CES 2023: 100+ Highlights and Oddities From the Show

I’ve been looking at and testing gadgets for a long time and to be honest—a lot of things I get stoked on do not end up working out (see: Google Stadia). To see it all memorialized in the Gallery of Flops by Prelaunch.com in Eureka Park, though, is very striking. I liked the Zune! Please give it another chance! 

(Filmed by Alicia Cocchi)

In the market for a new standing desk? ErgoAV makes mounts, but it's a new player in the home desk space. Its first standing desk (the ERDS1-01B) is pretty dazzling, especially if you go for the Meteor Black version. (You can choose from a variety of other designs.) 

There’s a hub on the left side with USB-A and USB-C ports, all of which can dish out up to 100 watts of power for recharging your devices. It has a single motor but it’s relatively quiet and smoothly moves up and down via a button on the right side. What makes it unique is it can go really low, enough for little kids to use, and it can get high enough for adults to use while standing. Don’t worry, there’s a sensor that prevents the table from going lower if it detects someone underneath it. 

You’ll also go “whoaaaa” like I did when you place your phone on the wireless charging base, as it will automatically spin and tilt up toward you, making it easy to see notifications and recharge your handset at the same time. Unfortunately, the desk is pretty spendy—the base version costs $1,499, which is more expensive than some of our favorite standing desks from Fully and others. It launches in March.

The Audio Technica AT-SB202 “Sound Burger” turntable is among the most coveted toys in audiophiledom. Place your record in the middle of what looks like a mix between a flat iron and a plastic mouth, and the cute turntable spins them in front of you as though with its tongue, allowing you to listen to your favorite records while out and about or on vacation. 

It’s a fun little toy that Audio Technica reissued late last year for its 60th anniversary, not anticipating the absolute fervor with which nostalgic audio nerds would purchase them. Not to worry! 

It has now announced that the Sound Burger will return in 2023 in non-limited fashion, allowing everyone the chance to purchase this fun little audio accessory for a couple hundred bucks (actual pricing hasn’t been announced, but the last reissue cost $200) starting this spring. The new model even has Bluetooth, making it easy to pair with modern headphones and speakers, though not entirely analog.

Fall Detection can be crucial at getting emergency responders to an elderly person, but it’s kind of hard to convince Grandma to wear an Apple Watch all the time. Nobi has a workaround—a lamp that can detect falls. 

It hangs in a room and uses a mix of radar, a camera, and other sensors to identify when someone has fallen down; it’ll then alert a guardian, who can also talk through the lamp if they’re out of the house. It’s currently used in elderly care homes in Europe, but the company is in talks to enter the US this year as a device anyone can buy and install. 

You might be rightly worried about the camera—the company assures me that the vision data is analyzed locally and people are converted into stick figures to maintain privacy. Images are only sent to caregivers and family members in the event of a fall and with approval of the person being watched, who can choose to send the real images or a stick figure visualization. 

The Nobi has a few other handy features, like the ability to unlock the front door if you pair it with a smart lock so that help can get through, medication reminders, and it’s a lamp that can dish out bright blue light in the morning and warmer tones in the evening. 

Nobi unveiled a newer version this CES that is easier to install, has a more discrete look, and has better mics and speakers to filter out background noise during calls. The company also plans to introduce a fall prediction system later this year. Based on the data it has gathered from monitoring falls (with, reportedly, zero false negatives), it can potentially alert caregivers seconds or minutes before an elderly person is about to fall. That’s some important peace of mind.

CES is filled with a lot of wacky concepts and products. Most of them aren't available yet and a lot of them never come out at all, but each year we do make a list of the interesting products we spotted that are actually available for preorder or purchase. 

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Automakers don’t often debut a car's interior at a show without anything attached to it, but after grasping its fair share of attention at last year at CES with its Airflow EV concept car, Chrysler wanted to show off the carmaker’s priorities in the next few years when it comes to EVs’ interiors. 

The Synthesis Cockpit’s instrument panel is made of post-industrial recycled plastics, textile-infused walnut flooring, and “upcycled” soft grim—Chrysler didn’t elaborate on how that upholstery was upcycled, or upcycled from what. 

The 37.2-inch dashboard-spanning infotainment screen is massive compared to anything currently on sale. Much of the rest of the concept details a personalized voice assistant, over-the-air updates, and level 3 autonomous driving. While the concept displayed at CES lacks a steering wheel, Chrysler says production versions will come with one. 

We discuss the Synthesis in our roundup of fascinating auto tech at CES.

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In addition to a variety of gaming laptops, Acer announced a new portable speaker. The compact speaker comes equipped with a detachable leather strap (making it easier to carry around the house) and a transparent USB-C charging dock with RGB visual effects that match to the beat of the music. Using the Acer Halo app, you can customize the speaker’s LED display with a premade message, image, or drawing of your own.

In terms of sound quality, the Halo Swing packs an internal subwoofer and DTS sound which Acer says delivers “rich, clear vocals and distinctive sound” and “wide bass extension.” The company also claims up to 10 hours of battery life. 

With Google Assistant built-in, you can control it using voice commands using the built-in microphone. There’s a button to mute the microphone along with manual controls on top of the speaker. It has an IPX5 water-resistant rating as well, so you don’t have to worry about accidental spills. Acer has yet to confirm pricing and availability information. 

Smell-o-Vision! It’s real! Well, sort of. Aromajoin is a Japanese company and it currently sells the unfortunately named “Aroma Shooter.” You can guess what it does—it employs several cartridges of scents you can buy from the company and shoots it toward your face; it’s not a liquid cartridge but a dry and solid scent, so you’re only going to feel a gentle breeze, and the scent doesn’t linger for too long. 

These smells can be tailored to various time stamps on any YouTube video using the AromaPlayer software, and so anyone who uses the device will get quite the nasal experience. Think of smelling dark chocolate as someone on screen bites into a chocolate bar. Yum. 

The Aroma Shooter is primarily for retail stores and marketing purposes but Aromajoin wants to enter the consumer space this year. The new product to accompany it? The Aroma Shooter Wearable, which rests around your neck, and is aimed at adding a scent experience to virtual reality to further immerse yourself in your VR escape.

The HP Dragonfly has long been a business device we wish we could get—always offering a lightweight and stylish design. HP has now obliged with new Dragonfly Pro and Dragonfly Pro laptops, but one thing will cause some raised eyebrows.

The Dragonfly Chromebook Pro offers up a world first 8-megapixel webcam in a clamshell Chromebook and the world’s brightest touchscreen display in a Chromebook—up to 1,200 nits. That is bright. One eye-catching feature is an RGB keyboard. It’s a rare inclusion for a device aimed at productivity users—but, hey, why not?

The Windows-powered Dragonfly Pro offers similar looks but uses AMD 7000 series CPUs, compared to the Chromebook models 12th Gen Intel processors. 

It’s a fairly standard-looking productivity machine one thing stands out: the hotkeys. 

The Dragonfly Pro has one key for bringing up the control center, and another for showing your webcam feed. You can map the third hotkey to anything you’d like—a neat idea. The final hotkey just contacts HP’s 24/7 live concierge support, which is a service you'd have to pay for.

Both Dragonfly devices are expected to be available in Q1 with no details on pricing revealed yet.

We already know that fitness trackers can be much more than just an athletic diary. These wrist accessories can often offer insights into your overall health based on different data sets—heart rate, oxygen levels, etc—to indicate anything from physical improvement over time to potentially catching illnesses or irregularities. While this is wildly helpful for humans, what if this type of technology could help us better understand our dogs? Invoxia’s improved Smart Collar hopes to do just that.

I’ve always wished my frenchies could tell me if they’re feeling well, and this seems like a step in the right direction. The updates to Smart Collar implement artificial intelligence alongside tiny sensors and accelerometers to measure your dog’s health and activity throughout the day. Invoxia uses what they call “Heartprint Technology” to graph continuous measurements of the dog’s cardio-pulmonary system and potentially highlight any symptoms of heart diseases, stress, and pain. 

But the tracking isn’t just cardiac—Invoxia notes that even by tracking how often your dog scratches during the day could indicate something like a rash or an allergy before it gets out of hand. The collar should be available for purchase in early 2023 and will cost $149 plus an additional $8 monthly subscription fee.

We liked Ampere's Dusk Bluetooth-enabled sunglasses with an adjustable tint, and now they have a version called the Dusk Sport that’s intended for running and biking. 

As with the previous Dusk sunglasses, they are also adjustable via an app and have built-in audio—handy if, for example, you’re running through woods or variable terrain and need to up or lower the darkness of your glasses on the fly. 

But if you and your pals are all wearing Dusk Sports, the sunglasses act as a pair of wearable walkie-talkies. Simply press all three audio control buttons at once to talk to your friends on the same channel. “Hello, guys? I’m tired, it’s time to head back to the car.”

Our head Gear editor Mike Calore tries out the King Fitness Gym Box and a fold-up water resistant rower on the CES show floor.

EVgo—one of the major nationwide electric vehicle charging networks in the United States—has partnered with Amazon to bring new EV-specific functionalities to Alexa-enabled vehicles, as well as aftermarket automotive Alexa accessories, such as Echo Auto. 

After the update goes live later this year, drivers will be able to ask Alexa to find them charging stations by piggybacking off the nationwide PluGshare database that has detailed information on more than 250,000 charging stations. They’ll also be able to initiate charging sessions and pay for them through Alexa voice commands, although we should point out that the driver obviously still has to get out of the vehicle to physically connect the charging cable, so it’s not all hands-free. 

The dream of devices that charge wirelessly without pads or cables shows progress each year. 

At CES, the AirFuel Alliance (which includes Samsung, Huawei, and a host of wireless power players among its members) announced the first global interoperable standard for RF wireless power transfer, called AirFuel RF. It uses radio frequency waves to transmit small amounts of energy from a few inches up to a few meters. 

You can charge devices without precise placement on a pad, charge awkwardly shaped gadgets like earbuds, and simultaneously charge multiple devices within range. The catch is we are still talking about tiny amounts of power suitable for things like electronic shelf labels (so they don’t need batteries), some wearables, and IoT sensors.

AirFuel competitor Powercast announced its Ubiquity RF wireless charging system, offered to manufacturers as a reference design, available for license from February or as an embeddable module and transmitter from June 2023. Powercast estimates the cost of integrating the receiver into a device at $5 and offers the Powerharvester PCC110 receiver chip and a small antenna at around $1. 

Again, we are talking about a trickle charge here, but it might be suitable for things like TV remotes, keyboards and mice, game controllers, headphones, hearing aids, wearables, and smart home sensors. This kind of wireless power could also prove handy for bathroom gadgets like electric toothbrushes and shavers, where there might not be an outlet.

Ossia announced the wireless Cota Universal Base charger, which can be charged over the air with a Cota Home node and deliver power to other devices. Ossia is partnering with Marubun and Fujitsu on ePaper RFID Tags, allowing for digital displays and asset tracking that don’t require wiring or batteries.

These are small steps forward, but as I wrote last year, wireless power at a distance in our homes remains, well ... distant.

It may be called the Consumer Electronics Show, but in the past half-decade, the EV revolution has turned CES into a big destination for interesting automotive concepts and unveilings.

Our guide to the best auto tech of CES is filled with motorcycles, EVs, charging tech, sustainable tires, and more.

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Our Gear crew left Las Vegas last night, but we'll be back for at least a few hours today to share more of their experiences from the show and anything else we find.