Best of CES 2018: The Year's Showstopping Gadgets

Google comes into 2018 with a choice: Find a way to make Google Assistant compete with Alexa, or risk finishing a distant second in the all-important virtual assistant race. It would be hard to overstate how much Google went for it. The company put ads on seemingly every buyable surface in Vegas, and sent an army of onesie-wearing helpers into the crowd, and most importantly, showed off a Best Buy's worth of devices with Assistant inside. From Smart Displays to TVs, cars to headphones to dishwashers, to oh so many smart speakers, it felt like Google Assistant was listening from every device you touched at CES. Alexa was here, too, but you could hardly hear it through the cacophony of Google's advertising. Which was probably precisely the point.

Lenovo’s thin and portable Miix 630 tablet looks like a Microsoft Surface on the outside—but inside, it’s packing a power-sipping Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Lenovo’s touting the Miix's built-in 4G LTE and 20-hour battery life as two big wins against the typical Intel-based systems. For $800, Lenovo throws an active stylus and a keyboard cover into the (ahem) mix, making it a tempting deal for shoppers looking for a portable, long-lasting Windows system.

Manufacturers have used CES to tease people-sized drones and personal flying machines for years. Supposedly, in the future, we'll use these devices to whisk across cities in sky-highways, laughing at the people stuck in traffic in old-timey cars below. In 2018, things are getting more serious. Bell Helicopter (best known for military aircraft, like the the V-22 Osprey) offered rides in a full-sized air-taxi cabin this year. OK, so the experience is VR—the electric propulsion to get these vehicles into the air is still being worked on—but it's a sign that companies are taking this field seriously, and working on the components they'll need to make flying cars a reality.

Mouthguards aren’t fun to wear, but they’re an important part of keeping kids safe while playing football, ice hockey, or any kind of potentially concussive sport. Prevent Biometrics’ head impact monitoring mouthguard is unlike any we've seen. It won a Department of Defense grant for study in military head impact applications and later helped concussion researchers understand injury risk. The boil-and-bite fit model, with wireless syncing to the companion app, will be available starting this summer. Coaches and parents can monitor athletes in real time and quickly evaluate whether they’re able to return to the field of play—in a protective device that they should be wearing anyway.

The router singularity was inevitable. Now, it’s here—or at least a rough draft of it. Rather than ask you to plant single-purpose mesh network units throughout your house, the Lyra Voice extends your Wi-Fi network while doubling as an Alexa-enabled speaker. It looks a little funky, and would benefit from Bluetooth, but it’s the first networking product to embrace the glorious future in which everything that networks must converge.

The HTC Vive Pro may as well be a love letter to hardcore fans of the Vive. It has 78 percent more pixels (you can see details, like text on a book, even clearer), integrated high-quality audio, improved comfort thanks to a sizing dial on the head strap, dual front-facing cameras, and dual microphones for noise isolation. It can also create a much larger virtual room up to 10 x 10 meters—larger than most actual Star Trek holodecks. Oh, and a new peripheral also makes it wireless, eliminating all those cords you almost trip over every few minutes. With the Pro, HTC is doubling down on premium VR and reiterating what made the Vive so outstanding in the first place.

When you're a pro gamer, every split-second twitch of the cursor can spell win or lose. That's why Razer made the new, featherweight Razer Mamba with Firefly Hyperflux. The mouse feels like there's nothing inside, and that's because it's fully battery-less, and gets its power directly from the Firefly mouse mat. Of course, Razer's liberally applied its signature Chroma lighting system to both mouse mat and mouse. If you don't want to bring the mouse mat with you, you can go corded thanks to a microUSB port.

Soundbars make a simple kind of sense in 2018: Everybody launched new TVs, all of them very thin. Thin TVs make for bad speakers, because even display manufacturers can't defeat physics. So you get a soundbar, stick it below the TV, problem solved. Smart manufacturers see more possibility, though. TCL, for example: It announced a new soundbar at CES that's powered by Roku, which means it can be used like a smart speaker and a voice-powered universal remote. It's an easy way to smarten up your otherwise-dumb TV, too, and it stays on even when your TV's off. Roku's working with lots of manufacturers on similar soundbars, to come out later in 2018. So buy that super-thin OLED, stick the thing to the wall, and get yourself a soundbar to handle everything else.