Lego Smart Brick: watch an immersive 15-minute demo like you’re right there with us at CES
Lego Smart Brick: watch an immersive 15-minute demo like you’re right there with us at CES

The Lego Smart Brick won our Best in Show award at CES 2026, and it was no wonder after watching Lego designer Maarten Simons’ expert demo there. So I thought: why not let you virtually attend the same tech demo I did? Before I left Las Vegas, I snuck back into Lego’s suite to film […]

We tried CES 2026’s best and weirdest products, ask us anything!
We tried CES 2026’s best and weirdest products, ask us anything!

We spent last week running to meetings, demos, and the convention floors to see as much as we could at CES 2026. And now that we’ve (sort of) recovered, it’s time to answer any questions you still have. Did we replace Dom with his clone? Did Jen survive a robot falling on her? Is Vee […]

How Lego’s Smart Brick works
How Lego’s Smart Brick works

The most interesting story at this year’s CES was just a little tiny bundle of technology. One way to look at Lego’s new Smart Brick is as something like a Raspberry Pi, an endlessly remixable gizmo with infinite hacking potential – it can be anything, in the best possible way. Another way to look at […]

Why Amazon bought Bee, an AI wearable

Amazon explains where its wearable Bee fits in and whether it will merge with Alexa.

Motional puts AI at center of robotaxi reboot as it targets 2026 for driverless service

Motional says it will launch a driverless robotaxi service in Las Vegas before the end of 2026.

I went looking for weird phones and CES 2026 did not disappoint
I went looking for weird phones and CES 2026 did not disappoint

It’s January, which means there’s a whole year of rectangular glass slabs ahead of us. But before that happens, I managed to find phones of a different shape lurking around the corners of the CES convention center halls. They weren’t center stage, of course. That was reserved for robots doing laundry badly. But in the […]

These are the smart home gadgets that impressed me at CES 2026
These are the smart home gadgets that impressed me at CES 2026

I picked Aqara’s Smart Lock U400 and Roborock’s Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor. It was a banner year for smart home products, and the big trends I saw weren’t about new product categories; they […]

I’ve never used a trackball, but Keychron’s Nape Pro looks like the perfect one
I’ve never used a trackball, but Keychron’s Nape Pro looks like the perfect one

Keychron announced new mechanical keyboards with marathon battery life at CES, but this trackball stole the spotlight. The Nape Pro is Keychron’s first trackball, and its slender frame means it can work on your desk in multiple ways. You can keep it to the right or left of a keyboard like a traditional trackball, or […]

The CES 2026 stuff I might actually buy
The CES 2026 stuff I might actually buy

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 111, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about gerrymandering and watch conventions and John […]

This company could help bring Auracast to an iPhone near you
This company could help bring Auracast to an iPhone near you

One of the issues holding Auracast back from wider mainstream use is some companies’ lack of support for the Bluetooth technology – Apple being a prime example. With iOS having 58 percent of the market share in North America and nearly 28 percent worldwide, a decision by Apple to enable native Auracast support would potentially […]