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This year, over 4,000 exhibitors descended on Las Vegas, Nevada to showcase their wares at CES, and the Engadget team was out in full force. The week started with press conferences from the biggest companies at the show, which were often a flurry of AI buzzwords, vague promises and very little in the way of hard news.
More than one company even decided to forgo announcing things during their conferences to make way for more AI chatter, only to publish press releases later quietly admitting that, yes, actually, they did make some consumer technology. It's appropriate, I guess, that as we're beginning to feel the knock-on cost effects of the AI industry's insatiable appetite for compute resources — higher utility bills and device prices — companies would rather use their flashy conferences to reinforce AI's supposedly must-have attributes rather than actually inform the public about their new products.
We're by no means AI luddites at Engadget, but it's fair to say that our team is more excited by tangible products that enrich our lives than iterative improvements to large language models. So, away from all of the bombast of NVIDIA's marathon keynote and Lenovo's somehow simultaneously gaudy and dull Sphere show, it's been a pleasure to evaluate the crowd of weird new gadgets, appliances, toys and robots vying for our attention.
Over the course of several days of exhaustive discussion and impassioned pitching, our CES team has whittled down the hundreds of products we saw to pick our favorites. Starting with an initial shortlist of around 50 candidates across a diverse range of product categories, we eventu
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When Meta first announced its display-enabled smart glasses last year, it teased a handwriting feature that allows users to send messages by tracing letters with their hands. Now, the company is starting to roll it out, with people enrolled in its early access program getting it first,
I got a chance to try the feature at CES and it made me want to start wearing my Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses more often. When I reviewed the glasses last year, I wrote about how one of my favorite tings about the neural band is that it re
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Have you ever wanted to save approximately three seconds and two mouse clicks when shopping online? Microsoft has something special just for you. The company just introduced something called Copilot Checkout at the NRF 2026 retail conference. This is exactly what it sounds like. It's a shopping assistant embedded within Copilot.
The feature is rolling out now in the US and integrates with PayPal, Shopify, Stripe and Etsy. It lets people complete purchases directly inside of Copilot without having to withstand the grueling experience of being redirected to a retailer's website. Participating partners include Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Ashley Furniture.
The retailers remain the actual merchant of record, so they'll still get customer data and all of that jazz. Microsoft controls the interface.
We don't know what kind of safeguards are in place to prevent the AI from hallucinating its way into buying you a giant bounce house when you wanted to order some Bounce dryer sheets. Engadget has reached out to Microsoft to inquire about these safeguards and how exactly the money is handled.
This is a pretty big moment for AI shopping. OpenAI introduced a shopping assistant several months ago that
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 If you've ever bought a bag of spinach only to come home and realize you already had a bag of spinach, you may appreciate this fridge. I had a chance to check out the GE Profile Smart Fridge with Kitchen Assistant at CES and was surprised to find I kinda wanted one. To be perfectly honest, most attempts I've seen at the show to "stick some AI in it" are at best amusing but usually completely unnecessary.
Here, though, the AI has a purpose. After seeing how the autofill water dispenser worked, I asked the GE Appliance reps how easy it was to change the fridge's water filter. Jason May, a GE Appliances product management executive, walked up to the fridge's (appropriately sized) touchscreen and said "Hey HQ, where's my water filter?" (HQ is short for SmartHQ, GE Profile's assistant). Then, relying on information it had gathered from this model's user manual, the AI assistant explained exactly where to find it (in the left hand door below the ice maker). It took another rep about two seconds to pop out the filter and, justlikethat, the task was on its way to done.
As for the spinach conundrum, that's handled by a crisper drawer camera, called Fridge Focus. Each time you open the drawers, a built-in camera (that you can physically shutter or turn off in the app) takes a video snapshot of what's left when you're done. So if you're at the store and wondering how much kale you already have, you can take a peek and see.
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Disney will add vertical videos to its service in the US sometime this year, in hopes that they can entice viewers to engage with its app every day. The company has made the announcement at its Tech Data Showcase event at CES 2026. Disney first dabbled in vertical content with Verts, which launched for the ESPN app in August 2025, giving it the insight it needed on how its users respond to the video format.
Erin Teague, Disney Entertainment's EVP of Product Management, told Deadline that the company will use the format for all kinds of content. The service isn't just planning to use it as a vehicle for movie and series teasers, but also for original short-form programming. She didn't say what kinds of original programming Disney will be adding as vertical videos to its app, but vertical micro-dramas have become incredibly popular over the past year.
"We're obviously thinking about integrating vertical video in ways that are native to core user behaviors," Teague said. "So, it won't be a kind of a disjointed, random experience." The company is targeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha users, in particular, since they're not inclined to sit and watch long-form content on their phones for hours. Disney said in a statement that the experience will "evolve as it expands across news and entertainment" and will be personalized for users, with making the service "a must-visit daily destination" as its goal. After all, if a user is already in the app, they're more likely to explore and watch the service's programming.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/disney-i
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