergens on the spot at a restaurant, school or anywhere you dine out. A single-use pouch analyzes the food sample inserted into the device and displays results within minutes.
Best Yard or Outdoor Tech
Winner
Beatbot AquaSense X ecosystem
The AquaSense X ecosystem removes the worst chore associated with pool robot vacs — cleaning the debris baskets filled with soggy leaves, slime and bugs. The standalone cleaning dock empties debris into a disposable bag in a bin waiting below and then cleans out its internal mechanisms with fresh water fed from an attached hose.
The Luba 3 AWD mower stole the show at CES 2026, easily climbing slopes up to 80% thanks to its four-wheel drive design. It offers wire-free navigation enhanced by lidar and AI vision, plus adjustable cutting heights. This attractive robot lawnmower can also overcome and avoid obstacles in your yard.
This hummingbird feeder has a beautiful design that resembles an actual flower. However, more importantly, it uses AI and an 8-megapixel camera to capture slow-motion video — slow enough to see the flap of a hummingbirds’ wings — and can identify 150 different species of your avian visitors.