This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
CES 2026 was awash in bodily fluids
9 Jan 2026, 3:00 pm by Victoria Song
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here.
At CES 2026 this week, people kept asking me what health tech I was seeing on the show floor. My only answer was this: bodily fluids. As in urine, blood, sweat, and saliva.
With most people, my response typically got a handful of groans and raised eyebrows. Among insiders, I surprised no one.
CES is ground zero of the wellness wi …
The Vergecast Live at CES 2026: What is the point of a robot that falls over?
9 Jan 2026, 2:23 pm by David Pierce
This year’s CES was an odd one. This is a conference usually dominated by futuristic, expensive TVs and futuristic, expensive cars, but those things weren’t what dominated CES 2026. Instead, Las Vegas was filled with new ideas about old gadgets and showed us a whole lot of really impressive hardware waiting on software to catch up.
On this episode of The Vergecast, recorded live at the Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas, David and Nilay talk through some of the big stories from this year’s show. (Thanks to everyone who came to see us and stuck around after for drinks and bowling – we had a blast hanging with all of you!) We talk about the robots that c …
Kia’s EV2 is its smallest and most affordable EV for Europe
9 Jan 2026, 2:07 pm by Andrew J. Hawkins
Kia unveiled the EV2, a small and affordably priced electric vehicle built for the European market. The EV2 made its debut at the Brussels Auto Show, where executives touted it as its “most compact” EV to date.
Of course, it was another in a long line of affordable, capable, and impressively designed EVs that won’t be available to US customers – at least not right away. And it arrives at a time when Europeans have many affordable options from which to chose, potentially complicating Kia’s strategy for the EV2.
The EV2 will come in two trims: a Standard-range version, with 42.2kWh battery pack and 317 km (197 miles) of range based on the W …
The best tech announced at CES 2026 so far
9 Jan 2026, 1:53 pm by Andrew Liszewski
The CES show floor officially closes its doors at the end of the day, but there’s still a trickle of announcements and reveals coming out of Las Vegas. If you’re struggling to stay on top of all the new tech, gadgets, concepts, and AI-powered devices as the final day of CES gets underway, we’re still rounding up the best hardware and upgrades that have debuted so far so you can quickly get up to speed.
As the show draws to a close for another year, you can still catch up on all of The Verge‘s CES 2026 coverage here.
Philips Hue SpatialAware
Preset scenes are the easiest way to take advantage of color-changing smart lights in a room, but t …
All the tech trends we saw at CES 2026
9 Jan 2026, 1:27 pm by Thomas Ricker
CES is a lot — a deluge of consumer tech surrounded by lots of bad carpeting. The Verge’s on-the-ground team of super nerds covered so many new products and technologies that it’s understandable if it was all a little overwhelming.
That’s why we’ve gathered up a collection of trend reports from the show to help make sense of everything that happened at CES 2026, which, by extension, is a preview of the big tech stories for the year to come.
- CES 2026 was awash in bodily fluids
- Most dubious uses of AI at CES 2026
- TV makers are taking AI too far
- Is this the world’s first solid-state battery?
- The PC market braces for an AI-driven storm
- The gap between premium and budget TV brands is quickly closing
- What surprised us the most at CES 2026
- Wi-Fi 8 is appearing at CES before most of us have switched to Wi-Fi 7
- CES promises the robot butler, but delivers better Roombas instead
- AI moves into the real world as companion robots and pets
- Power bank feature creep is out of controlÂ
- I tested Nvidia’s Tesla Full Self-Driving competitor — Tesla should be worried
- RGB is the next big thing in OLED gaming monitors
No, Grok hasn’t paywalled its deepfake image feature
9 Jan 2026, 1:09 pm by Robert Hart
Elon Musk’s X has partially restricted access to Grok’s image editing capabilities amid growing backlash to the flood of nonconsensual, sexualized deepfakes of adults and minors generated by the platform. As of this writing, it no longer generates images as @grok replies for free, but Grok’s image editing tools remain readily available for any X user to churn out images, both sexualized and tame.
X users were previously able to ask Grok – by tagging @grok in a tweet – to edit or create images on the platform. Users now attempting this are met with an automated response from the chatbot’s account, telling them that “Image generation and edi …
Reality still matters
9 Jan 2026, 1:00 pm by Sarah Jeong
The first video I saw of the Minneapolis shooting was bad enough. Shortly after I saw it, I had the terrible realization that there were multiple people in the clip holding their phones up – another angle was bound to surface. Within minutes, a second video was all over social media, and it was even more horrifying. In another recording, seemingly made by a neighbor, a man approaches to render aid. As armed agents rush toward him with guns, he shouts, “I’m a physician!” You can also hear someone sobbing just outside the frame: “That’s my wife!”
Much of America has now seen the first few seconds of this video obtained by the Minnesota Refo …
The Verge Awards at CES 2026
9 Jan 2026, 12:00 pm by Verge Staff
Every January, the world of consumer electronics heads to Las Vegas to spend the first full week of the year in the desert presenting, prodding, and gawking at all the new gadgets and gear debuting at CES. The show has once again delivered an avalanche of products, both innovative and vaporous, that will shape the industry in 2026.
The Verge‘s team has been working around the clock to share the experience. Some of it wowed us while some of it weirded us out, but that’s part of the fun of CES.
After taking it all in over the past week, there are some gadgets that stood out from the rest. They innovated on an existing product, entirely ret …
Microsoft is making it much easier to add hyperlinks in Word docs
9 Jan 2026, 10:58 am by Tom Warren
Microsoft is making it a lot faster and easier to add links to text inside Word documents. Instead of having to open a menu item to insert a link or use the CTRL + K keyboard shortcut, you can now simply paste a link on top of the text you want to hyperlink.
This new feature reduces the amount of clicks you need to do an everyday task like linking URLs, and it works across Word for the web, Windows, and Mac. It’s similar to the way WordPress and many other content management systems and text editors let you quickly insert links. Now we’re just waiting on Google Docs to join the club.
Microsoft has started rolling out this feature to all Wo …
Xbox’s Towerborne is switching from a free-to-play game to a paid one
9 Jan 2026, 1:05 am by Jay Peters
Towerborne, a side-scrolling action RPG published by Xbox Game Studios that has been available in early access, will officially launch on February 26th. But instead of launching as a free-to-play, always-on online game as originally planned, Towerborne is instead going to be a paid game that you can play offline.
“You will own the complete experience permanently, with offline play and online co-op,” Trisha Stouffer, CEO and president of Towerborne developer Stoic, says in an Xbox Wire blog post. “This change required deep structural rebuilding over the past year, transforming systems originally designed around constant connectivity. The res …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
