You came. You saw. You voted. And you picked our Top Tech of CES 2021 Audience Choice Award winners!
Normally, we get to have all the fun. Every year, our editors poke, prod, try on, and otherwise test all the hottest gadgets at the show, then gather in the final days of the show to pick our Top Tech of CES awards. But this year, for the first-ever all-digital CES, we’re shaking things up by reaching out to you, our readers. You’ve been voting on the best gadgets all week using the voting module on all of our CES content.
It’s always fun to hear reader feedback when we announce our own awards, and it was just as eye-opening to see which gadgets caught your eye. Only one of these awards overlapped with what our editors chose, which gives us an all-new perspective on what really matters to you at CES.
So, after tallying tens of thousands of votes, it’s now time to announce the first Top Tech of CES 2021 Audience Choice Award winners, as picked directly by our readers. There is no Digital Trends Electoral College, we promise.
It’s really no surprise that readers concurred with our editors to select this super-slick infotainment system as the best automotive innovation of CES 2021. Just look at it: A sweeping 56-inch panel of Corning Gorilla Glass elegantly blurs three separate OLED displays into one perfect dash. Besides the sheer amount of screen here, Mercedes has put a lot of engineering into the way drivers interact with it. The middle display uses A.I. to suggest relevant buttons at the right time, rather than forcing you to wade through menus, and 99 percent of the options can also be activated by voice.
What’s better, this is not a concept: It will hit roads in 2021 aboard the Mercedes EQ luxury EV.
You all must be pretty fed up with flaky Wi-Fi, because in the same show that brought us titanium laptops, AR glasses that project virtual monitors, and mobile GPUs faster than a PS5, you selected … a router!
Not just any router, mind you. The RAXE500 is the first of a new generation of Wi-Fi 6E routers. This technology doesn’t just promise more speed — we know your internet connection can’t keep up anyway — but less interference. It taps into an unused 6GHz slice of wireless spectrum that you won’t have to share with baby monitors, microwaves, and a dozen apartment neighbors. Will you finally be able to Zoom reliably from your backyard? We can dream.
The sci-fi appeal is strong with this one. Using 40 different vibration motors embedded in a vest that looks like something Batman would wear, the TactSuit X40 makes VR more immersive by emulating everything from getting shot to punched (if you’re less of a masochist, you can use it for movies and music, too). An internal battery and Bluetooth connection means it doesn’t add any cables to your VR setup, and Korean developer bHaptics also sells add-ons that bring motion feedback to your face, arms, hands, and feet.
This is definitely one we wish we could’ve tried on in person at a real-life show. But if you’re interested, you won’t have to wait long. It goes on sale February 8 for $499.
Samsung and LG often duke it out for CES supremacy, but it was Sony’s flagship Series Z9J that made readers drool the most this year. And we can see why. It’s stacked with basically every spec you could ask for: 8K, full-array LED backlighting, and HDMI 2.1, the holy grail of connectivity that brings with it variable refresh rate, 4K at 120Hz, low-latency mode, and eARC. If you own a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, this is a TV that unlocks everything these next-gen boxes can do, and splashes it across a glorious 75 or 85 inches of screen.
Many of Kohler’s 2021 innovations focused on a touchless experience that makes bathrooms more hygienic, but we suspect it’s the luxurious $16,000 Stillness Bath that you would all love to have in your homes. Like an infinity pool, the Stillness Bath spills over on all four sides into a grate while the “Experience Tower” emits a thick fog over the surface of the water. And because this is CES, you can use voice controls to prefill the tub to just the right level and temperature, plus control all the other features.
We thought for sure it was LG’s rollable OLED phone that readers would gawk over and mash “vote” for the most, but you surprised us all by nominating none other than an iPhone case. We’ll concede, though, it’s an appropriate accessory for the moment. Catalyst’s Total Protection iPhone 12 cases are basically an impenetrable bubble for your phone, allowing you to wash it with soap and water, or even disinfectant alcohol. Considering how disgusting your phone is under a microscope, it’s no wonder we’re after cleaner phones instead of bigger phones. The Catalyst Total Protection cases are made for every iPhone 12, and are already on sale for $90.
Also check out the winners of our Top Tech and Tech for Change awards.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.