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

I love how flashlights have evolved in the past decade with powerful LEDs, lithium-ion batteries and USB-C charging, and while this Olight ArkPro is way pricier than my Wuben X4, it feels way more elegant, compact, and offers both a green laser beam and UV light as well as up to 1700 lumens of white.

I had a blast with the OhSnap MCON viral sliding gamepad, save for one teensy thing — it’s incredibly impractical to keep your phone attached to it because it’s thick and blocks the cameras. The upcoming ~$100 MCON Slim and ~$60 MCON Lite might fix that, but they don’t have the spring loaded action. The Lite uses 3DS-style Circle Pads, the Slim has touchpads. Tentatively coming September.

As a result, the D2 Pro Palm Vein Smart Lock will work with both Alexa and Google. It also offers improved palm vein recognition, which, according to TCL, “uses infrared technology to detect unique vein patterns beneath the skin,” using AI local processing to tweak recognition data each time it’s used. Along with the new D2L Fingerprint Lever Lock, it will be available in the second quarter of 2026; no price was announced.

We wrote RGB is the next big thing in monitors, and today we got a look. John and I agree LG Display’s 27-inch 4K RGB-stripe OLED panel looked wonderfully crisp, a way better demo than Samsung Display’s 34-inch RGB-stripe ultrawide. Also, LG has a 39-inch 5K RGBW OLED ultrawide with 1,500-nit peak brightness, if you don’t mind the extra white subpixel...

How can both Samsung Display and LG Display claim to have the world’s brightest TV when they offer the same 4,500-nit brightness peaks? Not convincingly! But the extra 500 nits is still a milestone over last-gen tech, and boy are these new OLED screens gorgeous in person. You can’t say OLED is lacking brightness anymore.

The AMD Ryzen AI Halo is built with Ryzen AI Max Plus series processors and is “capable of running up to 200 billion parameter models locally,” AMD says. It’s “planned for introduction” in the second quarter of 2026, with information about pricing and commercial availability to be shared “closer to launch.”

Alienware’s flagship desktop finally ditched proprietary parts last year (no more Dell-specific motherboards) and welcomed AMD’s flagship Ryzen X3D desktop chips in November. Now it’s getting the latest AMD chip too — just know the new 9850X3D is only a tad faster than the 9800X3D (AMD says roughly 7 percent uplift).

Acer is announcing a new Nitro V 16 AI entry-level gaming laptop with AMD’s new Gorgon Point chips. Announced at CES with a handful of other Acer laptops, the Nitro is meant to offer a budget-friendly-ish price for AMD’s new chip and Nvidia GPUs — from the RTX 5050 to RTX 5070. It’s expected in Q2, but pricing isn’t finalized.

Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos availability will be extended across Peacock’s live sports throughout 2026, and the streamer has committed to supporting Dolby Vision 2 and the Dolby AC-4 audio codec when they launch later in the year.