🚀 Good morning! Alright, it’s the end of the week, time to wrap this CES thing up!

Best of CES

With the big CES announcements out of the way, more or less, we can take a breath and look at what really matters out of the show.

• What’s good is that when you start handing out awards across categories, a bunch of the lesser known but interesting/useful new bits of gear show up.
• And, you may disagree with some of these awards too!

So, of course, there are the names we’ve been talking about all week that took home prizes, but so did a new backpack, interesting new audio devices, and a bunch more.

Best of CES 2022 highlights:

• The best phones launched at CES 2022: Samsung Galaxy S21 FE, OnePlus 10 Pro, and Nokia gets a rare win, with the Nokia G400 making the cut thanks to bringing 5G to a $239 phone.
• I like the Targus Cypress Hero EcoSmart backpack winning the best mobile accessory, too. Made of 26 recycled plastic bottles, and it has Apple’s Find My tech built-in, which is going to become more standard, I guess?
• Over at wearables, the winner was the Garmin Venu 2 Plus, while the best wearable innovation went to MindMics, to record “highly sensitive body metrics whenever you pop your earbuds in” via Infrasonic Hemodynography.
• In audio, the JBL Quantum TWS gave gamers earbuds that mitigate latency, while the new HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless won a headset award for bringing battery life up to 300 hours of continuous playback, which is nuts.
• Laptop-wise, my colleagues chose the Dell XPS 13 Plus though I went on about its shortcomings earlier this week: it does look like a nice redesign of the XPS series, until you consider the capacitive touch bar, loss of headphone jack, microSD card slot? Still, maybe the future is dongles, just like Apple, and it does accommodate the new P-series Intel CPUs at 28W. The best Chromebook was the ASUS Chromebook Flip CX5, while best laptop innovation was the foldable Zenbook Fold 17.

• Over on TVs, the new QD-OLED panel from Samsung, the Sony A95K QD-OLED won for its flagship specs, while the best 8K TV went to the Samsung Neo QLED QN900B.
• Smart home winners were the Withings Body Scan smart scale and the ECOVACS Deebot X1 Omni for taking auto-empty docking further with the mop, too.
• The team handed out automotive awards too: the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX taking the best car, while the best automotive accessory was the Nextbase iQ, an AI-powered dashcam that’s always-connected via Wi-Fi and 4G TE.

Also:

• CES 2022 gave us 5 things we’ll be talking about all year, including laptops and TVs are flashy again, the EV tsunami (which made CES “the best auto show in years”), and more (CNET).
• CES 2022 shows the very convoluted future of video game tech: You can increasingly buy very powerful gaming devices, but gaming is shifting towards any old device being able to play AAA games, too (Digital Trends).

Roundup

📸 Official OnePlus 10 Pro camera details are here, including 150-degree ultrawide (Android Authority). One take from our peers is that it doesn’t sound good enough(Gizmodo) but let’s wait and see how reviews shake out…

⛔ The US International Trade Commission has ruled Google infringed on five Sonos Audio patents, and that’s leading to all kinds of trouble: a ban on the importation of Google products that violate Sonos patents, which may even include Google Pixels, Chromebooks in the US. The ruling will go into effect in 60 days, though the Biden administration could veto it? In any case, Google sure lost big here (Android Authority). In effect, your Google Home/Nest speakers are about to get slightly worse because Sonos won (The Verge).

🍎 Apple loses lead Apple Silicon designer Jeff Wilcox to Intel to design new SoCs (Ars Technica).

📹 E3 makes months-in-advance call to skip convention hall in 2022, go virtual (Ars Technica).

📺 Explaining QD-OLED, Samsung’s display tech that’s wowing CES (Ars Technica).

🔊 Spotify has a new way of making podcast ads unskippable: Sticking them in the app (Gizmodo).

💸 Mozilla hits pause on crypto donations following backlash (TechCrunch).

😎 OrCam’s MyEye Pro clips to glasses to help visually impaired people read and identify faces (Engadget).

📺 Amazon’s Fallout TV series set to start production this year (The Verge).

🕹 This keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions (Vice).

🌮 The maniacs at Taco Bell made Moviepass, but for Tacos (Gizmodo).

🥽 “I spent hundreds of hours working in VR. Here’s what I learned” (Wired).

🤔 Natural Cycles’ data shows limited menstrual changes after COVID-19 vaccination (The Verge).

☀ Giant dying star explodes as scientists watch in real time — a first for astronomy (CNN).

🧙‍♂️ “What science fiction or fantasy show is worth watching?” (r/askreddit)

Friday Fun

This week people have had some fun pointing at the Tesla traffic jam in Las Vegas’ Boring Company tunnel.

• Without knowing anything, it seems like with the CES show rolling on, and with tech enthusiasts more likely than anyone else to want to ride the tunnel in a Tesla, the loop system became busy.
• None of which is good, per se, but people love giving it back to ol’ Musky, who has said things like “it’s either traffic forever or tunnels,” to the shouting of people who like trains and buses and stuff.
• Anyway, Mashable has assembled videos of people waiting in tunnels.

Good times, good times,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.