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CNET has been testing robot vacuums for years, but we're always refining our testing procedures. Here's the process we use to evaluate robot vacuums for cleaning, navigation performance, obstacle avoidance, noise levels and more.
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 Back in late 2022 and early 2023, Apple rolled out a new architecture for its Apple Home platform to deliver improved performance and compatibility, although the rollout came with some hiccups that forced Apple to pull and later re-release the upgrade.
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The AI chatbot has been creating sexualized images of women and children upon request. How can this be stopped?
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 We're wrapping up coverage of the biggest tech show in the world. CES 2026 is almost over, and while we have more stories and wrap-ups to come, here are the most interesting products we've spotted, written about and critiqued/praised. That includes our picks for the best of CES. We gave out 15 awards as well as our best of show, and you might be surprised by some of our picks — I know I was.
Read on for some of the best things to come out of Las Vegas this week, but first up, our Best of the Best winner, which was Lego Smart Play. As Engadget's editor-in-chief Aaron Souppouris put it, "Lego could almost be seen as the antithesis of the typical CES product."
Regardless of trends, Lego has always persisted. And in 2026, it's getting much smarter.
Lego
The system consists of a Smart Brick, Tags and Minifigures. They're packed with modern technology, so they can respond to how you play with them or the sets you build. The Smart Brick has a 4.1mm ASIC chip, which Lego says is smaller than a standard Lego stud. It senses things like motion, orientation and magnetic fields, but also has a tiny built-in speaker, which produces audio "tied to live play actions," not just canned clips.
It's hard to explain it in only a few words (we've got a deep-dive hands-on
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ExpressVPN is back on sale again, and its two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now. You can get the Advanced tier for $101 for 28 months. This is marked down from the $392 that this time frame normally costs. On a per-month basis, it works out to roughly $3.59 for the promo period.
We've consistently liked ExpressVPN because it's fast, easy to use and widely available across a large global server network. In fact, it's our current pick for best premium VPN. One of the biggest drawbacks has always been its high cost, and this deal temporarily solves that issue.
In our review we were able to get fast download and upload speeds, losing only 7 percent in the former and 2 percent in the latter worldwide. We found that it could unblock Netflix anywhere, and its mobile and desktop apps were simple to operate. We gave ExpressVPN an overall score of 85 out of 100.
The virtual private network service now has three tiers. Basic is cheaper with fewer features, while Pro costs more and adds extra perks like support for 14 simultaneous devices and a password manager. Advanced sits in the middle and includes the password manager but only supports 12 devices.
The Basic plan is $78 right now for 28 months, down from $363, and the Pro plan is $168, down from $560. That's 78 percent and 70 percent off, respectively. All plans carry a 30-day money-back guarantee for new users, so you can try it without committin
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 Clicks is an apologetically gadgety company, making gear that feels charmingly out-of-place in a world where almost every smartphone out there is an all-screen slab. That was obviously two years ago when the company first revealed its keyboard case that brought tactile typing to the iPhone and eventually other Android devices. Rather than that being a one-off curiosity, the company had two new announcements at CES 2026: a magnetic keyboard accessory that also doubles as a battery bank and small, squat mobile phone with a keyboard. And while there isn't a working prototype of the Clicks Communicator available for the press to see, I got to check out the new Power Keyboard talk with Clicks co-founder and former BlackBerry marketing director Jeff Gadway about where he thinks his products fit into the smartphone world.
At first glance, the $79 Power Keyboard feels like a big improvement over the original Clicks Keyboard case. It magnetically attaches to any phone with Qi2 and connects over Bluetooth. The keyboard itself is similar to the original Clicks keyboard, but there's a dedicated number row which is a nice improvement. But the thing that really caught my eye was its old-school slider form factor. When closed, the Power Keyboard sits on the back of your phone like a thick wireless battery pack — but it satisfyingly slides up to reveal the keyboard like the Palm Pre or BlackBerry Torch smartphones of old.
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Apple keeps most of its product pricing on a tight leash, but we do see the company's AirTags go on sale pretty frequently. Another cost cut has come around for this item just in time for the holidays. Amazon is currently selling a four-pack of AirTags for $65. At a third off the regular cost, that price is pretty close to the record low discount of $63 we've seen for these Bluetooth trackers.
AirTags can be useful for people who travel frequently, helping you to keep track of essentials like your passport as well as a way to keep tabs on luggage while you're on the go. If you do purchase some AirTags, we have some recommendations for useful accessories to go along with them, such as dif
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Meta has announced three new agreements to purchase nuclear power for its AI infrastructure as well as the Prometheus supercluster, a 1-gigawatt data center being built in Ohio. The social media giant is partnering with power companies Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo to deliver an expected 6.6 gigawatts of generation to its projects by 2035.
The company's agreement with TerraPower will fund the development of two new reactors capable of delivering up to 690 megawatts of power as early as 2032. The deal also gives Meta rights to energy from six other reactors that could deliver an additional 2.1 gigawatts by 2035. All this power would come from TerraPower's "Natrium" reactors, which use sodium instead of water as a coolant.
A partnership with Oklo will bring 1.2 gigawatts of nuclear power online as early as 2030. Meta says the agreement opens the door to the construction of multiple Oklo reactors, which it claims will create thousands of construction and long-term operations jobs in Ohio. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of Oklo's largest investors, and owns
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Amazon is giving managers a badge-swipe dashboard that tracks how long corporate staff stay in the office, tightening enforcement of its five-day mandate.
The post Amazon Introduces Dashboard to Track Employee Attendance, Productivity appeared first on eWEEK.
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Probably my favorite thing about the Lego Smart Play system unveiled this week at CES is that it was designed for kids, first and foremost. In the past 10 years or so, Lego has increasingly courted an older audience with more expensive and elaborate sets. But when it was time to bring more advanced technology to Lego, the idea right from the beginning was more social and interactive play.
If you haven't heard about Smart Play yet, its a way for Lego to make its sets more interactive. A Smart Brick filled with sensors makes it so sets can respond to each other, know when they're moving, play sounds and know when the corresponding Smart Minifigures are near them. Tiny Smart Tags, meanwhile, help the Smart Brick know the context of how it's being used — whether it's in a helicopter, car or duck for example.
Tom Donaldson, senior VP and Head of Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group, told Engadget that the company worked on Smart Play for about eight years before introducing it this week, and that social play was the starting point. "We started really looking at consumer needs, and this idea that kids really like social play," said Donaldson "Kids really like the sort of things that change when they come back to them, and the kids really like agency. They want to be able to change things."
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Meta's messaging app WhatsApp could soon be subject to deeper scrutiny (and punishment) under the European Commission's Digital Services Act, Reuters reports. Because the app's broadcasting feature WhatsApp Channels grew to around 51.7 million average monthly active users in the European Union in the first six months of 2025, the feature has crossed the 45-million-person barrier that lets DSA rules apply.
A platform is designated as a "very large online platform" or VLOP once it has 45 million monthly users or more, according to the European Commission. Once an app or service passes that amount, it's subject to the DSA and all its rules about how digital platforms should operate, particularly around removing illegal or harmful content. Companies can be fined up to six percent of their global annual revenue for not complying with the DSA.
WhatsApp traditionally functions as a private messaging app, but its Channels feature, which lets users make one-sided posts to anyone who follows their channel, does look a lot more like Meta's other social media platforms. "So here we would indeed designate potentially WhatsApp for WhatsApp Channels and I can confirm that the Commission is actively looking into it and I wouldn't exclude a future designation," a Commission spokesperson said in a daily news briefing Reuters viewed.
Engadget has asked Meta to comment on WhatsApp's possible new designation. We'll update this article if we hear back.
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Robots are everywhere at CES 2026, but it's a robot phone that has me most intrigued.
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There are no recruitment ads for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) running on Spotify at the moment, the streaming service has told Variety. A spokesperson has confirmed the news after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, but they also clarified that the ads stopped running in late 2025. "The advertisements mentioned were part of a US government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms," they explained.
Spotify caught flak back in October for playing ICE ads, asking people to "join the mission to protect America," in between songs for users on the ad-supported plan. The advertisements even promised $50,000 signing bonuses for new recruits. Campaigns were launched to urge users to cancel their subscriptions and to boycott the service, and even music labels called on the company to stop serving ICE advertisements. Spotify said back then that the ads don't violate its policies and that users can simply mark them with a thumbs up or down to let the platform know their preferences.
The company reportedly received $74,000 from Homeland Security for the ICE ads, but that's a tiny amount compared to what other companies received. According to a report by
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Get the latest Litter-Robot Discounts on Litter-Robot self-cleaning litter boxes, accessories, and more.
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At CES 2026, we saw the newest health tech that we may one day wear on our bodies and use in our homes.
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 Lumus got a major boost in brand recognition when one of its waveguides was selected for use in the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. But that already feels like old tech now because at CES 2026, the company brought some of its latest components to the show and based on what I saw, they seem poised to seriously elevate the optical quality of the next wave of high-end smartglasses.
When the Meta Ray-Ban Displays glasses came out, they wowed users as they were (and still are) one of a handful of smartglassess to feature a full-color in-lens display with at least a 20-degree field of view. But going by the specs on Lumus' newest waveguides, we're set for a major upgrade in terms of future capabilities.
If you look closely, you can see where light from the waveguide propagates into the one of the smartglasses' lenses.Sam Rutherford for EngadgetThe first model I tried featured Lumus' optimized Z-30 waveguides, which not only offer a much wider 30-degree FOV, they are also 30 percent lighter and 40 percent thinner than previous generations. On top of that, Lumus says they are also more power efficient with the waveguides capable of hitting more than 8,000 nits per watt. This is a big deal because smartglasses are currently quite limited by the size of batteries they can use, especially if you want to make them
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 If you've never docked a boat before, consider yourself lucky. There are plenty of popular TikTok channels devoted to shaming those who bring their craft back home clumsily or berth them with something less than finesse. Tricky crosswinds, unpredictable surf and even the jeers of passersby can make it a stressful experience at the best of times.
Brunswick, which owns more than 50 water-borne brands like Sea Ray, Bayliner and Mercury Marine, has a solution. It's demonstrating some self-docking tech called AutoCaptain at CES 2026 that makes this process a cinch, plus a fleet of other innovations that, in some cases, leave some of the smart cars on the show floor looking a bit remedial.
One of those technologies is edge AI. While in-car AI is an increasingly common feature, those agents are exclusively running remotely, relying on cellular connections to offload all the processing power required to drive a large language model.
Sadly, that won't always work on a boat.
One of Brunswick's tech-equipped boatsBrunswick"One of the things about AI for boats
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