8BitDo has steadily become one of the most trusted names in controllers, building out a lineup that genuinely feels like it’s made by gamers, for gamers. Their catalog spans retro throwbacks, modern pro-style pads, arcade sticks, and everything in between, covering just about every platform and playstyle you can think of. At CES 2026, that identity was on full display.
The standout from their booth was the 8BitDo Ultimate 3E Controller for Xbox, a premium, officially licensed controller that immediately feels like a statement piece. The design is clean and modern, but once you look closer, the details start to pop. Modular components, Hall-effect sticks, impulse triggers, and a sleek charging dock all point to 8BitDo aiming directly at players who care about performance and longevity. We didn’t have enough time to really put it through its paces, but even in a short hands on session, the controller felt responsive and thoughtfully built.
What really makes the Ultimate 3E hit is the timing. We’re clearly in another golden era of fighting games and competitive gaming, and the FGC is louder than ever! With several new titles releasing this year, gamers are more about wanting hardware that’s reliable, customizable, and doesn’t overcomplicate things. Not only so, there is a rise of PC players that want only the best. While we’ll need more time to fully judge how it holds up in real competitive environments, our CES 2026 impression is clear: 8BitDo understands the culture, understands the players, and continues to move in lockstep with the scene.
CES is where you see laptop makers trying to solve the same problem from a hundred angles: Something we haven’t seen in sometime is how do you get more screen without carrying more screen. Lenovo’s answer this year is the Legion Pro Rollable concept. It looks like a normal Legion Pro at first glance, but the whole point is that the display can physically expand on demand, turning a standard 16-inch gaming laptop into a wide, ultrawide setup in seconds.
In person, the trick is simple and satisfying. The screen starts in a 16:10 layout, then expands horizontally into wider modes when you want that extra peripheral space. Lenovo showed it capable of stretching out to around 21.5 inches in one mode, and close to 24 inches in the widest mode, which shifts you into those 21:9 and even wider aspect ratios that feel perfect for racing, sims, and anything where more view actually helps. On the demo units I saw, the expansion is triggered through a keyboard shortcut instead of a dedicated button, which feels a little “prototype,” but the effect itself is the kind of thing you immediately understand once you see it happen.
What makes it feel more than just a party trick is that Lenovo is building this around the same “real” gaming laptop foundation, not a thin concept shell. The bottom half is essentially Legion Pro territory, and Lenovo has talked about keeping the performance chops you’d expect from that line, including high-end Intel Core Ultra options and up to an RTX 5090 Laptop GPU on the concept build. Pair that with a high-refresh OLED panel (some coverage points to 240Hz with a fast response), and you start to see the vision: a travel-friendly esports-style machine that can behave like a wider desktop monitor when you need it.
The engineering story is the other reason this grabbed me. Lenovo’s rollable mechanism uses a dual-motor, tension-based system so the panel expands evenly from both sides and stays controlled as it moves, which is important because the last thing you want is a screen that looks wavy or feels fragile every time you extend it. That said, it still looks and feels like a concept today. Some hands-on reports noted faint lines from the internal mechanism and a bit of waviness or creaking depending on the unit, and you can tell Lenovo is still working through the stiffness of the lid and how “production-ready” the whole top half feels.
Still, as a CES preview, the Legion Pro Rollable is exactly what I want from Lenovo: ambitious, a little ridiculous, and weirdly logical once you think about how many gamers lug around external monitors. If Lenovo can get the build quality tight and make the expansion feel effortless every time, this is the kind of idea that could actually graduate from concept status, especially for people who want ultrawide gaming but do not want to commit to a permanent desk setup.
I normally know what to expect when it comes to XGIMI and I’m usually wow’d by the next iteration of their projector lineup, this time however I was wow’d by a completely different reason. XGIMI’s MemoMind glasses caught me off guard at CES in the best way. I expected another “late to the party” smart glasses attempt once I saw it, and instead I walked away thinking this might be one of the most normal-looking, ready-to-ship AI glasses concepts we’ve seen so far.
MemoMind is a new venture born out of XGIMI, and it’s their first serious step beyond projectors. You can feel that projector DNA in the approach: design-forward, optics-first, and focused on visibility that stays clear in real-world lighting. The pitch is pretty simple and honestly refreshing: make glasses you actually want to wear all day, then let AI sit quietly in the background until you need it. That philosophy came through in the demos, because the glasses didn’t scream “tech,” they just looked like… glasses.
The personalization angle is a big part of why they work. MemoMind is leaning into modularity with multiple frame styles, interchangeable temples, and full prescription-lens support, which is exactly what most smart glasses miss. If you want these to become an everyday thing, they have to match your style and fit like your usual eyewear, not feel like a gadget you tolerate. In person, that variety matters. None of the styles felt overly sci-fi, and that alone makes MemoMind stand out on a CES floor full of attention-grabbing wearables.
There are a few models in the lineup, and they’re clearly trying to cover different comfort and feature priorities. Memo One is the “most complete” version with a dual-eye display plus integrated audio for AI interaction. Memo Air Display is the minimalist option with a single-eye display that delivers key info without feeling like you’re living inside a heads-up display. XGIMI also teased a third model that’s meant to feel even closer to traditional eyewear, which tells me they understand the real goal here is wearability first, everything else second.
On the AI side, MemoMind is running a multi-model system that can choose between different AI models depending on the task. Translation, summaries, note-taking, reminders, contextual guidance, all the practical stuff, without turning your day into a constant conversation with your glasses. That’s the part I liked most, it didn’t feel like a device begging for attention. It felt like it wanted to help, then get out of the way. The app experience also seemed surprisingly far along, with most functionality already working in the demo and more planned, which is not something you can say about every “first-gen” wearable shown at CES.
These glasses took me by surprise. They felt like a “finished” idea, not a prototype trying to find its purpose. If MemoMind can stick the landing on comfort, battery, and that subtle AI experience in the real world, I can see this being the version of AI glasses that actually makes sense for more people. I’m looking forward to spending real time with them in a full review, because what I saw at CES looks way closer than I expected for a brand-new wearable push.
2XKO is officially here, and it honestly feels like a “finally” moment for the fighting game space. After all the build-up, Riot is kicking things off with the full launch and the start of Season 1 on January 20 across PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, and yes, it’s fully free-to-play. That matters, because it opens the doors for way more people to jump in, lab, learn, and actually stick with it without a price tag being the first hurdle.
Season 1 also comes with a new champion right out of the gate as they’ve mention was going to be the case: Caitlyn. She’s built around traps, control, and that long-range precision you’d expect from the Sheriff of Piltover, and she looks like the kind of character that’s going to create some very annoying, very fun team setups. If you want her immediately, you can grab her with KO Points, a Champion Token, or through an Ultra Battle Pass bundle, but the best part is you can also unlock her for free through a three-week Champion Recruitment Event just by playing and completing missions. I love that approach because it keeps new drops feeling hype without forcing everyone into the same purchase lane.
On the progression side, Riot is giving players a clear on-ramp. There’s a Battle Pass with a free track, plus premium options if you want to go deeper, and they’re adding more daily and weekly missions to keep things moving. Ranked is getting some quality-of-life love too, including a feature that lets you hop into Training Mode straight from the Ranked lobby while still queueing, which is exactly the kind of small detail that makes grinding feel smoother. And if you played Ranked during Season 0, there are rewards coming based on where you ended the season, which is a nice nod to the early crowd that helped shape the game.
The patch itself is also doing the real work of a “launch patch,” tightening up systems and pushing the meta forward. Projectiles are getting clearer rules to cut down on those no-win situations where you either get hit or block into a mixup anyway. Assists are riskier now too, with bigger punishment when you tag them, which should help keep runaway assist spam in check. Movement is getting tuned so backdashes and forward dashes feel more consistent across the cast, and there are a bunch of other adjustments aimed at making interactions cleaner, more readable, and more competitive in the long run.
For me, this has been a long time coming, and I’m excited to dive into what already looks like one of the best content launches we’ve seen in a fighting game in a while, especially being free-to-play. Join us on stream this week and beyond, because I’m really looking forward to seeing how the community builds around this, what combos start taking over, and what kind of energy 2XKO brings to 2026.
I’m always a sucker for immersion devices and accessories I can check out at CES and bHaptics showed up with a simple but smart move: take the TactSuit Air and give it a new Camo look that feels less “VR accessory” and more like something you would actually want to own.
The Camo TactSuit we demoed looked way better than the standard colorways. Those default designs can sometimes read like a laser tag vest, especially when you are setting it next to a clean headset and a premium controller. The Camo version gives people options and instantly makes the whole thing feel more intentional, like it belongs in your setup instead of feeling like add-on gear you only pull out for specific games.
The TactSuit Air is designed to be the more comfortable, more versatile option compared to the Pro, and that lines up with how it feels when you actually wear it. It’s lighter, built to move with you, and the sizing range is wide enough that it feels less fussy to get dialed in. For long VR sessions, that matters as much as the haptics themselves, because the best immersion upgrade is the one you forget you are wearing.
On the spec side, it’s still the Air at heart: 16 haptic motors with positional feedback, a stated 12-hour battery life, and dual connectivity so you can run it wirelessly over Bluetooth or plug in with a 3.5mm jack for audio-based haptics. That flexibility is a big deal because not everything you play will have native support, and sometimes you just want to feel the impact and rhythm without worrying about perfect integration.
In the demo environment, we checked out Counter Strike 2 and a racing game, it had impact and directionality that adds a layer of physical context, but does not overwhelm the experience. When a haptic vest works, it turns moments you normally just see and hear into something your body understands instantly, and the Air’s lighter design makes that easier to enjoy for longer stretches.
What I am hoping comes next is more of this. The Camo look is a step in the right direction, and it makes me want bHaptics to keep pushing design options the same way they push the tech. If this is part of a bigger move toward more wearable, more “normal” looking haptics, I’m here for it. We’re looking forward to when this one arrives, and if CES is any hint, bHaptics is not slowing down.
I saw Ambilight through POVEC first, an electrochromic sunglasses brand. The owner wanted me to see the technology his designs are built on, but scaled up in a vehicle.
In the car, it was wild seeing the tint change that smoothly and that fast. It went darker than 5% tint in under 30 seconds. From inside the car, visibility stayed clear. From the outside, you couldn’t see in at all. That inside-outside contrast was the most impressive part, especially considering how dark tint usually kills visibility. Same idea as smart eyewear, just applied at a much larger scale.
The technology in the film is really the secret sauce. It’s electrochromic, which is what allows it to darken smoothly, stay clear from the inside, and do it all with very low power draw. The film itself is extremely thin and flexible, way more than you’d expect given how dark it can get and how quickly it responds. What surprised me most was how little power it needed to do all of this.
The heat rejection was the other big takeaway. New cars, especially EVs, are basically glass boxes, or mobile greenhouses. Huge windshields, panoramic roofs, glass everywhere, and very little you can do dynamically once the sun is beating down. Watching how much heat this setup blocked across that much glass made the use case obvious. This isn’t just about privacy or looks. It’s about making those interiors more livable.
After seeing it in a vehicle, Ambilight being connected to automotive programs with Audi and BYD makes complete sense. Cars live in harsh environments. Heat, UV, vibration, long-term exposure. If a material performs there, it explains why the same core tech translates cleanly into smaller, more personal applications.
That’s where POVEC really clicked for me. Once I saw the car setup, the glasses made sense immediately. The smoothness, the speed, the way it blocks light outward without killing visibility inward, and the low power consumption. It’s the same behavior, just closer to your face.
What stuck with me after was how many other places this could live. What excited me was how obvious those next use cases felt. Motorcycle visors. Windscreens. Home and office glass. Any surface where glare, heat, privacy, and visibility all matter at the same time. The thinness and flexibility alone open doors. Add in the low power requirement, and a lot of previous limitations disappear.
Right now, this is clearly aimed at manufacturers, and that tracks. But if this ever becomes consumer-direct, traditional tint solutions are going to feel very dated, very quickly.
Seeing Ambilight in a vehicle wasn’t about judging tint. It was about understanding where a design language came from. The car showed the scale. POVEC showed one translation. This kind of adaptive glass isn’t locked to one category at all. It feels like a material that’s going to find a lot of places to belong.
Most gaming hardware focuses on faster inputs, better visuals, or tighter audio. Ovomind is going after something else entirely. Your emotional state.
I spent a short time hands-on with one of their demo games, and it immediately felt different. Not flashy. Not overwhelming. Just quietly reactive in a way games usually aren’t. It felt like an early look at a future input layer games haven’t explored yet.
The demo centered on a simple idea. Calm yourself down and see how the game responds.
At first, it took some time. Breathing slowed. Focus narrowed. Eventually, the game reflected that shift. Calmness increased on screen in a way that matched how I was actually feeling in the moment.
Then I tested the opposite.
I intentionally thought about something mildly annoying. Something realistic. My wife spending unnecessary money. Almost immediately, the game reacted. Calmness dropped. Annoyance showed up.
It confirmed this was not guesswork or vague biofeedback. The system was picking up real, meaningful changes and translating them into visible feedback.
Think about ranked play. You start missing decisions. Focus slips. Tilt creeps in before you consciously recognize it.
Ovomind does not need to interfere with the match. It does not need to adjust outcomes or mechanics. Instead, it can surface awareness through post-round insight or between-match prompts.
Just as important, it can capture the opposite state. When you are locked in. Calm, focused, and playing well. That state becomes measurable and reviewable.
Narrative games could also benefit from this kind of input. Tension could drive pacing instead of scripted triggers. Horror games could escalate based on internal stress rather than relying on jump scares alone. Even dynamic difficulty becomes more intentional, responding to engagement without breaking immersion.
For gaming, that actually strengthens the case. It suggests Ovomind is building a platform, not a single use case.
At the same time, it is clear Ovomind is thinking beyond games. They are positioning this as a broader emotional intelligence layer that can live across different interactive systems. Training, performance environments, and adaptive experiences all sit within their longer-term vision.
It reinforces that what I saw in the demo is not just a novelty, but a foundation they plan to build on.
The Ovomind DK1 is currently available for preorder and is clearly aimed at early adopters and developers. My hands-on time was strictly within a gaming context, and that is where the tech felt the most immediate and natural.
Ovomind feels less like a finished product and more like an unlocked door.
We have seen games evolve through new layers of feedback before. Rumble packs. Adaptive triggers. Haptic vests. Each one added another way for players to feel the game.
Not something you control with a button, but something the game can read, reflect, and respond to. That opens an entirely different way to experience games. One that reacts not just to what you do, but to how you feel while doing it.
If developers lean into that idea, this could mark the beginning of a very different kind of immersion.
Status Audio expanded its options for the flagship Pro X earbuds at CES and also gave us a small glimpse of the future in a panel held at their suite.
The big headline is the new Moonbeam White colorway, a silky finish that makes the Pro X feel even more premium than it already does. In person, the color fits the product’s whole vibe: refined, minimalist, and more “lifestyle” than loud. It also helps highlight one of the underrated parts of the Pro X design, the metal-plated chassis that’s smaller and easier to wear than earlier Status models. It’s the kind of change you appreciate fast because comfort is the difference between earbuds you like and earbuds you actually keep in your ears.
What makes Pro X stand out is that Status is still leaning into real audio hardware choices instead of just chasing features. You’re getting their hybrid triple-driver setup, a 12mm dynamic driver paired with two Knowles balanced armature drivers, which is a rare approach in true wireless and way closer to how serious in-ear monitors are built. The promise is better separation, more detail, and a sound that doesn’t collapse when tracks get busy. It’s the “we care about tuning” move, and it shows.
Status also put a ton of attention into the part most people complain about first: call quality. Voiceloom AI Speech Enhancement is the centerpiece here, built to isolate your voice from background noise in real time so you don’t sound like you’re calling from inside a hurricane whenever you step outside. Between the beamforming mic setup and the AI noise handling, this is aiming to solve that real-world problem where ANC helps your ears, but does not always help the person on the other end of the call.
At CES, Status didn’t just show the new color, they used it as a reason to go deeper. The panel they hosted was a cool change of pace because it let attendees get into the “why” behind the Pro X, not just the marketing bullet points. Knowles was among the presenters, and hearing them break down the driver approach and engineering decisions made the product feel even more intentional. There was also a bit of a forward-looking tone, like Status is clearly thinking about how to reach more people without watering down what makes them different.
Beyond the headline upgrades, Pro X is stacked: improved hybrid ANC, a user-adjustable transparency mode, an optical wearing sensor, IP55 water and dust resistance, LDAC and LC3 support, High Res Wireless certification, Google Fast Pair, Microsoft Swift Pair, and a revamped companion app experience. It’s also positioned as more “future-proof” with Bluetooth LE Audio and Auracast support as those features become more common. And now with Moonbeam White in the mix, it feels like Status is rounding out the product into something that can sit in the premium conversation without needing an asterisk.
If you’ve been waiting for Status to push harder into the high-end lane, this is that moment. Moonbeam White is available now, and based on how they’re talking about what’s next, it feels like there’s more coming from Status soon.
CES has no shorter of certain devices such as soundbars but one company I wasn’t expecting to finally make their debut in the same. SVS finally stepped into that world with the R|Evolution Soundbar system, and honestly, this has been a long time coming for a brand that already owns the “serious bass” conversation.
SVS is not aiming this at the thin TV speaker crowd. The R|Evolution Soundbar is built like a real LCR setup squeezed into a single bar, with a dedicated 3-way design for left, center, and right channels. Inside, it’s rocking nine total drivers with 180 watts of onboard amplification, and the goal is pretty clear: loud, clean dialogue and that punchy cinematic hit you usually do not expect from a slim bar.
On the surround side, it supports Dolby Atmos decoding and can run everything from stereo up to immersive mixes. The system is designed to scale depending on your room and how deep you want to go, with 3.1, 5.1, and 5.2 configurations available. If you are not adding extra speakers, Atmos virtualization is there to give you that wider, taller presentation, and there’s also a dialogue enhancer option that should help voices stay crisp when movies get chaotic. It also includes an Auto EQ room correction feature to tune itself to your space.
The real SVS flex is bass, because they are not treating it like an optional add-on. The R|Evolution system includes a wireless subwoofer in the box, built around a 12-inch high-excursion driver and powered by a 600-watt continuous Class-D MOSFET amp. It comes pre-paired for plug-and-play setup, and SVS is even offering an optional dual-sub configuration, which is rare in soundbar land and a big deal for smoothing out bass across a room.
Connectivity is modern and loaded: Wi-Fi, AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, Bluetooth, and hi-res streaming up to 24-bit/96 kHz. For hookups, it includes HDMI 2.1 with ARC/eARC, plus app control and an included IR remote if you like to keep things simple. And if you want to go beyond virtualization, SVS has an upgrade path called the R|Evolution Soundbar Max that adds a pair of wireless surrounds, each with a 2-way design and bi-amped 50-watt amplification, using a proprietary multiband wireless connection to keep things stable.
Pricing is still under wraps along with other precious info about it we’re going to have to wait for, but SVS is targeting a late Q2 2026 ship date. If they land the tuning and keep the setup as painless as it sounds, this could be the product that helps SVS break into every corner of the market, and I cannot wait to see it finally hit shelves.
This year at CES NVIDIA brought something that feels like a real next step for competitive displays: G-SYNC Pulsar, a new flavor of G-SYNC that is clearly built around one goal, making motion look ridiculously clean without forcing you to give up VRR smoothness to get it.
It has been a minute since we have heard bigger, truly new news from G-SYNC, and that is why Pulsar landed with some weight. The simplest way to explain it is this: traditionally, you could chase motion clarity with backlight strobing, or you could chase tear-free smoothness with VRR, but mixing the two has always been messy. Pulsar is NVIDIA’s attempt to finally fuse them properly using variable-frequency backlight strobing, so the strobe behavior can adapt as your frame rate changes. In NVIDIA’s words, it can deliver “over 1,000 Hz effective motion clarity” on these early 360Hz panels, which is a wild sentence to say out loud.
In our demos, the effect was easiest to spot when we stopped looking at the whole scene and focused on one or two specific objects. Tracking targets and watching high-contrast edges in motion is where Pulsar starts to click, because blur that normally smears detail just tightens up. It is not that the entire image suddenly looks different, it is that motion stops looking like a compromise. You get that “locked-in” feeling where your eyes are not fighting the display when you flick, pan, or snap to a target.
What I found interesting is what was not talked about much. The whole conversation is framed around esports and fast shooters, and that makes sense, but I kept thinking about everything else we do on these monitors. Scrolling, camera movement in non-competitive games, sports, even just content playback where motion clarity can make things feel sharper than you expect. Nobody in the demo was really pushing that angle, which makes me even more curious to test it outside of games and see what it does to day-to-day viewing.
There’s also a sleeper feature bundled into the first wave of Pulsar monitors called G-SYNC Ambient Adaptive Technology, which uses a light sensor to automatically tune brightness and color temperature based on your room. It sounds simple, but it is one of those quality-of-life things you appreciate when you game late at night, then jump back on during the day without wanting to constantly tweak settings. NVIDIA also highlighted that these new Pulsar displays are built in collaboration with MediaTek to integrate G-SYNC tech directly into the display scaler, which should help get this technology into more monitors faster.
The launch details were the surprising part. NVIDIA says the first Pulsar monitors from Acer, AOC, ASUS, and MSI were available starting announcement day (January 7, 6AM PT) at select retailers, with more inventory rolling out over the following weeks. The first batch is clearly aimed at the competitive crowd: 27-inch, 1440p, IPS, 360Hz, with pricing starting at $599. And if Pulsar performs as well in real home testing as it did in controlled demos, I fully expect this to scale into bigger, more premium gaming monitors over time, because motion clarity is one of those upgrades you do not want to give back once you see it working.
