My colleague Chris Velazco is the nerdy buddy you need to sift through the technology that promises to make your life better.
Chris tries gobs of gadgets and other technology each year, and he spent this week at CES, a yearly Las Vegas showcase of weird and occasionally marvelous technology that might be a preview of what could hit it big in your life.
Chris’s wisdom can be a guidepost to the technology worth trying for yourself and what you can probably ignore. I also made him pick sides on hot topics, including whether “smart” toilets that monitor your human waste are useful or yuck.
Shira: What’s a new technology you’ve seen that made you immediately think, ME WANT?
Chris: A company called Clicks announced this week a BlackBerry-style Android smartphone with a physical keyboard. After handling samples of the device in Vegas, I’m considering paying $499 for one later this year. I like the idea of a small, beautifully designed secondary phone that I can take with me on weekends.
What’s a new technology that made you immediately think, NOPE?
I had a visceral negative reaction to Lollipop Star, which pipes music into your head via bone conduction technology as you’re eating the lollipop. I noped right outta there.
A roughly $9 single-use product that’s destined for the trash feels awful. And back me up here, ‘90s kids: We already cracked this technology with Sound Bites lollipops. It was basically the same product, except you could stick in a new lollipop each time.
What’s the best technology you bought last year?
A high-powered wall charger from Momax is now an indispensable part of my tech travel kit. It charges my phones, cameras and computers quickly and does double duty as a voltage converter for devices that need that.
What is a technology that you’re using much less?
My friends and I have gravitated away from scheduled, slightly staged catch-up Zoom calls in favor of impromptu phone calls.
Is there a recent chatbot experience that won you over to the magic of AI?
I wouldn’t say AI has won me over with anything, but my mom liked when I used Google’s Gemini AI app to add images of conservative politicians to photos of her. Anything for family, I guess.
Pretty much every smartphone company, reportedly including Apple this year, is releasing phones that fold open like a book to whopping screen size or fold in half to pocket size. These foldable phones have been unpopular so far. Do you want one, Y/N?
Yes! That’s a recent development, though. I’ve loved the concept of folding phones for a long time, but companies only now seem to have figured out how to manufacture them reliably and make the devices feel comfortable to hold and stick in your pocket.
I think foldable smartphones are about to become a lot more appealing. Let’s hope the $2,000-and-up prices come down.
There are a bunch of “smart” toilets now that put a camera or a poop or pee tracker in the most intimate place in your home. Would you do this, Y/N?
No. I’m verging on a privacy nihilist, but even I have my limits.
Are camera-enabled smart glasses with artificial intelligence features worth owning, Y/N?
No, at least for now. The current AI glasses give off a work-in-progress vibe that keeps me away.
I’m still looking forward to trying a new pair of smart glasses from Even Realities, although wearing their latest model made people around me suspicious and resentful. And Meta is clearly onto something. I respect the company for experimenting in public with its janky AI glasses like the Ray-Ban Display.
What do you think of the growing number of home helper robots that companies say can fold your laundry and run the dishwasher? Kill them now, or awww?
It would be great if we could do less work, but I wouldn’t bet on too many helpful home robots this year. The standout at CES, if there was one, was LG’s human-ish upright robot that can handle objects with its (his?) hands. It was a neat spectacle, but the robot took ages to fold laundry and scoot around during a preplanned set of chores. Hardly inspiring.
You can read more of Chris’s dispatches from CES here.
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