The Best of CES 2016

If there were an unofficial slogan for the Consumer Electronics Show this year, it would be Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary. Let's be honest, groundbreakers were in short supply at CES this year. There was no news out of Vegas that blew our socks off. Not that this is a terrible thing.
The good just got better. Drones are still commanding the air space. Cars continue to work hard on driving themselves. Virtual reality keeps on climbing. Our homes are getting smarter and smarter. Televisions are inching closer and closer to perfection. Technology continues to become more personal as self quantification is still all the rage. And at the core of our world, our namesake even, the mighty PC still looms large, albeit slightly smaller and sleeker than the year before.
With yards and yards of convention center space, thousands of products, and plenty of opinionated analysts and editors at CES, it wasn't exactly a breeze to finalize our top picks, but we duked it out to bring you this list of 18 standouts. Many of these products, we believe, will be key in shaping the tech landscape for the next 12 months. And some of them might not even make it to market.
A good number of our Best of CES 2015 winners were top performers in our lab last year, while some vanished into the ether. You can take a look at how our 2015 picks fared, but for now, here are the most interesting, innovative, and important things we saw at CES 2016.

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Best Gaming Laptop
Razer Blade Stealth
Razer not only built its lightest laptop so far (2.75 pounds) with top-notch specs including a deluxe 12.5-inch 2,560-by-1,440 resolution screen, a beautiful black chassis, and USB-3 connectivity, the gaming company did it at a price ($999) that's lower than anyone else's. At its base configuration, the Razer Blade Stealth runs on a Skylake Intel Core i7, so work is a snap. But when you're ready to play, pair it with Razer's accompanying external graphics bay, the Core, and you get a gaming desktop that can rip through Fallout 4 without a hiccup. And Razer's Chroma lighting technology, capable of 16.8 million customizable color options, adds to the fun.

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Best Business Laptop
HP EliteBook Folio G1
Thinner and lighter have always been the mantra for the laptop makers, but very few competitors are able to match the half-inch height and 2-pound weight of HP's EliteBook Folio G1. This laptop gets my pick for best in show by integrating features that you want (a 4K UHD display, sleek metal body, USB-C with Thunderbolt 3) with technologies you need for work (TPM, Intel vPro, enterprise-class management and security). The latter are where consumer-focused laptops like the Apple MacBook and LG Gram fall short. It's a business laptop that looks and feels just the like the ones you're buying for yourself. Yeah, I want one.

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Best Convertible Hybrid Laptop
Lenovo Yoga 900S
Most convertible hybrid laptops feel a little chunky when you switch them into tablet mode, but the Lenovo Yoga 900S is slick in every pose. It's only 12.8 mm (about 0.5 inch) thick—Lenovo claims it's the thinnest convertible on the market, and we don't doubt it—and weighs just over two pounds, so it works just as well as a tablet as a laptop. It doesn't have the processing power of its bigger brother, the Lenovo Yoga 900, running a Core M chipset, but with over ten hours of battery life, a vibrant 12.5-inch 2,560-by-1,440 screen, and solid carbon fiber construction, it's almost everything we look for in a light-processing convertible hybrid. Plus, it's also probably the prettiest laptop we've ever seen, with a bright metal chassis that comes in silver or champagne gold with a matching keyboard.

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Best Tablet
Samsung Galaxy TabPro S
The Microsoft Surface-like Galaxy TabPro S has all the marquee Samsung Android tablet design cues including the slick build, the metal frame and the shiny, bright white or deep black bezel that are reminiscent of the Galaxy Tab S2. But it's not another Android, rather an enterprise-worthy tablet, running full Windows 10 with a Core M processor inside. And the star of the show is the gorgeous, bright 12-inch 2,160-by-1,440 Super AMOLED display. While most of the Windows tablets we've seen at CES are big, bulky, and almost always boring, Samsung freshens up the field with trademark elegant design plus a USB-C port, fingerprint authentication, and 10-plus hours of battery life, all on top of an intuitive and easy to use keyboard cover.

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Best Phone
Huawei Honor 5X
At $199.99 unlocked, Huawei's Honor 5X looks like an amazing value. With its all-metal body, sharp main camera, 5.5-inch screen and fingerprint sensor, it feels like a $350 phone. In fact, it's very similar to Huawei's own $349 GX8. Squint a little, and it looks just as nice as $500-$600 phones like LG's G4 and Huawei's Mate 8.

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HTC Vive Pre
HTC and Valve's joint virtual reality project, the Vive Pre, is developing rapidly, and we got a chance to try the latest version here at CES 2016. We also got our hands on the development motion controls for the HTC Vive Pre, and strapped the headset on for a battery of demos. The Vive Pre incorporates a front-facing camera for crisp and bright display and it tracked our heads quite admirably. I didn't feel any disembodied sensation or motion sickness. The camera on the front isn't for seeing where you're going; rather, it's part of an ingenious safety system. The camera detects objects and walls in front of you, and turns them into a virtual set of walls for the VR experience. When you get too close to something you might knock over or bump into, the Vive displays a glowing blue wall before you, letting you know you're about to hit something. It's a functional way to prevent embarrassing VR-related accidents, and worked quite well in the fairly large test cubicle set up for HTC's demonstration. The Vive controllers are much more PC-oriented - instead of an analog stick and a set of buttons and two triggers, the Vive wands use large, round, clickable trackpads and single triggers for each hand. The demo took us through a series of simple scenes, starting with a passive underwater view. We stood on the wreckage of a sunken ship and watched fish swim by our heads, unable to do much more than walk around within the boundaries of the virtual room and bat away smaller fish with the controllers. It culiminated in a whale drifting dangerously close to our view. HTC and Valve are planning to commercially launch the Vive in April, but until then only 7,000 Vive Pre units will be released to developers. We can't wait to get our hands on a unit for review!

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Best Fitness Wearable
Fitbit Blaze
CES was flooded with activity trackers this year, and only one managed to stand out from the crowd: The Fitbit Blaze. For one thing, the Blaze's vibrant color touch screen is still unique to fitness trackers, which mostly use simple monochrome displays. It's thinner than the Apple Watch or Fitbit's own Surge tracker and the improved heart rate sensor means we'll likely get more accurate readings—a big deal considering most wrist-based HR sensors are somewhat unreliable. Add in automatic sleep and activity tracking, a modular design, and the best fitness app in the biz, and the Fitbit Blaze places high above the rest. And guided workouts right on your wrist? Beats paying for a personal trainer.

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Best Health Wearable
Mio Slice
Health trackers and devices at CES this year tried too hard, or didn't try hard enough. They were either complicated multi-item bundles (don't forget to buy them all!) or unwieldy armbands that take forever to deliver a result. The Mio Slice, far and away the best in show, cuts right to the core. More than just hardware, it uses a software platform that can save your life. Instead of striving toward a generic daily 10,000 step goal, the Slice focuses on your PAI (Personal Activity Intelligence) score, an algorithm based on the comprehensive Hunt Study that found links between heart rate and cardiovascular health. Keep your score above 100 and you could extend your lifespan by years and keep diseases at bay. Even better, the PAI system can be found across all Mio devices. With the Slice, it's simple and streamlined—exactly what health tracking should be.

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Best Smart Appliance
Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator
The Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator is the one thing I saw at CES that I can't wait to get into the PC Lab to test. Aside from the silly name, the Family Hub is a genuinely smart appliance that swiftly erases the memory of some unimpressive attempts at smart fridges in the past. With a 21.5-inch, 1080p touch screen built into the right door, you can leave notes for your family, set calendar reminders, and display artwork, just like a regular fridge. But there are also connected cameras inside that can show you what's in the fridge while you're at the grocery store, so you don't overbuy or forget something important. And if you don't have time for the store, you can order what you need right from the refrigerator itself. Now that's smart. Pity my apartment could never fit one. And that it starts at $5,000.

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Best Television
LG Signature OLED TV
LG has consistently wowed us in the lab with its organic light-emitting diode (OLED) HDTVs, and it's new 77-inch 77G6P TV looks like it will follow the tradition. It's one of the first products in LG's new cross-category Signature line of flagship products, and it's utterly striking. The panel itself measures less than three millimeters thick, built entirely onto a single glass sheet that attaches to a downright puny electronic back, which itself attaches to a stylish, but small speaker base. Since the panel is OLED, it's capable of perfect blacks, and this TV features Dolby Vision high dynamic range (HDR) content compatibility. LG has not announced pricing yet, but it's safe to say it'll be really, really expensive.

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Best Home Theater Gear
Dish Network Hopper 3
Dish Network is stepping up its game with a new Hopper DVR with an unheard-of 16 separate tuners so you'll never, ever have to decide what's worth recording. The Hopper 3 also supports 4K, and while you shouldn't expect loads of ultra-HD broadcasts in 2016, you can still take advantage of your new 4K television with Sports Bar Mode. It lets you display four HD channels in their native resolutions at the same time on one screen.

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Best Gaming Gear
Oculus Rift and Touch
It's taken years, but the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is finally getting a consumer release. The consumer Oculus Rift is the best-looking and most powerful version yet, and it's coming to users this Spring. On its own it's an interesting VR headset among several major names in VR, but the Touch controllers designed to work with the consumer Oculus Rift push it over the edge. Touch by Oculus combines motion sensors and positional cameras to accurately track where each controller is in relation to the headset, and a comfortable and intuitive collection of gamepad-like components including analog sticks, face buttons, and triggers make it feel like a natural bridge between conventional and motion-based control schemes.

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Best Drone
Yuneec Typhoon H
Let's talk about the competition here. First, Parrot showed off the fixed-wing Disco, a big departure from the typical quadcopter drone. But it's a prototype at this point, and the 1080p nose-mounted camera (the same as in the Bebop) is underwhelming. DJI announced the Phantom 3 4K, which is a less expensive version of our favorite consumer drone, the Phantom 3 Professional, with a more limited operating range. The Yuneec Typhoon H is setting its sights higher—as an affordable ($1,799 to start) alternative to the DJI Inspire 1. It has a six-rotor design, a 4K camera that can rotate 360°, support for dual operators (one to fly, one to operate the camera), and a promised 22-minute flying time. Yuneec plans on selling this in a few different configurations, with one of the upgrades being a collision avoidance system powered by Intel's RealSense system. If you've ever worried about crashing your expensive drone into a tree, that's a big plus too.

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Best Action Camera
Nikon KeyMission 360
There are a lot of generic GoPro clones at CES. And there are a good number of action cams that cover a 360° field of view, but not all of those are truly spherical—single-lens cameras like the 360fly 4K cover a fully spherical image on a horizontal plane, but not vertically. The KeyMission 360 has two lenses that capture everything around the camera, in 4K. It's also pretty small (a bit bigger than a GoPro), waterproof to 100 feet, and shockproof to 6.5 feet. Pricing isn't set as of yet, but I'm looking forward to taking this camera out into the world (and mounting it to the bottom of a drone).

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Best Digital Camera
Nikon D500
Camera announcements at CES ranged from $120 Canon PowerShots to premium long zooms from Panasonic all the way up to Nikon's $6,500 pro D5 D-SLR. But I'm picking the D5's little brother, the D500, as my favorite camera of the show. It has the same 153-point autofocus system as the D5, but because the D500 has a smaller APS-C image sensor the focus points run across the entire width of the sensor, and gives telephoto glass a bit extra effective reach—a boon for wildlife and sports photographers. Build quality is right up there with the D5—the camera is a rugged tank—it can focus and fire at 10fps, and it records 4K UHD video. Wi-Fi is built-in, with Bluetooth so you don't have to constantly connect the camera to your smartphone. It's on the pricey side for an APS-C D-SLR, $2,000 for a body only, but it looks like it's a serious threat to the Canon EOS 7D Mark II's dominance of the category.

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Best 3D Printer
Mcor ARKe
The Mcor ARKe gets my pick as the best 3D printer at CES, for bringing full-color 3D printing to the desktop. The ARKe can print photorealistic models at resolutions up to 4,800 by 2,400 dpi. Unlike fused filament fabrication 3D printers like the MakerBot Replicator Desktop 3D Printer, which print with plastic filament, or stereolithography printers such as the XYZPrinting Nobel 1.0, which use resin as the print medium, the ARKe prints with paper. Individual sheets are bound together using an adhesive to create strong and stable 3D models. Mcor has used this Selective Deposition Lamination (SDL) technology in its industrial 3D printers. With a price tag of $5,995, the ARKe clearly is not geared to consumers—it's meant for creative professionals—but it offers the hope that full-color 3D printers for schools, hobbyists, and households may be on the horizon.

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Best Car
Farady Future FFZERO1
Now, you might think it's unfair to give this award to a concept car, but if anything caused a splash at CES this year, it was the Faraday Future FFZERO1. Looking something like a real-life Batmobile, the FFZERO1 is a 1,000-horsepower, fully autonomous, all-wheel drive supercar. Your phone fits into the steering wheel to configure a number of settings that personalize the experience exactly to your liking, and that's just the beginning. This car is packed full of wild ideas, such as virtual mapping, and seating based on zero-gravity research by NASA. What does that even mean? I'm not exactly sure! But take a look at that car and tell me it doesn't make you want to get out there and fight some crime on the streets of Gotham. Or at the very least, take it for a spin around the test track against a Tesla Model S.

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Best Concept
LG Rollable OLED Display
It's not a real product by any means, but LG's fully flexible 18-inch transparent OLED looks like the future. Imagine a world where you can read the morning news on your own paper-thin personal screen and then roll it up and stick it in your bag. Or being able to roll up your television to take with you to a friend's place. LG has said it's confident it can produce an flexible and transparent Ultra HD OLED panel of more than 60 inches by 2017. Who knows when, or if, that technology will make it into a consumer product that anyone can afford, but it's still fun to dream.