Gadgets

Asus brought a completely cable-free liquid cooler to CES: Asus’s “Q-Connector” uses hidden pogo pins instead of fan/pump cables! No price, but Asus spokesperson JJ Guerrero says even some mid-range Strix motherboards should include, and a modular connector makes it backwards-compatible. Another way it’s becoming easier to build a beautiful PC.

True story: when we forgot to pack a hairdryer on a beach trip last year, I bought Wolfbox’s awesome MF100 mini blower instead. (It’s one of the top-rated ones in comparison tests.)

It’s not just a tongue-twister — the Pocket Taco is GameSir’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone, not to be confused with 8BitDo’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone. This one’s Bluetooth rather than USB-C, and cradles your phone’s bottom instead of hanging off the USB-C port. It also has a $35 price and a March release date.

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.)

Before saying goodbye to CES 2026, I roamed around without a destination in mind to soak up the scene with my camera. After a week of operating at breakneck pace for long hours, it felt meditative to just capture a tiny glimpse of tech on display — including some human (and very non-human) moments.

15 years ago, j5create made a cable that magically let you drag and drop between PCs and Macs. Now, it’s got a $70 USB-C astronaut dongle that wirelessly links Windows PCs with iPads here at CES. You can send files, mirror displays, and beam your mouse and keyboard. I can’t vouch for latency yet — Wi-Fi reliability at CES is kind of crap.

When I wasn’t looking at huge phones at CES I managed to track down a small one: the ikko MindOne Pro. It offers a 4-inch OLED panel and a 50-megapixel camera that flips up for selfies. The MindOne Pro will ship with Android 15 as well as a proprietary OS with AI apps that you can also use as a kind of focus mode. It’s in late stages of Kickstarter funding with shipping promised for February.

The Brolan ClearX uses “sensors” (no one could tell me what sort, though) and AI to detect what material your shoes are made from and select the appropriate cleaning and drying cycle, with “micro-nano bubble technology” to help clean. Is it too late to add this to my dubious AI roundup?

After February 9th, it will discontinue support for the button that has let Microsoft 365 users send Word docs from within the app to devices like the Scribe for reading and annotation, ever since it was added in 2023.

External GPUs are rad but many need work — maybe they’ll take off now we’re throwing AI dollars at them? Gigabyte, Plugable, and newcomer Ugreen aren’t even calling them “eGPUs” anymore here at CES. Guess I can’t complain unless AI companies buy them all up.

AMD’s Strix Halo is a big, pricey chip with the best integrated graphics we’ve ever seen. The Asus TUF is the brand’s budget-friendly gaming line. So how “affordable” will Asus’s new TUF Gaming A14 laptop with Strix Halo be? We don’t know yet, because Asus hasn’t finalized pricing. But I look forward to testing this TUF.

*To be clear, this was with Intel’s XeSS upscaling, at 1080p resolution, with 4x frame gen — the actual framerate was a quarter of that. But the beefiest integrated GPU in Intel’s new Panther Lake chips never let the true framerate dip below 40fps, even unplugged, with settings that looked and felt good enough for single-player games.

It seemed inevitable given how many alternate versions of the original Switch’s Joy-Cons Nintendo released over the years, but starting on February 12th, 2026, light green (right) and light purple (left) Switch 2 Joy-Cons will be available. Like the standard Switch 2 Joy-Con two-pack, the new colors will be $99.99.