Even with all the Covid Cancellations, CES 2022 ended up launching some really Cool Tech

The 2022 Consumer Electronics Show is in the record books, and it was a weird one.  The weeks leading up to it were filled with COVID-19 cancellations due to the uber contagious Omicron variant, and as a result the show floor was virtually empty. Once inside, it seemed that the keynote presentations lacked the usual spectacle, and the mood was definitely subdued.

Nevertheless, those who attended report that CES 2022 was a slightly better than average year for the show. There weren’t any industry-shaking products announced and shipping — but that almost never happens at CES, and the expectation that it should was always misguided.

Instead, attendees saw some genuinely good improvements on technology that will actually ship, which isn’t always the case at CES. Here are a few standouts, as reported by the tech experts at The Verge:

• Dell’s XPS 13 Plus is a bold (maybe too bold) reimagining of a classic laptop design. It’s too bad the company mixed some interesting ideas with one obviously bad one: dropping the headphone jack.
• AMD and Intel both had chip announcements that should lead to some solid computers (although an M1-level revolution isn’t on the table for PCs yet).
• The smart home ecosystem is gearing up for a big year with more ambitious products designed to actually work together with the new Matter standard.
• There’s a curved monitor you can rotate 90 degrees so it swoops over your head.
• A home robot that could actually be useful because it doesn’t try to do anything too futuristic, just provide the service of helping people with mobility issues carry stuff around.
• New Quantum Dot OLED technology that should allow OLED screens to be much brighter — plus there’s the CES intrigue of Sony announcing a TV with a Samsung-made panel before Samsung itself announced a TV.
• A portable projector that manages to solve for the actual hassles involved with portable projectors. It was almost like the product manager used these types of products and understood their problems.
• A Chromebook that slots into the high-end spot that’s been frustratingly empty for about two years now.

Then there’s the electric car gadgetry, because CES is as much a car show as a gadget show (i.e. cars are pretty much big moving gadgets these days) and all the car companies that desperately want you to believe they’re innovative, environmentally friendly, and have multi-year roadmaps that are actually realistic.

As The Verge reports, there was was one concept car that was just unabashedly fun because it was cool and because nobody pretended that it would turn into a real product. That would be BMW’s use of E Ink on the body panels of an iX to give it the ability to change from black to white at the flip of a switch.

But this is a time where every car manufacturer feels the need to earnestly project that they’re switching to electric but most of them have yet to ship EVs at meaningful scale. Which means that CES 2022 was filled with more than its usual share of concept cars and paper-thin promises that at some point in the near/far future, the company will be fully electric.

• The biggest car news of the show was undoubtedly the Chevy Silverado EV, but it has a target ship date of late 2023, which is plenty of time for plans to change.
• Mercedes-Benz had a DB5-looking concept whose purpose was to convince us that 600+ mile ranges could be easily achievable in the future.
• Cadillac and Chrysler both had concepts that aren’t really going anywhere (literally and figuratively, I suppose).
• BMW’s non-E-Ink iX M60 looks like a rad performance crossover and its summer 2022 release date seems promising. But the electric crossover space is awash in announced-but-barely-shipped EVs and so the burden of proof is on BMW to make this thing at volume. (The same burden lies on Chevy’s promised $30k Equinox.)
• Hyundai, General Motors, and Volvo each made bombastic autonomous driving claims when it would have been better to let the results speak for themselves when (or if) they actually happen.
• Most egregiously of all to me, Sony said it’s launching an entirely new company to “explore” getting into the car manufacturing game alongside revealing another concept vehicle. I would love to be proven wrong, but it read like a blatantly disingenuous grasp at attention.

But aside from the cool car stuff, there were also plenty of pedestrian laptops, wearables, and various other gadgets that will surely come out this year and definitely seem like improvements on what came before. Nothing worthy of their own keynotes, but all in all a decent enough haul for a weird year at CES.

For example, the LG’s 42-inch OLED TV was interesting, not because it was a massive, wall-sized TV but because it was small and useful. It fills a hole that needed to be filled — a TV with superb picture quality that works in a smaller room (or, alternately, a potentially cool option for a gaming monitor).

Here’s one more which may surprise you: L’Oreal has created a hair gadget that combines a dye cartridge with a brush with vibrating bristles. It handles the amount of dye and makes applying it much easier. It’s not Wi-Fi enabled. There is no app. It doesn’t support Bluetooth. It seems great in part because it lacks those things — and the time that would have been wasted building that tech in was instead put into designing it for its actual purpose.

So, in spite of everything, it was a pretty good year for CES. There were more gadgets that seemed more useful this year, making the vaporware easier to ignore. Practicality: what a concept.

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Photo Credit: RYO Alexandre / Shutterstock.com