What surprised us the most at CES 2026

But CES always manages to sneak in a few surprises, whether with what has been announced, what hasn’t made an appearance, and trends that no one saw coming. We’ve rounded up the biggest CES 2026 curveballs so far.

Motorola has really gotten into a groove with its clamshell-style flip phones over the past few years. They’re a natural fit with the Razr legacy, and Moto has done some really fun stuff with them. Years went by and it seemed like the company was content to focus on flip phones, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case. Almost as surprising: the book-style fold carries Razr branding, too. I guess Motorola is ready to move beyond the nostalgia factor with its brand and embrace the future. — Allison Johnson

Despite Asus, Broadcom, and MediaTek announcing Wi-Fi 8 routers and chipsets at CES 2026, the IEEE 802.11bn successor to Wi-Fi 7 isn’t fully ratified and won’t be until late 2028. Nevertheless, they plan to start selling hardware built on the draft spec later this year. It’ll be truly bleeding-edge stuff, likely requiring a firmware upgrade to be compliant with the final 2028 standard. Hopefully, it won’t be a repeat of the “Draft-N” fiasco suffered from 2007–2009, when the draft 802.11n Wi-Fi spec changed significantly over that same two-year timeframe, leaving some devices orphaned. — Thomas Ricker

Robot vacuums with arms? You don’t even need to remind me that those came out in 2025. It’s now 2026, and we live in the future, one where robot vacuums have legs. Roborock’s new Saros Rover prototype swapped appendages, trading the ability to pick up socks for some very compelling locomotion. It can climb stairs! This alleviates my biggest concern about setting my little robot vacuum free near my cat-hair-coated stairs: that it’ll fall to its death (which, ironically, I’ll have to clean up with a different vacuum). Like my colleague Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, I also look forward to whenever Roborock can put both arms and legs on a robot vacuum. — Cameron Faulkner

CES is always a showcase for huge TVs, but it’s also been a way to see the more reasonable TVs we should expect in the following year. In 2025, TCL came out of the gate with the QM6K — its most affordable of the QM line — and teased the QM7K, LG showed off the G5 with a brand new OLED panel technology (even if we needed Panasonic to confirm what it was), and both Samsung and Hisense showed off a range of reasonably sized TVs. There was a lot for regular consumers to look forward to. But this year has been almost exclusively about big and expensive TVs. Sure, Amazon is showing off their affordable Ember Artline, LG has the C6 and G6 on the floor, and a bunch of people will buy the Wallpaper TV. But companies aren’t focusing on sets people can actually afford. We have no information from Hisense, TCL put the QM8L on the floor with zero information, Sony TVs are (per usual) absent from CES, and Samsung focused on a bigger RGB LED instead of the smaller sizes. It’s fun to be aspirational, but it’s also good to know your options for a new, more sensible TV. — John Higgins

I expected this to come at some point, but not at CES this year. Samsung had a demo of a creaseless folding display, which means we might be getting even closer to foldable phones that mainstream consumers will actually buy. Why this matters: Samsung provides displays for Apple, and Bloomberg reported in November that Apple’s folding iPhone is set to launch sometime in the fall. Samsung, which pulled the demo from its CES booth, told noti.group that the screen at CES was an R&D concept with no current timeline or plan for commercialization. Still, my guess is Apple won’t launch a folding phone until the crease is invisible. So, this may have been our first look at that screen. — Todd Haselton

CES used to be one of the world’s biggest car shows. But this year, the cars have been replaced by AI chatbots and humanoid robots. Hyundai, one of the biggest EV sellers, brought out a production version of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot. BMW announced it was integrating Alexa Plus. Mercedes revealed its new Nvidia-powered driver-assist. The only concept car to grace the stage was Sony and Honda’s Afeela SUV — and this was from a company that hasn’t even sold any cars yet. CES used to be a showcase for weird movable machines, but there was a noticeable absence this year. Blame the EV doldrums or trade anxiety or whatever. Let’s hope next year we can get back to the cars. — Andrew J. Hawkins