Twelve years ago, I could have told you exactly what happened at my first CES and what happened at my third. Each was a chapter with a beginning, middle, and end; the lines between them drawn clearly. But now, 15 years since I attended my first CES, it’s a lot fuzzier. I know I missed my flight home at that first show. I know I saw a lot of cameras at first, and then progressively fewer cameras over the years. I know there were team dinners and early meetings, but I couldn’t tell you what happened when.

What I do know about my first CESes is that I had — and I cannot stress this enough — no clue what I was doing. The same went for CES two, three, and four, to varying degrees. I think I had a Pentax DSLR loaned to me by a colleague. I had a work-issued BlackBerry and, I’m pretty sure, insisted on wearing nice dresses and impractical shoes to evening events. There was no Uber at the beginning, and you could spend an hour waiting in a cab line at the airport. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which housed live lions at the time.

I broke an 11-year streak of not going to CES this year, which gave me a rare opportunity. It’s not often in life that we get to step back and see something...

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After several attempts, OnePlus made a great high-end phone.

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Lenovo has unveiled two new ThinkPads: the X9 14 and X9 15, both Aura Editions equipped with Intel Core Ultra processors and slim designs. But what they don’t offer might be the most interesting thing about them: namely, Lenovo’s signature red TrackPoint. Instead, they use a haptic trackpad without the ThinkPad’s usual discrete button for a distinctly MacBook vibe.

No doubt, it’s a ThinkPad, through and through. It’s tested to MIL-SPEC 810H durability standards. It offers a Thunderbolt 4 port on each side of the machine, making it easier to arrange docks and displays to your liking. And the design allows access to the SSD and battery to facilitate repairs and replacements.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Both the 14-inch and 15-inch versions come with OLED panels in touch and non-touch variations. All versions come with an HDMI 2.1 port and 3.5mm audio jack and can be configured with up to 32GB of DDR5x RAM and 2TB of storage. As Copilot Plus PCs, they’re ready for Microsoft’s AI as well as Lenovo’s “Aura Edition” features including focus mode-like Smart Modes to filter out distractions or optimize privacy.

Still, the missing TrackPoint is probably the ThinkPad X9’s most notable feature (or anti-feature?). In a time when hardware has shifted toward a kind of sameness, the TrackPoint stood out as a quirky carryover from a time when you could try to reinvent something — namely, the mouse. The trackpad won out long ago, but Lenovo kept the TrackPoint around for its loyal fans. Now, it might just be checkmate for the TrackPoint.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto

The ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition will start at $1,399 and the 15 Aura Edition will start at $1,549; both go on sale in February.

Following a teaser last month, Asus’ latest ROG Strix Scar gaming laptops have arrived and they’re leaning all the way into the gamer aesthetic. The 2025 Scar 16 and 18 come with RGB lights all the way around the bottom of the chassis as well as a user-programmable LED dot-matrix display on the lid, as seen on other ROG devices like Asus’ gaming phones.

Beneath the flashy exterior, the Scar 16 and 18 can be maxed out with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. It can also be configured with up to 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and a 2TB PCIe Gen4 SSD. The ROG Nebula HDR display comprises a 16:10 2.5K Mini LED panel with a peak brightness of 1,200 nits and a 240Hz refresh rate. There are two Thunderbolt 5 ports included, and the design allows for easy access to the bottom panel for component upgrades.

The Strix Scar 16 and 18 have all the cooling tech you’d expect from a gaming laptop of this caliber, including an end-to-end vapor chamber and sandwiched heatsink. Combined with the Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal treatment on the GPU and CPU, Asus claims that it can keep fan noise levels to a library-like 45dB, even during extended gaming sessions.

On top of all that, the ROG Strix Scar comes with the aforementioned light show. Asus calls it AniMe Vision, and you can customize it to display personalized animations and sync it with any other AniMe Vision devices you own. Download some prebaked artwork or cook up your own using Asus’ pixel editor — the choice is yours.

The ROG Strix Scar starts at $2,599; Asus says its new gaming laptops will begin shipping in February.

I didn’t have “phone toaster” on my CES bingo card, but here we are. Swippitt is a unique solution to the problem of keeping your phone battery charged up, and it promises a life where you basically never have to plug your phone into a charger again. But it’ll cost you.

To be clear, there isn’t an actual toaster involved. Swippitt — which rhymes with “whip it,” and I’m sorry you have that song stuck in your head now — includes a system of interchangeable batteries that fit into specially designed phone cases. You use your phone like normal, and the extra battery charges your phone through a power connector integrated into the case — much like plenty of other battery cases on the market.

But instead of having to recharge the external battery, you swap it out. To change the battery out for a new one, you insert your phone, case and all, into the Swippitt Hub, which is the toaster-looking bit. Inside the hub, a fully charged battery is swapped into your case, the old one is retained to recharge, and your phone is ready to go with a fresh external battery. The whole thing happens within seconds. The demo unit I saw was pretty noisy about it all, but I’m told final production models will have much better sound dampening.

Each external battery provides an extra 3,500mAh, which is roughly 50 to 90 percent extra charge, depending on the size of your phone’s battery. That power is available immediately to begin charging your phone, or if you’re topping off a battery that’s not super low, it can sit in reserve until needed. An accompanying app lets you set lots of different parameters — things like limiting the charging of your phone’s battery to 80 percent to extend its lifespan, dictating certain times of day to charge your phone, that kind of thing.

Because it uses a mechanical process to swap external batteries, Swippitt works with any phone as long as there’s a case designed for it. That way, a single hub can serve a whole household of people with different phone models. At launch, it will offer cases for the iPhone 14, 15, and 16 series, and the company plans to expand with Samsung Galaxy S series cases by the end of 2025. The company’s CEO and founder Padraic Connolly tells me that they’ve designed it with some wiggle room to keep the hub and batteries all compatible even if phones (groan) continue getting bigger in the coming years.

This all clicked for me when I realized that Swippitt isn’t just selling a silly charging gadget — it’s selling a life where you never have to plug your phone into a charger again. Who wouldn’t want that? But this vision of an untethered future comes at a price: $450 for the hub, which contains five batteries, and a phone case with a battery included is $120. The company is running some introductory promos, including 30 percent off your entire purchase if you order in January, as well as another $100 off as a kind of CES special. Swippitt expects the system to start shipping in June 2025.

Still, you could buy a whole bunch of nice MagSafe chargers for that kind of money. But what Swippitt offers is a tidier solution, one you don’t really have to think about. For some people, that kind of convenience might be worth the price. The rest of us will probably have to keep our phone chargers for now.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Look, I haven’t picked up the TCL 60 XE, but I can already tell you the name of its best feature: Max Ink Mode. The 60 XE is the latest of TCL’s phones to use its Nxtpaper display technology, aimed to go easy on the eyes with reduced glare and an E Ink-like monochrome mode.

The phone has a full-color 6.8-inch display by default, but if you flip a slider on the side of the device, you enter Max Ink Mode. In addition to being a kind of e-reader mode, it can also silence notifications so you can get a little peace and quiet while you do some reading. How lovely! TCL introduced this “Nxtpaper key” on some phones last year, but they never made it to the US. It’s our turn now, because the 60 XE is a North American exclusive.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

The TCL 60 XE also features a 50-megapixel rear camera and a 32-megapixel selfie camera and comes with a healthy 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. It’ll start at $199, going on sale first in Canada in May 2025, with US availability later in the year.

TCL has a couple of other non-TV things to show off at CES 2025: a Nxtpaper 11 Plus tablet with the company’s next-gen Nxtpaper 4.0 technology, which is supposed to offer better clarity and sharpness. The Nxtpaper 11 Plus emphasizes eye comfort with viewing modes designed to ease strain, offering an 11.5-inch 2.2K display with a 120Hz refresh rate. The company isn’t announcing its pricing or availability yet.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

There’s also a new projector — the Playcube, which uses a “modular concept integrating aesthetics and functionality,” according to a press release. No price or availability on that one, either.

Smart lighting brand Lifx is introducing its first smart lamp at CES 2025: the Lifx Luna. It uses Matter over Wi-Fi, so it’ll integrate with an existing smart home setup easily — or it’s a low-stakes way to add some smarts to your non-smart home.

The Lifx Luna Smart Lamp includes 26 controllable color zones and offers up to 1,000 lumens of brightness. There are four built-in buttons that can control not just the lamp but also other Matter-connected Lifx lights or smart devices. It’s designed to sit on a tabletop or attach to a wall with an optional mount. It’ll launch in March 2025 and cost $69.99 exclusively from The Home Depot — either in-store or online.

Photo: Lifx

For the more advanced smart home lighting enthusiast, Lifx is also announcing a bigger smart ceiling light. It’s oval-shaped, like the Luna lamp, measures 13 x 26 inches for a significant size bump over the 15-inch model, and includes 120 color zones. It’ll cost $149.99 and arrive in February.

The smart lamp will probably be the item with the widest appeal, though, given how easy it is to plug and play. It’s also significantly cheaper than high-end, sleep-oriented options from Philips and Hatch and doesn’t require a subscription like the latter. The Luna lamp doesn’t come with fancy features like guided morning stretches, but it does allow you to schedule routines like a sunrise alarm. For $130 less than something like the Hatch Restore 2, I’d skip the stretches, personally.

Home security company Kami Vision is introducing a new camera that’s designed especially for seniors living on their own. The Kami Fall Detect Camera monitors for falls and can alert families or caregivers to take action. The company has been offering similar fall detection systems for senior living communities, but this is its first product designed with private homes in mind.

The Fall Detect Camera offers an 87-degree view and can rotate 360 degrees. The owner can authorize other users to receive alerts if a fall is detected or access the camera’s live view to check on them — there’s even two-way audio communication built in. Kami Vision claims the camera detects falls with 99.5 percent accuracy and uses AI to identify a fall even if the person is partially obscured.

Kami Vision offers a subscription service at $45 per month that includes professional monitoring to verify falls and automatic calls to emergency services if there’s no response to a fall. The camera itself costs $99 and can be used on its own, but the subscription is required to get the fall detection features.

Kami isn’t the first company to introduce tech to help people age in place. Both the Apple Watch and Google Pixel Watch include fall detection features that allow the wearer to call for help when a fall is detected. But those devices need to be on your body to work and need to be kept charged, which might not be practical for someone whose age or condition puts them at risk for falls. As baby boomers reach their senior years, something like Kami Vision’s approach will probably look awfully appealing to caregivers and those wanting to age in place alike.

Ring is doing something rare for a technology brand: upgrading devices that customers have already purchased. The company is updating its outdoor cameras to boost video resolution, but it’s not just new customers who will benefit — existing owners of the floodlight and spotlight cams will get the upgrade, too.

Ring’s series of outdoor cameras currently support 1080p video. The Floodlight Cam Pro and the Spotlight Cam Pro are getting the boost to 2K video, while the Plus versions of those cameras will remain at 1080p. It’s a significant jump in resolution for the Pro models considering that most other Ring cameras top out at 1080p, with the exception of a few doorbells that do 1440p and 1536p.

Across Ring’s product line, these outdoor cameras are good candidates for a resolution bump. Since they’re typically mounted higher and farther away from the subjects they’re meant to record, a little extra resolution can make a significant difference in image detail. Digital zoom, which was already pretty good on the Floodlight Cam Pro, should get a little sharper, too.

Existing Floodlight and Spotlight Cam Pro owners will be able to upgrade their devices through the Ring app when the update starts rolling out on January 8th.

The Barbie Phone, much like the doll it pays tribute to, is a thing of beauty. But like that doll whose proportions, historically, are impossible, the Barbie Phone just isn’t built for the modern world.

Even if the ultra-feminine aesthetic isn’t your thing — and it’s not really mine — you have to hand it to the Barbie flip phone. From the box it comes in, to the interchangeable back plates, rhinestone stickers, and Barbie-fied interface, it’s a delight. The charger and battery are both pink, though they’re a lighter shade than Mattel’s trademarked Barbie Pink (Pantone 219). The phone says “Hi Barbie!” when you turn it on. It’s the definition of committing to the bit.

The breezy fun of the Barbie aesthetic, Pantone 219 or otherwise, is at odds with the actual experience of using the phone. It’s based on one of HMD’s feature phones, and it runs an operating system called KaiOS. The phone is designed for basic connectivity — texting, calling, emails — and even includes a web browser.

According to HMD, in addition to being cute, the nostalgic design and limited feature set are supposed to encourage you to disconnect and spend time with your friends IRL. There are a series of...

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Despite loud proclamations, AI on smartphones is still mostly a sideshow.

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The grid is a comfortable place to live.

The app grid, I mean: the rows and rows of app icons on your iPhone’s homescreen. It’s familiar. Safe. It’s how I’ve lived with my various phones over the past decade. But at some point, it started to feel oppressive.

All those icons staring at me in the face, vying for my attention. The clutter! The distracting little notification badges! The grid was a reasonable way to organize apps when I had like, ten of them. There are sixty on the iPhone I’m using now, and I set it up from scratch a few months ago.

Naturally, living off-grid or in a non-traditional homescreen arrangement has been possible for much longer on Android. Google’s OS lets you keep your screen clear and just find your apps in the app drawer, which is always a swipe away. You can even replace the launcher entirely. But iOS — where every new app you download winds up on your homescreen by default — hasn’t exactly made it easy to abandon the grid.

That started to change when iOS 14 added widgets, an app library, and the ability to hide apps from your homescreen — though I haven’t developed the muscle memory to use it much. Now, iOS 18 adds even more flexibility. You...

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The bad news: flagship phones cost a small fortune these days. The good news: we can help you pick the right one and get the most for your money.

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Phone cameras are incredible little machines, capable of way more than their tiny lenses and sensors would lead you to believe. They can capture core memories at the beach and northern lights in the sky. But even with all of their computational smarts, they have their limits, including one that’s particularly obvious at the moment. You know all those clear, high-quality pictures you’ve seen of the drones hovering over New Jersey at night? No? Exactly.

You are probably aware by now that there are drones of mysterious origins visiting the New Jersey skies at night. And if you’ve watched or read a report on the drone situation, you’ve probably seen a grainy photo of distant lights in the sky, maybe with blurred trails from red and green navigation lights. You know the type, because they all basically look the same. But this isn’t happening in some remote part of the country, this is a seemingly nightly occurrence in one of the most densely populated parts of the country. And considering that everyone has a camera in their pocket, why is every photo of these drones so bad?

I had my suspicions, but I asked Sten Odenwald,...

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You can’t have everything at this price, but you can get a great smartphone. Whether you want an iPhone, a 120Hz screen, or water resistance, you’ve got options.

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Verizon is making good on one of the many unfulfilled promises of 5G with a new service called Enhanced Video Calling.

According to the company’s website, it delivers “optimized video and sound quality on calling apps,” even in times of congestion. That may not sound exciting on its own. But under the hood, Verizon is using network slicing to boost video call performance, which is a new technology only possible on a standalone 5G network.

Unlike remote robot banana surgery, network slicing is a real benefit of 5G technology that we can reasonably expect to see in more places in the next few years. Slicing lets network operators provide the right resources for certain kinds of demanding activities where a strong connection is critical. Right now, that means boosting performance for video calls, but in the future it could mean being able to prioritize the data needed to safely guide an autonomous vehicle through an intersection.

The catch is that you need a standalone 5G network to pull this off, and much of the US’ 5G networks still operate on 4G cores. T-Mobile has been able to move quicker on this thanks to its Sprint acquisition, and it rolled out its first feature based on slicing this fall with a service that gives priority to first responders. Verizon has been testing slicing for the past year or so, but this is its first rollout of a consumer feature based on the technology.

In order to try Enhanced Video Calling out for yourself, you have to meet a specific set of requirements. It’s available in “more than 150 metro areas” right now, with more to be added in 2025. But you also need to be on Verizon’s priciest plan, Unlimited Ultimate, which costs $90 per month for one line with autopay. And you’ll need an iPhone 14 or newer running iOS 18.2. Samsung Galaxy S23 and newer and Pixel 9 phones will be compatible too, but support for Android video calling apps on Android is arriving in 2025.

If you meet the above prerequisites, you should see a setting in iOS that reads “Enhance 5G” if you go to Settings > Cellular, according to Apple’s documentation.

I was about to okay my friend’s restaurant suggestion for lunch — an Indian place on 2nd — when Apple Intelligence swooped in with another idea. “How about The Ritz?” appeared above the keyboard as a suggested response, highlighted in that telltale AI rainbow glow. The other suggested response, “Sounds good!” was much more reasonable. But ignoring both, I typed out my affirmative answer, hopped on my bike, and headed to downtown Seattle, where there are, to my knowledge, zero Ritzes.

Suggested replies aren’t new in iOS 18.2, but they’re a piece of the Apple Intelligence feature set that’s falling into place with this week’s public release of 18.2. Those suggestions I got while planning lunch kind of sum up my whole experience with Apple’s AI up ’til now: occasionally helpful, sometimes way off base, and often good for a laugh. But once the novelty wears off, it’s easily ignored — just like the AI feature sets on every other so-called AI smartphone I’ve used this year.

Apple took its time getting here. The first set of AI features dropped with iOS 18.1 at the end of October, including...

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Whether you want everything but the kitchen sink or top-tier performance for a midrange price, you’ve got options.

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A Norwegian payment app called Vipps is the first service to take advantage of a new, more open iOS ecosystem thanks to EU regulations. Starting today, Norwegians can use Vipps for tap-to-pay transactions and online payments, and they can even set the app as the default payment option on their iPhones, as reported by MacRumors.

It’s all thanks to commitments Apple made in response to scrutiny from EU regulators.

Since its launch a decade ago, Apple Pay has been the only way to use tap to pay on an iPhone. That’s changing with iOS 18.1, which makes tap-to-pay via NFC available to third-party developers for the first time. Apple committed earlier this year to open up the API after EU regulators ruled Apple Pay anti-competitive.

This pressure from the EU has recently forced Apple to open up the famously locked-down iPhone in unprecedented ways, from adding RCS support to letting you delete pretty much any app you want from your phone. But unlocking the NFC chip is a particularly interesting test case since it could usher in a whole bunch of new and helpful ways to use your phone — or create a mess of competing payment and ID storage platforms that don’t cooperate with each other.

Either way, it’s going to be a big deal, and the first step forward into that new era comes from a small financial organization in Scandinavia.

T-Mobile is once again shuffling its 5G internet options, adding a streaming bundle to its priciest plan and introducing a new mid-tier option. The new plans start at $50 per month (including an autopay discount) and become available starting December 11th.

Importantly, it seems that prices are staying consistent with T-Mobile’s previous 5G Home Internet options — if you’re new to T-Mobile. Discounts for existing customers with a T-Mobile voice line aren’t quite as generous with the new plans.

The new T-Mobile Rely Internet plan costs $50 per month for new customers, which is what T-Mobile charges now for its Home Internet Unlimited plan. Current T-Mobile customers will pay $35 per month, which is $5 more than the $30 a month promo the company is offering now. Unlike the pricier plans, Rely includes a previous-gen 5G router.

The next step up is a new T-Mobile Amplified Internet plan that costs new customers $60 a month with autopay or $45 with a T-Mobile voice line. It comes with T-Mobile’s newest 5G gateway; the small business version of the plan includes a mesh access point, too.

Image: T-Mobile

The new top tier plan, All-In, includes the latest router and a streaming bundle with ad-supported Hulu and Paramount Plus Essential. It’s still $70 per month to new T-Mobile customers, but current customers will pay $55 per month — again, not quite as good as the $50 per month promotional price on the outgoing Internet Plus plan.

T-Mobile spokesperson Katie Brinton tells The Verge “There are no changes for existing customers” on the outgoing plans. The Home Internet Backup plan is also sticking around for anyone who just wants an option when their primary Wi-Fi goes down.

Wireless carriers in the US are leaning into fixed wireless internet as a way to make the most of the 5G spectrum these companies have acquired at great cost. T-Mobile has been at the front of the pack with 6 million wireless internet customers, according to its October 2024 earnings release. But its net internet customer additions were down year-over-year, something T-Mobile’s earnings factbook attributes partially to “Increased deactivations from a growing customer base.” A fresh batch of internet offers with extra streaming services included look like they’re a key part of T-Mobile’s strategy to keep pushing forward in the category.