The 10 Coolest Things We’ve Seen So Far at CES 2025
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The spectacle of CES doesn’t reach full steam until tomorrow, but we’ve already gotten a preview of some of the most exciting tech debuting this week. The expo officially opens to the public on Tuesday, but at a media event on Sunday night, the tech press who have gathered here in Las Vegas to cover CES got to peek at some of the gadgets launching at the show. Here’s a selection of some of the coolest things we’ve seen so far.
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereLoomos AI Glasses
We’re still figuring out what our face computing future will look like, but here's an intriguing new entry. These Loomos smart glasses offer an impressive collection of features, including a 16-megapixel camera for recording up to 4K video, 32 gigabytes of storage, open-ear speakers, and easy adaptability for your fit and lens choice. Smarts are handled by ChatGPT-4o, and while the glasses connect to the web over Wi-Fi or your phone via Bluetooth, the company says its smart assistant processes some requests locally and even learns as it goes, offering options like summarizing a lecture or slide by simply asking with the “Hey Loomos” command. The glasses are expected to be available in the first quarter of the year for around $200. —Ryan Waniata
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereTomBot Jennie
Shortly after his mom was diagnosed with dementia, Tom Stevens made the difficult decision to take away her dog, as she could no longer care for him. He tried alternatives, like stuffed animals and dolls, but his mom didn’t like them. That’s when he created TomBot and, a few years later, Jennie, a robot emotional lap dog.
Jennie looks more realistic than most robot dogs you’ve probably seen before. That’s because it was designed by the folks at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Underneath is a bevy of sensors that allow the dog to react to pets and rubs—Jennie let out a little cute bark and wagged her tail as Stevens rubbed her belly. Studies have shown that petting a companion animal can reduce stress and lower blood pressure, and there are potential benefits in lowering Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia symptoms.
TomBot has been running customer trials for several years, iterating on its robot dogs, but it will finally begin shipping a consumer version this year, with an estimated retail price of $1,500. Stevens tells me he envisions a future where the robot dog is more than a lap dog, but one that can move and go on walks and even double as a way to monitor seniors. At least this one’s much cuter than that Boston Dynamics pooch. —Julian Chokkattu
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereRoam SodaTop
Boring tap water be gone! The Roam SodaTop is a portable carbonation device that creates sparkling water in an instant. It screws onto the mouth of a Hydro Flask, or Roam’s own proprietary water bottle, and with single-use CO2 canisters, it creates up to a liter of sparkling water in less than five seconds.
As well as freeing up kitchen counter space by making your bulky Sodastream redundant, Roam is also claiming to reduce the environmental impact compared with single-use bottles and cans, with 35 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The Roam SodaTop will launch later this year for $50. —Verity Burns
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereOlight OstationX
If you, too, have a drawer full of rechargeable AA and AAA batteries of mysterious provenance, you will appreciate this ingenious device. It works like a battery marble run. Drop up to 32 rechargeable batteries from any brand in the top. You don’t have to worry about which way they’re placed. The OstationX will analyze them, spit out the bad ones, recharge the rest, and store them in the bottom. You can take it apart for easy cleaning. It has an easy and intuitive app to monitor the batteries, and it’s see-through so you can tell what’s going on. Olight also makes one of our favorite flashlights, which is similarly rechargeable, has thoughtful design details, and is idiot-proof. The OstationX launches on January 7 at 11 am Pacific time and will retail for a completely reasonable $99. In a sea of gimmicks and vaporware, the OstationX struck me as a blissful island of sanity. Hooray! A device that solves an actual problem, in an attractive way, for a reasonable price. —Adrienne So
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereEli Health Hormometer
In terms of health monitoring, we’ve moved waaaay past counting your steps and tracking your heart rate. Eli Health’s Hormometer is an easy, at-home test strip that helps you monitor your cortisol and progesterone levels. Simply unwrap a test strip and put the absorbent tip in your mouth for one minute. A bioassay in the test strip reacts to your hormone levels and binds them to reagents, which produces colored test lines. Then an app on your smartphone scans the lines and displays your result, which Eli Health says delivers 97 percent accuracy, compared to FDA-approved standard testing.
The company is starting out with measuring cortisol, the stress hormone that can affect your metabolism and immune function, among other things, and progesterone, which lets women monitor their reproductive and overall health. Beta access begins January 2025, at about $8 per test strip. —Adrienne So
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereNékojita FuFu
It’s official—we now have a robot for everything. Tokyo robotics startup Yukai Engineering has shown off the Nékojita FuFu, a portable cat-shaped robot that will blow air to cool your hot food or drink so you don’t have to. Hooking on to the side of a mug or bowl, it uses an internal fan controlled by a special algorithm to randomize its blowing strength to more closely mimic the way a human might blow. There are several modes to choose from, depending on what you’re cooling.
The name, if you were wondering, comes from the Japanese word for “cat tongue” (neko-jita), a phrase used in Japan to describe people who can’t tolerate hot food, while “fu fu” imitates the sound of blowing. It’ll launch in Japan in mid-2025 for around $25. —Verity Burns
Tristan deBrauwereAutoKeybo
It’s hard not to stop and stare at the AutoKeybo as you walk past it. This keyboard is split in half and has layers. With small hand gestures, one keyboard layer slides away into the main box to reveal a trackpad underneath. On the left side, the keyboard retracts to show a NumPad. The system manages this with the camera in the center, which detects your hand movements, and—combined with machine learning algorithms, understands when you expect it to reveal the trackpad or NumPad. Why would you want such a keyboard, especially when it’s so large? The company says it’s designed for people with shoulder impairments and to help prevent shoulder strain. Split keyboards are hardly new, but this revealing trick is unique. The main selling point, though, seems to revolve around reducing “hand transfer” in general. Moving your hand to a mouse and then back to the keyboard could cause you a few seconds of reorienting to the layout of the keys, but that ideally wouldn’t happen with the AutoKeybo.
Efficient! Unfortunately, it’ll cost $600. And in my limited experience with it, it was difficult to parse out how to make the keyboard layers retract reliably. There’s a learning curve. I watched multiple people try it and fail, only for the inventor, Christian Ryan Leonardo, to swoop in and show how it’s done without much fault. —Julian Chokkattu
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereWonder Petal Nature Camera
I am endlessly charmed by the conceit of Wonder, a company started by the founders of Bird Buddy, the popular smart bird feeder. The Petal is a tiny and adorable outdoor camera shaped like a flower. It has a flexible stem so you can position it anywhere you like and a tiny (optional) solar panel to keep it charged. An AI layer (Wonder calls it Nature Intelligence) identifies any sights and sounds around it to alert you to small species like birds and bugs that might be living nearby. Nature Intelligence is ambitious, but in our testing we've found the Bird Buddy’s AI recognition was the best at identifying birds. As far as I’m concerned this is a far better use of AI than composing dumb jokes. —Adrienne So
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereMonar Canvas Speaker
Last year at CES, Samsung gave us a stylish new way to jam out with the Music Frame speaker. It stuffed multiple speakers inside a working picture frame. The Monar Canvas takes this idea to new heights, offering built-in speakers as well as a 19-inch screen at the center with all sorts of ways to change the scenery. Not only can you drop in your own images or choose between over 50,000 classical paintings, but the Monar can also display the lyrics of your favorite songs and even create AI art based on those lyrics. In my brief time with the speaker, its artistic interpretations were … interesting. Still, while I’m not sure it always got the gist of each song, it was fascinating to watch (and sounds pretty good too). My favorite touch? The side control in the shape of a miniature turntable. —Ryan Waniata
Photograph: Tristan deBrauwereDoublepoint WowMouse
Got an Apple Watch? If you download Doublepoint’s new WowMouse app, you can use finger gestures to control the cursor on your MacBook. Sit on the bed and hit Next Episode on your Mac screen without even touching the laptop—just use the Apple Watch on your wrist and hand gestures like a Jedi.
Last year, the company started with a Wear OS app for the Pixel Watch and Samsung Galaxy smartwatches, but now it’s the Apple Watch’s turn. There are some caveats—the Apple Watch can’t control the screen of an iPhone whereas this is possible with a Wear OS watch and an Android phone, but it’s supposedly on the roadmap.
It’s powered by the Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) sensor on most smartwatches, and you can make a few gestures, like a double tap. Right now the main utility is to control the Mac screen in front of you, but the goal is to let it work with a variety of Bluetooth-enabled devices. Imagine being able to play the next song with a tap of your thumb and index finger while on a run—instead of fiddling with wireless earbud controls. Or controlling the TV interface with a gesture instead of reaching for a remote. Or dimming a smart lamp without speaking out loud or opening an app.
The company also unveiled a collaboration with Bosch Sensortec, which makes IMUs. Embedding Doublepoint’s algorithms directly onto the IMU supposedly delivers even more precise low-latency gesture control, and if more device makers employ these IMUs in their products, you’ll feel like a composer, waving your hands to control the gadgets in your life. —Julian Chokkattu
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