The smart home was once a far-flung pipe dream, but it is now a reality. Wherever you live, your home is ground zero for some of the most interesting tech available right now, and tech that’s yet to come. Best of all, it doesn’t have to cost a fortune to get your home up and running with smart hardware and services.
Home security and monitoring solutions can alert you to a burglary, smoke, fire, or just simple motion activity. There are plenty of options with a range of capabilities, from smart doorbells and smart locks to indoor and outdoor cameras that can see in the dark.
Smart speakers, like the Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod each play a big role in helping you out, too. In the kitchen, they can read out recipes, or if you’re cleaning, you can call out to them to change the song on the fly. If you buy smart light bulbs, for instance, you can turn them on and off by using your voice.
The company calls it Senso, and it’s cute! Detachable heads and charger so you can leave the probe in soil. Light, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, plus a whole AI pitch I’m not quite buying. I’d be more tempted if it weren’t a Kickstarter and had a local smart home API. (YouTube version here.)
Smart lights that know where they’re placed in a room, wild designs for next-gen routers, and a glowing inedible donut.
Rollable laptops, twice-folding phones, and a ‘longevity station.’ This is the CES tech we come back for.
The CleverK9 is one of the first, if not the first, smart pet crates on the market. As you’d expect from anything with the word “smart” in the title, it has an app for opening the doors, and you can even automate it so they’ll unlock in the event that smoke or CO2 is detected.
Unsurprisingly, the CleverK9 won’t be cheap, starting at $600 and going up to $2,000 based on size. But hey, at least there’s no subscription.
The Wi-Fi 8 spec isn’t finalized, but Asus is showing a ROG NeoCore concept router at CES. Buying a router based on an unfinished reference design spec sounds risky, but I do hope this d20-like styling sets a trend.
The clear spider-like version you see here is Asus’s Wi-Fi 8 test model. A rep told me the NeoCore internalizes the antennas, which are the edges of the polyhedron. Neat.
Who needs humanoid robots when your vacuum can sprout legs?
You’ll soon be able to browse through third-party integrations that can add more features to your camera. Meld, for example, uses your Ring camera to analyze your dog’s behavior and alert you to anything concerning, while PoolScout can send real-time notifications before an unattended toddler or pet reaches your pool.
Ring says the new store will be available within its app in the “coming weeks.”
Aqara’s new U400 smart lock is the first to use Apple’s UWB-based hands-free unlocking, and it works every time, even with full hands.
As a result, the D2 Pro Palm Vein Smart Lock will work with both Alexa and Google. It also offers improved palm vein recognition, which, according to TCL, “uses infrared technology to detect unique vein patterns beneath the skin,” using AI local processing to tweak recognition data each time it’s used. Along with the new D2L Fingerprint Lever Lock, it will be available in the second quarter of 2026; no price was announced.
As Jen Tuohy demonstrates, Samsung’s new Family Hub lineup can use voice control to close the refrigerator door, in addition to a slew of other AI-enabled features.
In addition, the Eve Thermostat works without an internet connection and doesn’t require any sort of additional subscription — something that is depressingly rare these days. Otherwise, it offers all the usual stuff you’d expect, including app and voice control, automations, and scheduling, for $129.95.
The household robot made its debut at the company’s CES 2026 press conference, rolling onto the stage and giving a ponderous demo of putting a towel into a laundry machine.
The sizable wheeled robot used its articulating arms and huge hands to perform the action and talked to the audience about its technology and capabilities, using human-like hand gestures to emphasize its words.
These are the boxes that’ll make up its new Solix E10, aka “the world’s first smart hybrid whole home backup solution.” What that means, exactly, won’t be known until the launch event on January 12th. I’m seeing stackable battery expansion and an inverter as you’d expect, an inlet box and smart panel to tap directly into your home’s circuitry, and what looks like a gas-powered generator like EcoFlow sells.
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