The Consumer Electronics Show was filled with cancellation due to Omicron, and the floor was almost empty, as a result. The keynote presentations lacked spectacle and were overshadowed by circumstance.
I was surprised to learn that the show was slightly better than average. The expectation that there would be industry-shaking products announced and shipping was always misguided.
We saw some really good improvements on technology that will actually ship, which isn't always the case at the show. Here are a few of my favorites.
The Dell XPS 13 Plus is a remake of a classic laptop design. The company mixed some interesting ideas with a bad idea: dropping the headphones.
The chip announcements from Intel andAMD should lead to some solid computers.
The smart home is getting ready for a big year with more ambitious products designed to work together with the new Matter standard.
The curved monitor swoops over your head when it rotates 90 degrees.
A home robot that doesn't try to do anything too futuristic, just provide the service of helping people with mobility issues carry stuff around.
There is a new technology called Quantum Dot that will allow the screen to be much brighter.
The portable projector is able to solve the hassles of portable projectors. The product manager used these types of products and understood their problems.
The high-end spot has been empty for about two years.
The stuff that will likely never ship but are worth examining is the ones that are. They reveal the id of consumer tech: companies that desperately want you to believe they are innovative, eco-friendly, and have multi-year plans that are realistic.
I am talking about electric cars. The cars are all gadgets now, and that's why the car show is called the CES.
There was a concept car that was fun because nobody pretended that it would turn into a real product. BMW uses E Ink on the body panels of its iX to give it the ability to change from black to white at the touch of a switch.
We sit in a strange time where most car manufacturers have yet to ship electric vehicles at scale, despite the fact that they need to. The company will be fully electric in the next year or two, and that was one of the main promises of the show.
I'm put off by the concept cars this year, but I have a modicum of sympathy because supply chain issues make ramping up any new thing difficult. Car companies are participating in the tech hype at the Consumer Electronics Show. My sympathy doesn't go as far as it otherwise would when the tech is an essential part of eliminating fossil fuels. We need EV to be real and widespread, so looking at concepts that are probably vaporware is more sting than if it were a fancy monitor or a weird pretend robot.
The E Ink one is still cool, but look away from the concept cars. There were a lot of new gadgets that will come out this year, and they seem to be better than before. Nothing worthy of their own keynotes, but all in all a decent haul for a weird year.
One of the staff's favorite announcements here at The Verge was the 42-inchOLED TV from LG. We loved it because it was small and useful, not because it was a massive TV. It fills a hole that needed to be filled, a TV with superb picture quality that works in a smaller room, and a potentially cool option for a gaming monitor.
L'Oreal has created a hair accessory that combines a brush with a dye cartridge. It makes applying it much simpler. It isn't wi-fi enabled. There is no app. It doesn't work with wireless technology. It lacks those things, and the time that would have been wasted building that tech in was instead put into designing it for its purpose.
It was a good year for the show. The vaporware was easier to ignore this year because there were more gadgets that were useful. What a concept.
