CES

The SteamOS and/or Windows-toting Lenovo Legion Go S was the best handheld of CES 2025, but it wasn't the only Lenovo portable I took for a spin! The third time was the charm for this detachable-controller and kickstand Legion Go 2 prototype, which I found working at the third venue I encountered it.

Every year toward the end of our trip to CES, the Verge staff in Las Vegas get together for a team dinner before we head back home.

This year we filmed that dinner, and I moderated a little chat about the trends, vaporware, and other memorable tech from the show floor.

CES 2025 officially wrapped up yesterday, but there was so much stuff that our team saw and wrote about and...smelled while on the ground in Las Vegas.

If your plans this weekend include catching up on all the news you may have missed from CES, there’s no better place to start than our annual best of video!

Meet Julien Navas, dressed as a Conehead wizard to promote VideoLAN’s new automatic subtitle generation and translation for VLC.

I tracked down the colorful character in the French section of Eureka Park in the dying moments of CES 2025.

Here, I saw Ricky Gervais’s Golden Globe speech being translated into Japanese in real-time, locally and offline — a feature the team says is coming to VLC later this year.

ThirdReality’s MK1 Magic Keyboard ($80, launching March) is a Matter smart button. Ingenious!

The function keys are programmable buttons. Just press to activate a scene or control smart devices like lights through Apple Home, SmartThings, or Home Assistant. Mechanical keyboard / smart home nerds rejoice!

As proof it’s on track with its next low-power laptop chip — the chip that will itself prove out Intel’s 18A process, which could in turn prove whether the company can regain silicon manufacturing leadership — Intel showed journalists these working samples.

These aren’t laptops you’ll actually buy — they’re demonstrators from Compal, Pegatron, and Wistron, which serve as ODMs to brand-name laptop companies.

Just before Christmas, I told you how the company behind those awesome Popsocket alternatives had rescued the coolest-looking gamepad phone attachment I've ever seen.

Here at CES, my colleague Chris Welch got a quick demo that answers the biggest question: can this snappy spring-loaded gadget fling your phone around without yeeting it to the ground?

So, of course, I had to go try it out. This $150 LED Light Therapy Face Mask is the smart lighting company’s first lighting-focused wellness product, and it sounds like there may be more to come. I think it’s rather fetching ... don’t you?

Wraparound glass is a fancy desktop trend, and so are CPU coolers with built-in screens — sure seems like two great tastes taste great together with the Asus ROG Ryuo IV SLC 360 ARGB!

It has a 6.67-inch 2K curved OLED screen that can display ”stunning naked-eye 3D media or customizable hardware monitoring information,” while also housing a water pump for its 360mm radiator. No price yet, but probably north of $350.

Asus, Samsung, MSI, and Alienware will all have them, so you can safely ignore the “world’s first” marketing baloney for now — but it’s absolutely true that the 32-inch version of these monitors was groundbreaking, and a 27-inch size means you can comfortably fit the entire gorgeous picture in view.

This is the Asus one, the ROG Swift OLED PG27UDCM, here at CES.

Asus made a laptop that transfers its heat to an air diffuser on the back lid. You won’t be stuffing run-of-the-mill Glade gel packs in these; instead, the Asus Adol 14 Air Fragrance Edition has its own replaceable inserts with conceptual descriptions... like “Be a new her.”

Wearables reporter Victoria Song got to wear three of Ultrahuman’s super-expensive smart rings in a new video from CES. Watch this one all the way to the end.

I sat in the Sony Honda car a year ago, six months ago, and now — improvements are slow. AI is new for 2025, but the chatbot got far too easily confused. I couldn’t see the lidar in action. I like the digital mirrors, though.

It’ll be 2026 before journalists can test-drive it, Sony Honda Mobility director Shugo Yamaguchi confirms, though the company’s already taking preorders for what’s now a $90K car.

I know everything in Vegas is for sale, but wouldn’t the Sphere be more of an attraction if the structure displayed more incredible 3D art and fewer ads? (This is one of like three we saw repeatedly looped while riding a ferris wheel.)

Also, for a seemingly struggling company, Intel must have spent quite a bit on CES this year — it’s plastered all over the Vegas monorail, too.

There I was, wandering the show floor, when I stumbled upon the Nova X and Nova Pay. The former is a smart ring that has a micro display, while the latter supports NFC payments. I’ve tested several smart rings over the years and seen dozens on the show floor... but it’s been 84 years since I’ve seen these features in a working prototype or product.

The update was announced at CES, according to Media Play News. Samsung and Amazon introduced the standard, a competitor to Dolby Vision, way back in 2017.

Delta’s CES keynote at the Sphere was truly an experience for all five senses. Wind whipped through my hair as a plane turned on a runway, and at one point, the place filled with the smell of hazelnut coffee as an Uber Eats driver “delivered” drinks to the speakers onstage. This recap doesn’t capture that aroma, but you’ll get an idea of the whole spectacle.

The Hollyland Lark M2S turns the microphone itself into a clip, offering a cleaner look for on-camera recordings.

This is a neat trick, especially after many wireless mics have been criticized for showing off huge logos when clipped on a shirt.

Also, the charging case is now able to fit two receivers and two microphones. These were my two big gripes with the Lark M2!

First announced at last year’s CES, My Arcade says its nostalgia-packed Atari Gamestation Go handheld will be available sometime in Q3 2025 for $149.99. It’s got a seven-inch screen and in addition to standard controls like a D-pad and action buttons, there’s a trackball, rotating paddle, and numeric keypad for authentically playing classic Atari titles like Missile Command and Breakout.

HP calls its ZBook Ultra 14 G1a “the world’s most powerful 14-inch mobile workstation,” because it comes with AMD’s most powerful mobile chip: the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395, aka “Strix Halo,” with up to 128GB of unified memory shared among the CPU, GPU, and AI engines.

I watched it generate an AI image of Las Vegas on a locally loaded large language model.

The AI boom means most of these highly sought-after parts wind up in server farms, so it’s rare to see one ourselves — but AMD and Nvidia showed off a few at CES 2025. Here’s AMD’s MI325X, and then what appears to be Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72, with potentially lots of its new Blackwell AI chips inside.