Transcript

Best of CES 2026

From The Verge · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 18 min · 3,287 words · 21 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Best of CES 2026", an episode of The Verge published January 9, 2026 (18 min, about 3,287 words). It mentions 12 people, works and ideas, including Wings Body Scan 2, Aara Smart Lock U400, Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold, TCL X11L, Fender Mix headphones.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 3:00: Wings Body Scan 2
  2. – 6:00: Aara Smart Lock U400
  3. – 9:00: Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold, TCL X11L
  4. – 12:00: Fender Mix headphones, Mercedes Drive Assist Pro
  5. – 15:00: Eovax Little Milo, Minverse by Hapley
  6. – 18:00: LEGO Smart Brick

Notable quotes from "Best of CES 2026"

  • I never thought I'd be barefoot on the CES floor. So, my pick for best health tech of CES 2026 is the Wings Body Scan 2. Now, it's a smart scale, but it's a little bit…
    about Wings Body Scan 2 · at
  • My pick for best laptop to CS 2026 is this right here, the Asus Rag Zephorus Duo. It's a dual screen gaming laptop with two 16-in OLED displays and a detachable keyboard deck…
    about Aara Smart Lock U400 · at
  • My pick for the best phone of 2026 at CES, Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold. There are a couple qualifiers here. It's not officially launched in the US, but we know it's coming.…
    about Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold · at
  • Definitely one of the coolest things I saw at the show. the coolest thing. My pick for the best TV is the TCL X11L. Now, the reason I'm choosing this TV is because of two new…
    about Fender Mix headphones · at
  • So, my pick for best car at CES was kind of a no-brainer because it was the only thing real enough for us to test ourselves. And that was the Mercedes Drive Assist Pro, which…
    about Mercedes Drive Assist Pro · at
  • All right, so my category for best of CES 2026 is most fun. And I'm choosing Minverse by Hapley. They make haptics controllers. And what that means is this controller, it has…
    about Minverse by Hapley · at
  • More. It's just really darn cute. The AI side of the whole thing is that it's packed with sensors. It's got a camera. It's got a microphone. And it's got various touch sensors…
    about LEGO Smart Brick · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

Products & tech

Full transcript with timestamps

We just spent a week at CES sifting through thousands of exhibitors that come to show off their latest tech. We've seen it all from laptops, TVs, phones, robots, and everything in between. Here's what the Verge team thought stood out the most. This is our best of picks at CES 2026. I never thought I'd be barefoot on the CES floor. So, my pick for best health tech of CES 2026 is the Wings Body Scan 2. Now, it's a smart scale, but it's a little bit different in that Wings is trying to reposition the idea of weighing yourself into a longevity station. Longevity tech is a big trend here in the health tech sector. And Wings has basically divided it into two pillars. One is going to be cardiovascular health and one is going to be metabolic health. Now, usually with metabolic health, it's got to be invasive. It's a blood test or it's a urine test, which is a little messy. This uses your foot sweat. There's actual science behind that. It's not complete mumbo jumbo garbage. But what I really like about this is that it's a scale. You know how to use a scale. The fact of the matter is is that using a scale is usually a quite loaded experience. We all have a lot of emotions and feelings towards weight, but weight is often a really

misunderstood health metric in the context of all of your health. So, repositioning it as a longevity station where you're measuring a whole bunch of different health metrics a couple of times a week and seeing what your weight is in the context of your entire health, I think is a really smart idea and something that we need to have more education about going forward. So that's why I chose this one. There's been a lot of longevity tech at this show. So much of it has involved blood or pee and other bodily fluids. I I'll take the foot sweat. And my next pick is for best wearable and that is L'Oreal's LED face mask. I got to say, wearables was a little disappointing at this year's show. But this, let me tell you, I really hate it when people ask me about LED face masks whether they should buy it. Mainly because as a category, it's full of snake oil. What I liked about L'Oreal's product, is it's actually taking the concept of a sheet mask, something that

a lot of skincare nerds already know how to use, and it's just condensing the steps of your skincare routine with a thin, flexible mask. And what is the number one rule of wearable tech? Verge readers will know, I keep saying this, it has to be comfortable to wear. Most LED light masks, they're not comfortable to wear. And a lot of these mask makers don't talk about FDA clearance. They don't talk about precise wavelengths of light used. L'Oreal does. They've worked with a partner that has done a lot of clinical studies and trials. And they're innovating on the form factor. The fact that it sits a lot closer to your face. One, it could help with penetration. It could help make your existing skincare routines a bit more effective while reducing the time needed. It's only 5 to 10 minutes. It just is more transparent. And I don't know if you want to go as VCNA for Halloween, there you go. It It does look a little creepy, but I don't

think you could have an LED face mask that isn't creepy. Anyway, we don't know price yet. They are planning on 2027 for a launch, but it is pending FDA 510K clearance. There you go. My pick for best laptop to CS 2026 is this right here, the Asus Rag Zephorus Duo. It's a dual screen gaming laptop with two 16-in OLED displays and a detachable keyboard deck and trackpad. You can set it up like a clamshell or you can use it in this kind of manner as an up and down dual monitor setup or side by side. A lot of versatility. We don't know the price just yet, but the bottom line is this. This is a really cool and unique gaming laptop to come to the space. I'm looking forward to testing it. I think it'll be a really interesting experience cuz I'm quite fond of dual screen laptops myself and any experience that I've had with them and I really like dual monitor big monitor setups. This gives you a taste of that in a portable form factor that should be powerful enough to play most games uh at some pretty high specs and also ideally hopefully have battery life that should last you for most or all of your day. Those are key factors for any

laptop and they're not always common in gaming laptops and nothing's common when it comes to dual screen. I'm a fan of OLEDs. I always say the more OLEDs the better and this has got two of them. My pick for best smart home product at CES 2026 is the Aara Smart Lock U400. It may just look like a fairly standard smart lock, but the U400 has a hidden superpower, a UWB antenna. This is one of the first smart locks to work with Apple Home Keys hands-free unlocking. The antenna in the lock connects to a UWB radio in your iPhone or Apple Watch and lets it unlock automatically as you approach. Hands-free unlocking means you just open the door. No need to get fingerprint. No need to type in a code and definitely no need to use a key. It's a matter over thread lock. So, it works with Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Home Assistant, Samsung Smart Things, but it also works with a new standard called ARO. And this is a standard for smart locks that's going to

allow any smartphone, not just Apple, to unlock this door using UWB. The main reason this is my pick is because this lock is a great example of how smart home standards are coming together to make the smart home easier to use. Is that enough?

Yeah. My pick for best robot at CES 2026 is Robo Rocks Saros Rover. They finally did it. They can climb stairs. This is a robot vacuum that can not only climb up stairs using its articulated legs, but it can also vacuum your stairs. I mean, what else do we want? Now you don't need to buy multiple robots for multiple floors. This bot will be able to climb up and down and vacuum all over your home. It can also hop to get over transitions between rooms. This could be a robot vacuum that hopefully will solve the problem of how to access every corner of your home and keep it clean. It is however a concept right now. No price or release date, although I am told by Robo Rock that it will be coming to market. Might do my best of white.

My pick for the best phone of 2026 at CES, Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold. There are a couple qualifiers here. It's not officially launched in the US, but we know it's coming. Samsung sort of announced this phone before CES. They released it in Korea, so could have bought one there, but it is coming to the US later this year. I got to play with it. Is super beautiful. You have a huge 10-in screen on the inside, and I'm hoping that that is the screen that's going to allow me to fire my laptop, and I can control it with a keyboard. I can set it up, bring it to the coffee shop. I have all kinds of ideas for it. It's a luxury item. It's going to be super expensive, I'm sure. We don't have an official price. The Galaxy ZFold 7 is $2,000 and it has one hinge. So, I don't know. Do the math. It's going to go up from there. But, this is a real working product. They were talking about it a year ago and teasing it like it might happen. It's not the first trifold phone. Huawei got that honor, but

definitely one of the coolest things I saw at the show. the coolest thing. My pick for the best TV is the TCL X11L. Now, the reason I'm choosing this TV is because of two new technologies that the company is implementing. We have newly reformulated quantum dots and a brand new color filter. And the combination of these two technologies allows this TV to achieve up to 100% of BT 2020. and it will be the only LED TV that will include this technology in 2026, but I do expect that other companies will eventually implement these. Now, the TV does get exceptionally bright. TCL is rating it for 10,000 nits. Do we need that much brightness? I don't think so. But the thing with this X11L is that they're really more focusing, in my mind, on the color accuracy. And I hope that that will become a trend. The TV itself is not cheap. We're looking at about $7,000 for the smallest size, which is 75 in. The 85 in is $8,000 and the 98 in is 10 grand. Now, do I

recommend you spend up to $10,000 for a TV? I I might hold off a little bit on that. But the interesting thing about this is that this combination of these technologies will likely filter down into some more affordable models as 2026 goes on, maybe, but definitely into the following year. And my pick for best audio of CES 2026 are the Fender Mix headphones. Now, these are the first headphones that Fender has released. They are solidly built. They're comfortable on your head. They have a good amount of clamping force, but not too much. And they also sound great. I was a big fan of the tuning the moment I put them on my head. And you'll be able to listen to them for a long time. Battery will get you 100 hours or 52 using the ANC. And the ANC performed pretty well. I mean, I was in a hall here at CES and I put them on and they did a really good job of blocking out a lot of the extra noise. The other great thing about the battery is it's replaceable. So when your rechargeable

battery starts to lose its juice, easily replace it and put the ear cup back on and you are good to go. Now under the other ear cup is a dongle, a USBC dongle, so you can listen to your headphones wirelessly with Oriccastast. One thing to say about that though is the OCAST transmission will only be receivable by Fender headphones. I really enjoy my time with these headphones and I look forward to getting them in and testing them longer. I think they're a great value for what you're getting with the sound quality and what seems to be really good A&C, the option of having lossless audio, and they're at $299.99. For a first attempt at Bluetooth headphones, I think Fender has done a really solid job.

So, my pick for best car at CES was kind of a no-brainer because it was the only thing real enough for us to test ourselves. And that was the Mercedes Drive Assist Pro, which is a level two plus plus partially autonomous driver assist system uh that works in both cities as well as on highways. And this system is powered by five radar sensors, 10 cameras, and 12 ultrasonic sensors. And all of that data from those sensors is shoveled into a supercomput from Nvidia that's capable of running at up to 58 trillion operations a second. I went on a test ride through San Francisco and was pretty impressed with how the system handled all the chaos of a big crowded city. There were bike messengers and double parked cars and delivery trucks and people pushing baby strollers and the Mercedes really handled it uh very effortlessly. I was I was very impressed by that. The driver is meant to sort of keep their hands on the wheel and stay paying attention to all the conditions and take control if

they need to. And it will monitor your eye movements to make sure you're not checking your phone or falling asleep for that matter. But think of it as Mercedes answer to Tesla's full self-driving, but arguably a lot more robust because of all those extra sensors as compared to Tesla's camera only approach. Plus, you've got Nvidia's safety certified silicon chips and AI software that's going to be in a lot more cars than just Mercedes in the years to come. So, that's my pick for best car at CES. All right, so my category for best of CES 2026 is most fun. And I'm choosing Minverse by Hapley. They make haptics controllers. And what that means is this controller, it has haptic feedback. So, whatever you're interacting with an object in 3D space on the screen, you'll feel it in your pen. It's something you kind of really got to experience to understand. But the demos are super cool and playing with it in 3D modeling was really, really fun. I was using Free Form, an app that I've never used

before. And I've always kind of played with 3D modeling as a hobbyist, but I got out of it because I didn't really like 2D cursors and I never really felt like tablet would be the workflow for me. What I always wanted was something that would make it feel like I was actually molding the clay or shaping the object that I was working with. What I really liked about 3D modeling with this tool is it felt like I was carving away at clay and it was so intuitive, so tactile that I was able to carve a pumpkin and it just felt like I was playing. You might think this is some really expensive thing that might lock you out of the experience. And some of their controllers are pretty expensive, but this one, the Minverse, it is $1,500. And that might just be cheap enough to get me back into 3D modeling. And that's why Minverse is my choice for most fun at CES. Most of our CES awards have been practical, sensible products that you can and maybe should go and buy this

year. This is not that. This is our irrational award of CES 2026. The thing that we love, even though we know we really shouldn't. Eovax. Little Milo. It is a fluffy little robot toy dog that doesn't really do very much more than just sit there and be a fluffy little robot toy dog. It's cute and it's cuddly and it wags its tail and it cranes its head around from side to side and even reacts when you give it scratches behind its ear. And that's it. There is no more. It's just really darn cute. The AI side of the whole thing is that it's packed with sensors. It's got a camera. It's got a microphone. And it's got various touch sensors so that it knows when you're giving it scratches and scratches and belly rubs in the right places. It can recognize its owner and regular visitors. And it reacts to their presence. If you're sad, it will behave differently to if you're happy, at least as best as it can tell. In theory, over time, it develops its

own personality. It develops its own relationship with you. And within the accompanying app, you can actually see its emotional levels as well. CES has been packed with other AI toys this year, and there's been a really big divide. Some do loads and they pack AI chatbots inside and they have interactive games and all sorts of stuff. But Lilo is the best of this other category that is just kind of cute. They're companions is the idea. And in fact, Eovac, like many of the other companies in this space, aren't even really pitching these as toys. They're saying they're great for lonely people or people who want pets but can't because of allergies. So maybe that means there is a small little niche market for this. But for most of us, you shouldn't buy Lil Milo. I have to reiterate it does not do anything. But we're being irrational here. And when it's this darn cute, it can get away with not doing anything.

The LEGO Smart Brick is my best of CES 2026 because this tiny computer keeps surprising me with so much playable tech. It doesn't just play lights and sounds. It lets LEGO characters and vehicles interact. When you drop Luke into an X-wing, it recognizes that he's there. It recognizes that it is an X-wing. And if you drop R2-D2 in as well, you can do a barrel roll and hear R2-D2 scream. It can do this because it uses NFC tags to detect that both Luke and R2B2 are there. Because the bricks have their own wireless Bluetooth mesh network, they can see each other's position and orientation, which lets two of them do battle. You can have this X-wing and Darth Vader TIE Fighter blast at each other, and it'll keep track of the number of hits they've taken.

I have you now. But there's also surprising hidden interactions. Like if you put a few different characters around a brick, they'll just start speaking in their own little language.

And it has a color sensor, too. So if you press a button on the X-wing, it can detect the red color and start firing the blasters. There are some predetermined sounds, like if you set the emperor down on his throne, it will play the Imperial March the same way every time. But if you drop a smart brick in the Moss Eisley Cantina and rock it back and forth, kids can determine how fast or slow it plays using the real-time synthesizer. You can even get Darth Vader to sing along. The Smart Break does seem to add a bit to the cost of a Lego set. This $70 X-wing isn't as big as the ones we typically see carding around mini figs. Is this just a way of outsourcing kids imaginations? I walked in thinking it might be that, but I walked out thinking it's more clever. It's not clear that this is the future of LEGO. They won't tell us there will be any sets beyond these three Star Wars ones, but you get the sense that it's a big platform that's going to come out to more and more sets. And this isn't just a concept

like many CES gadgets we see. This is a real product coming out in March. That's a big reason why it's my best of CES.

So, that's a wrap on CES 2026. It's going to be a year of trifolding phones and self-driving cars and vacuums with legs and I guess fake dogs. we're in the future or whether we're ready or not. Let us know what you liked the most that you saw. And if you want to check out our full best of coverage, you can check it out at the verge.com where we have even more categories listed. Thanks for watching everybody. Where the where the hell am I?

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Best of CES 2026"?

In order: 0:00 Wings Body Scan 2; 3:00 Aara Smart Lock U400; 6:00 Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold, TCL X11L; 9:00 Fender Mix headphones, Mercedes Drive Assist Pro; 12:00 Eovax Little Milo, Minverse by Hapley; 15:00 LEGO Smart Brick.

What is mentioned in this The Verge episode?

12 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Wings Body Scan 2, Aara Smart Lock U400, Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold, TCL X11L, Fender Mix headphones, Mercedes Drive Assist Pro. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Best of CES 2026"?

The episode runs 18 min; the transcript is about 3,287 words in 21 timestamped sections.

More from The Verge

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 12, 2026.