GameSir’s Smart Drive was just a prototype at CES — a wired one at that — but I’ve always wanted to have room for a direct-drive racing wheel in my house. Maybe my thumbs are enough! $139 in Q3. (YouTube version here.)
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 you can swap the pogo pins for a cable if you change motherboards. 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.)
Now, Wolfbox has super-sized it. Wolfbox Megaflow 500 Pro; $200 in May.
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.
It’s just one of two Game Boy-styled mini-controllers that cradle your phone at CES 2026. This one plugs directly into your phone with USB-C, is coming summer 2026, but doesn’t have a price yet. GameSir has a Bluetooth one for $35 that’s coming March and cradles your phone. (YouTube video version here.)
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.)
GDU Technology’s Li Lei says she’s not sure whether it might truly hurt her company. “It’s really hard to tell because they’re changing drone policy all the time,” she tells me at CES. Also, GDU mostly sells in China. But it just recently expanded in the US, and now its just-announced flagship P300 won’t come here.
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.
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This is Soramatex from Sora Materials. They wouldn’t tell me what it is, save that it uses carbon powder, which makes it sound like maybe it’s graphene aerogel — which, to be clear, already exists and can get even lighter. But it’s not every day I get to touch impossibly light lab material! (YouTube version here.)
