More from CES 2026 live: all the news, announcements, and innovations from the show floor and beyond

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.

When I wasn’t looking at huge phones at CES I managed to track down a small one: the ikko MindOne Pro. It offers a 4-inch OLED panel and a 50-megapixel camera that flips up for selfies. The MindOne Pro will ship with Android 15 as well as a proprietary OS with AI apps that you can also use as a kind of focus mode. It’s in late stages of Kickstarter funding with shipping promised for February.

The Brolan ClearX uses “sensors” (no one could tell me what sort, though) and AI to detect what material your shoes are made from and select the appropriate cleaning and drying cycle, with “micro-nano bubble technology” to help clean. Is it too late to add this to my dubious AI roundup?

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.)

External GPUs are rad but many need work — maybe they’ll take off now we’re throwing AI dollars at them? Gigabyte, Plugable, and newcomer Ugreen aren’t even calling them “eGPUs” anymore here at CES. Guess I can’t complain unless AI companies buy them all up.

AMD’s Strix Halo is a big, pricey chip with the best integrated graphics we’ve ever seen. The Asus TUF is the brand’s budget-friendly gaming line. So how “affordable” will Asus’s new TUF Gaming A14 laptop with Strix Halo be? We don’t know yet, because Asus hasn’t finalized pricing. But I look forward to testing this TUF.

*To be clear, this was with Intel’s XeSS upscaling, at 1080p resolution, with 4x frame gen — the actual framerate was a quarter of that. But the beefiest integrated GPU in Intel’s new Panther Lake chips never let the true framerate dip below 40fps, even unplugged, with settings that looked and felt good enough for single-player games.

RGB stripe subpixel arrangements are the next big thing in OLED gaming monitors, and my colleague Antonio took some great photos of Asus’s ROG Swift OLED PG27UCWM monitor at CES so you can see the arrangement on a real monitor. Sean snapped a few photos of RBG stripe screens, too.

Ace Combat in real life? This folding VTOL foam aircraft gives you a first-person view from inside a tiny toy fighter jet cockpit. A head-tracking DJI drone camera beams video to DJI goggles over DJI’s long-range O4 wireless tech; Fly Wing claims 60-minute battery life and nearly 75mph top speed. $2,000, tentatively in March, for the complete kit.

After 2020’s pricey first effort, Asus is trying the Zephyrus Duo formula again.