CES 2018: The Best Gadgets We've Seen So Far

Someday, all cars will have Alexa and 5G and the infotainment system of your dreams. Today is not that day. Garmin's Speak Plus helps bridge the gap: It plugs into your car's cigarette adapter, connects to your phone over Bluetooth, and sticks to your windshield. From its perch, this round gizmo provides a dash cam, turn-by-turn navigation, and all of Alexa's many other skills. If you connect it to your stereo (again over Bluetooth), you can even use your voice to control your music. It's not quite as simple as an integrated setup, but at $230 it won't require a bank loan just to get one.

Nokia's dream for the connected home starts when you slip into bed each night. Control IoT devices with its new sleep system as soon as you hit the hay: Turn off the lights. Tick the thermostat down a few notches. Set the home security system. Set your phone to "do not disturb" mode. While you snooze, it also tracks sleep cycles, heart rate, and snoring patterns through a thin pad that slips under the mattress.

Folding laundry is a genuine hassle. Enter the Laundroid: a ludicrously large, refrigerator-sized robotic dresser that folds your clothes for you. It has a bin at the bottom where you drop your clean clothes, and on the inside a series of robotic arms and cameras analyze each piece of clothing and fold it. If it ever comes out (and that’s a long shot), it will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $16,000. But in a tech conference filled with a lot of genuinely useless ideas, at least Laundroid is trying to make life legitimately easier. The company even says that it’s partnering with a laundry machine maker so a future Laundroid can actually launder your clothes too.

Most connected pet products (most connected products in general, really) don't offer any features of real value. Wagz seems to at least be thinking about it more holistically, developing a set of gadgets that work together to actually help out pets and their owners. Its smart collar tracks your pooch anywhere it goes, but it also acts as an ID, telling the Wagz smart feeder how much food to spit out. And when your mutt walks over to the Wagz smart door, it'll only open if it's the right dog and the right time. You can manage all your pets' schedules on your phone, or just open up the feeder if you're going to be home a few minutes late.

If you’re a working mom with a nursing infant, pumping breast milk is a royal pain. Too few improvements have been in this category for much too long. But now? The Willow Pump make its way onto the market this March. It’s small enough to throw into a purse, great-looking, and so quiet and discreet that a pumping mom had it running inside her shirt at a CES demo. And we had no idea.

We love Suunto’s sleek, gorgeous fitness watches and the Suunto 3 is no exception. It’s light, attractive, versatile, easy to navigate, and can turn a huge amount of data—like your heart rate and V02 max—into a personalized 10-day training plan.

Successfully watering your outdoor garden requires processing a huge amount of information: Type of plant, plant hardiness zone, soil quality, and the day’s precipitation (or lack thereof). If you find that poring over this information is a satisfying task, more power to you. But if you’d like to eliminate the guesswork, save water, and optimize your tomato growth, Scott’s smart irrigation system can help. It tailors your watering schedule to satellite weather updates, soil conditions, and plant variety, and can be monitored from your smartphone.

Building a gaming PC is an expensive proposition, and the antidote is Shadow PC. This service ties into a powerful gaming computer in the cloud (the company compares each virtual rig to an i7 PC with 12 GB RAM and Nvidia graphics) that’s always kept up-to-date on the backend. So, instead of popping in a new graphics card or upping the RAM, you just keep paying $35 per month and the upgrades are included. The company’s compact $135 Shadow Box will let you turn any monitor, PC, and mouse into a system hardcore enough to run games at up to 4K/60.